4. None More Noir
Frank Miller loves him some noir. Hoo buddy, if you went to his house? He's almost certainly got some kind of messed-up lighting scheme which casts expressionist shadows all over the place. His Sin City comics are a riff (to varying degrees of success) on classic pulp gumshoe tropes, from the lighting to the stock characters to the depiction of crime and punishment to the stylised narration and it's the latter that wound up all over the Year One script. Honestly, the further they got into the project, the more interested Aronofsky and Miller seemed in making a hardboiled noir thriller than a Batman movie. Jim Gordon is the one good cop in a sea of corruption trying (and failing) to turn the tide. It's basically the overarching plot of the current Gotham TV series done right. Plus he chain smokes, which is rare for a superhero flick. The most noir part of the whole shebang, though? The narration. Oh yeah, there was Phillip Marlowe-style voiceover throughout the Year One script, with the interior monologue of Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver and Rorschach from Watchmen (another gritty eighties superhero comic) being counted as touchstones which should give you some idea of the mental state of this particular Batman. Remember how Ridley Scott hated the voiceover added to Blade Runner? Well, this was much worse.
Tom Baker
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Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
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