Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2 (2013)

Part two of this animated adaptation arrives with the Joker awake from his coma, the government nervous, and an aging Batman continuing a campaign against a city that has grown tired of him. The film treats Frank Miller's 1986 graphic novel with a reverence that borders on archaeological. Every panel that mattered is reproduced, which means the film's cultural politics arrive pre-loaded from a decade with different concerns. Nobody has attempted to retrofit the material for a contemporary audience. The result is a remarkably untroubled piece of work by present standards.

Carrie Kelley remains the most interesting element on this front. A teenage girl in the Robin costume was a genuine novelty in 1986, and she gives the film a female character operating in a traditionally male role. Ellen Yindel, the new police commissioner, does the same. Neither is asked to carry an argument about gender. Neither is handed a speech about it. They exist, they do their jobs, and the film moves on, which is the older way of handling such things. The cast is otherwise white, and the story shows no interest in race, class, or the environment. Character designs follow conventional superhero proportions, and the Joker's madness is presented as criminal insanity, not as a portrait of the neurodivergent.

The film does have opinions, mostly about television, Ronald Reagan, and the willingness of institutions to trade principle for order. Those opinions arrive through talking heads and news broadcasts that churn inside the narrative instead of stopping it cold. The satire is baked into the frame, not appended to it, and it never once turns to the camera to explain itself. For a story about a man in a cape fighting a clown, this is sour and effective political commentary. That restraint reads almost as a period detail now. The film is a relic, and it is content to be one, which is its own kind of integrity.