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The Batman cuts to the chase. This latest reboot doesn’t take us back to square one — the days just before its old-moneyed hero, Bruce Wayne (played in this iteration by the trapezoid-jawed Robert Pattinson), reinvented himself as a vigilante crime fighter anonymized by a pointy-eared mask and billowing cape. Instead, it escorts us into an always-downpouring, underlit, and intimidatingly skyscrapered Gotham where this creature of the night is already the stuff of local legend.

Wayne has been at it for about two years now when the film opens. He’s gotten into a groove as far as vigilantism goes, but a healthy work-life balance slips his grasp. His bone-white skin suggests someone who never goes out and enjoys life; his face is almost always frozen in gloom, and when he speaks it seems like it hurts him. With his helmet of black hair, frequently kohled eyes, and the soundtrack’s multiple uses of Nirvana’s moody “Something in the Way,” I kept thinking about him like he were the first Emo Batman — a diary-keeping, socially stunted loner it’s hard to believe at first can transform himself into a fighting force to be reckoned with. He seems better suited to front The Cure. But you’re fully convinced soon enough. Wayne has been so efficient at making his savior complex real (it’s rooted in his childhood trauma) that police commissioner James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) wouldn’t think of shooing him away when he arrives to assist at a crime scene. It’s a place where he’s so comically good at making smart deductions that other officers on the scene get grumpy because they didn’t notice them first.

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