Friday Night Fights : Batman vs Batman (Burton vs Nolan's vision of Gotham)

 Typically, Friday Night Fights is a battle of the people, characters or films, but on this one I wanted to let the two directors versions of Gotham City, is the subject of this main event match!

The two are worlds apart in their vision and approach... which do you prefer?

Tim Burton went with a very dark & brooding version of Gotham with a very gothic look that made one completely unsure of the year or even the era the film takes place in.  The 1989 film took place in a very fictional surrounding.

Almost everything in Burton's world was outrageous, it was a great fit in theaters for the 1980s and early 90s, and I believe would still hold up today, perhaps that's the direction DC should head with it's films...

Burton took the fan into the world of the comic books, into the world of The Batman and the citizens of Gotham.  He did this early, using a family lost in Gotham as any of us would be, our first trip there, trying to find our way around.

While in the 2005 film, Batman Begins, director Christopher Nolan went with a much more realistic Gotham City, something similar that one might find in a New York, Boston or Detroit. 

Even stately Wayne manor seemed as if it were somewhere not that far away from where I was, maybe as close as just outside my town or up in the northeast but still part of my world.

Nolan brought Batman to the real world, in spectacular fashion, along with the citizens of Gotham, into a city that might be just outside the theater you were watching the film in.

When Bruce Wayne got beat up by the mob, and went out into the world to find a path to defeat the criminals, we felt as if he was crossing our own world.  This is the direction that the DCEU has taken but has all of it's characters in such dark versions of them, so serious, all the time.

Personally, I prefer the Tim Burton version, the one where we go into the comic book world, as great comic book movies have always done, draw us into their world to follow and share the adventures of those heroes in their own environment.   We have more than enough movies that take place in our own world and that might be happening right outside the theater we are in, but I go to see these to get away from that world, the same reason I'd pick up a comic book as a kid, an escape to another place.