AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS9/10 4 years ago
[9.0/10] Everyone knows the basics of how Batman, well, began. It’s been depicted enough in every piece of Batman media imaginable. Parents gunned down in crime alley. Mask of Zorro. String of pearls. Just some guy with a gun. An ache and a promise not to let it happen to another little boy again. A cape. A cowl. A never-ending quest. The details change, but the core parts remain. This was the irreversible step between a young boy named Bruce Wayne and a vigilante named Batman.
But the piercing suggestion at the core of *Mask of the Phantasm* is that the change didn’t have to be irrevocable. Before Batman was truly Batman, back when he was just a guy trying to relieve the pain he felt in his heart by cleansing the city that took his parents from him, he almost stopped. At the brink of donning the mask and prowling the night, Bruce Wayne found love, and it almost saved him.
Until it didn’t. *Mask of the Phantasm* is a great mystery. It’s full of the type of superlatively-designed and animated sequences that make it a stellar action movie. But it’s also a tragedy, a story of one man almost healed from the loss of his parents by someone who could understand, and the equal and opposite loss and ache in her that doomed the solace and companionship the unjust whims of the universe denied them both.
The story starts with the appearance of the mysterious Phantasm, another masked vigilante stalking through Gotham who seems to be targeting old mob associates. The Phantasm works on multiple levels as a force within the film. On the one hand, she’s just cool-looking. The grim reaper imagery, the smoke, the voice, all offer a scary, exciting, Bat-like-but-not-quite equivalent to our favorite Dark Knight. But the fact that she uses lethal force not only marks her as a different beast, but creates extra heat for Batman, who’s mistakenly held responsible and chased by the police. And the string of mob boss murders the Phantasm perpetrates gives Batman a good mystery to solve.
It coincides with the return of Andrea Beaumont, Bruce’s old flame from just before he became Batman. One of the real treats of *Mask of the Phantasm* is the way it uses Andrea’s arrival to trace the twin lines of Batman’s romantic life and his earliest days of becoming the caped crusader. The painful memories of his lost love provide the film a good excuse to flashback to when Bruce wasn’t quite the Bat, and when a chance encounter with a fellow mourner led to the star-crossed love of his life.
The movie wouldn’t work nearly as well if Andrea weren’t so well sketched, and if she and Bruce didn’t have such great chemistry. *Mask of the Phantasm* takes care to establish her as the equal to both Bruce Wayne and Batman. Her self-possessed, not even a little bit intimidated interactions with a young Bruce put her on even footing with our hero and let her leave an impression. At the same time, their flirtatious sparring, and playful back and forth both makes the pair endearing as a couple, while also hinting at things to come.
Speaking of hints, it’s a treat to see a proto-Batman figuring this crime-fighting thing out long before he became the seasoned, protector of the night we know and love. His rough and tumble skirmish with a bunch of petty thieves not only makes for a great streetside action set piece, but shows Bruce as a green rookie who realizes he needs something to scare criminals when he makes an entrance. He eyes a car at the World’s Fair, a moment portentous for multiple reasons. And his proposal to Andrea is interrupted by a flurry of bats emerging from the soon-to-be batcave, an omen for the way Bruce’s romantic life will be torn asunder by his crime-fighting life.
That’s the strongest emotional tie in this film. *Mask of the Phantasm* does a stellar job at communicating the tug of war going on within Bruce’s heart between Andrea and Batman. On the one hand, he made an oath in his parent’s name to defend Gotham from the hoods and criminals who would leave other families so broken and wounded. On the other, Andrea makes him happy, happy to the point that the loss doesn't hurt so bad, something that both makes him feel ashamed and tenderly imagining the possibilities of a life without this dark burden.
He also knows he can’t have both. The scene where Bruce Wayne confronts a pack of muggers hustling a man on the street isn’t just another set of kinetic thrills in a movie not short on them. It’s a dramatization of Bruce’s epiphany that if he’s always worrying about needing to come home to someone, he’s a less effective crusader. A momentary glance at Andrea lets the bikers get the best of him, and it’s a reminder that these two things cannot coexist.
So he chooses Andrea. He chooses to give up his quest, a decision with extra weight for fans who watched sixty-five episodes of Batman’s animated adventures up to this point. We’ve seen how much the fight against the night means to him. We know how raw his pain still is from his parents’ death all these years later. So for him to give that all up for Andrea not only cements how true and deeply-felt his love for her is, but magnifies the tragedy with the knowledge that it can’t possibly work out.
The overarching theme of *Mask of the Phantasm* is the way plans fall apart. Batman built his life around a plan to honor his parents and in his own way, avenge them, the best way he knew how. But that plan ran aground on a chance meeting with Andrea, one that let him forge a new plan of a life shared together. Then that plan was shredded to ribbons by her father’s illicit business dealings, which were a part of his grander plan for his daughter’s future. Even there, when he takes her to run away from the gangsters threatening to kill both of them, his plan to make enough money to pay them off and then return safely is destroyed by the bloody nubs and noses of mob justice. This movie is full of dreams of the future that shatter and turn to dust.
It’s a motif that comes through visually, not just in the storytelling. Bruce and Andrea’s love blossoms at the World’s Fair, a bright and shiny, pie-in-the-sky representation of what later days might hold for everyone. It mirrors the hopes and dreams of Bruce and Andrea themselves, a community’s hopes for Gotham, and maybe the world. But it’s also the setting for the film’s climax, by which point it’s fallen into disrepair and decayed, become the resting place and death trap of a murderous maniac, and in the end, blown up like so many other hopes for the future.
That’s merely the peak of so many outstanding visual sequences though. From an opening encounter with a crop of the usual gangsters, to the aforementioned skirmishes with muggers and the police, to the final, incredible battle at the fairgrounds, directors Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski pull out all the stops for this one. While *Batman: The Animated Series* features its share of incredible visual set pieces, this film’s creative team uses the extra runtime and budget to go all out, with that last, extended outing in particular proving the apotheosis of the series’s explosive art deco aesthetic.
The film’s creative team also know how to deliver one hell of a swerve. The series of mobster killings helps create a spider-web of connections that Batman must suss out. The reveal that all of the victims are connected to Carl Beaumont suggests the old man is masquerading as the Phantasm to exact revenge on the wiseguys who nearly rubbed him out all those years ago.
That twist would have extra weight given the reveal that Carl was the one who (with good intentions) took Andrea away from Bruce, especially with The Dark Knight set to confront this opposing vigilante who uses lethal methods. And unveiling councilman Reeves as having sold the Beaumonts out continues a proud *B:TAS* tradition of mixing ordinary, corrupt criminals in with the larger-than-life ones.
But the twist is even better when we learn that the Phantasm is Andrea herself, out for revenge on the mobsters who killed her father. It helps connect the mystery to the Joker, who gets his own little beginning here, given his old mob connections, but it also adds such poetry to this film.
Bruce and Andrea are both people who lost their parents to criminals gunning them down. They both took up masks and sought to right the wrongs that led to such a deep and meaningful loss. They lost not only their parents, but each other’s companionship and love, from the tangles of Gotham’s underworld and the need for someone to stop it. Hell, given this series’ quasi-canonical connection to Tim Burton’s Batman films, you could argue that both of them lost their fathers at the hand of a young, pre-face paint Joker.
There is a synchronicity between them, one that shows them starting from same places but ending up on different paths, paths that doomed their chance at happiness, the chance not to have to prowl rooftops in the moonlight in the hopes of doing right by fallen mothers and fathers.
The final reel of *Mask of the Phantasm* is a thrill, given the unimpeachable visual acumen, the use of light and shadow, the raucous, tension filled battle between Batman, Joker, and the Phantasm that proves the climax of the peace. But it’s also ridden with pathos, because it cements how the future that Bruce and Andrea dreamed of is gone, destroyed beneath so much blood and rubble, and in its place is a noble but lonely existence.
It posits that Andrea was consumed by the vengeance that Bruce never quite allowed himself to succumb to. That the string of terrible events that took so much from both of them are too far gone to undo now. And that once upon a time, there was a chance for this tortured soul to give up the cape and cowl. There was a chance to embrace a life of happiness that his parents would have wanted for him, a life he’ll never have thanks, once more, to the dark heart of this city that Batman struggles to cleanse every day and every night. *Mask of the Phantasm* shows us a world where that unquenchable rot robbed Bruce of his parents, stole away his love, and made him into the noble but sad crusader who missed that exit and is now fated to fight this fight forever.
