1.7.14

Animated Batman... Hypocrite?

While watching Son of Batman, I noted something strange. While the story followed the only broadest outline of Grant Morrison's intro to Damien (Batman Jr.) Wayne, the storytellers were careful to include Bruce's famous harping about how it's important not to kill anyone, ever. This would be less significant if Batman and his friends didn't kill a whole lot of people over the course of the story.

Let's take a look at Batman's reaction to being cornered by a group of Man-Bats who - and this is important to note - are just regular people (in this case assassins from the League of Shadows) given an entirely reversible serum that has temporarily transformed them into monsters. Here's Batman's play-



That's right - he blew them up with a terrifying powerful explosive, then crushed them under tons of steel and other debris.

Later in the movie, Damien defeats Deathstroke in a duel, then decides that his father's stance on killing is valid, and spares the one-eyed man's life. Then he and his parents do this-



They blast out of a secret deep undersea lab, leaving Deathstroke to drown/freeze/be crushed by the pressure of the incoming water. Apparently Batman's worldwide journey to learn from the world's greatest detectives never included basic lessons in moral logic, since those would have taught him that there is no moral/ethical/legal difference between stabbing Deathstroke in the head and leaving him to drown/freeze/be crushed by the pressure of the incoming water.

Okay, one difference - the sword would be less painful.

And just in case you'd thought that this hypocrisy was limited to Batman and his son, check out what his ward Nightwing and friend Kirk Langstrom get up to, when faced with a swarm of Man-Bats.



That doesn't seem too bad, right? They've just dropped somewhere between 50-100 guys in the water. That's not murder, is it? Well, it wouldn't be - if that particular patch of water weren't 50 miles off the outer Hebrides in the freezing North Atlantic.

Sure, these are ninjas from the League of Shadows, but let's be realistic - that's fifty miles, and they've been dropped in the ocean with no supplies (lifejackets, rafts, flares), then left there to die by Nightwing and the rest of the bat-family, who immediately fly off after the phony oil platform collapses. Even if ten percent of them were somehow strong enough swimmers to make it fifty miles in the open ocean, that's still well over fifty people that the Bat-folks let drown because it was expedient.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You're placing way too much faith in the hands of the writers. You know, those unfortunate fools who somehow thought fans would be okay seeing Talia reduced to boobs hanging from a chain. This film blew chunks all over the place and, if possible, reduced expectations for Batman vs Superman.