I can't believe that Batman was ranked so low, stating that it brought nothing new to the mythology.
How about redirecting the story from the campy stuff of Adam West, or the kid stuff of the Superfriends, and guest spots on Scooby Doo? How about bringing dark, gritty feel to a comic movie that Superman could never manage?
But I can see how Batman Begins was ranked high - it was damn good. I even managed to like the scarecrow for the first time.
They stated that
Batman (I presume Tim Burton's first
Batman) brought nothing new? Wow, that's so inaccurate, so short of memory.
The Dark Knight Returns was still pretty fresh when Burton made
Batman and most of the general public knew no other Batman than Adam West or the Superfriends variety, as you mentioned. I remember getting excited over the new look and feel, and spotting the various
Dark Knight influences. I also remember how surprising the choice of Michael Keaton was -- to hell with the old heroic look, the movie said. For the first time, let's portray the guy as the psycho he is. It wasn't a perfect film, but it hardly fell short on newness.
Batman Begins was great, maybe better, but relied heavily on the dark style and edge first made familiar with Burton's series.
Reminder, the "ranking" of the RT list doesn't really rank these films in the order that the critics would rank them. Technically, this list of descending values of percentages of positive reviews (calculated from inconsistent totals and sources) aren't even rankings. The order doesn't correspond much to how a real rank order might come out if critics compared these films
to each other, unless you divide the list into major chunks like pass and fail. Even then, the dividing point is at
X-Men: the Last Stand, with a "rotten" score despite being 39th out of 94; so it's a bit misleading to think of it as far above, say,
Fantastic Four to the average reviewer.
In a true rank order,
Spider Man 3 coming up below
Hulk, or the horrible 1980 version of
Flash Gordon rising above almost anything in the top 80 or 90, would make no sense to me at all.
