Matt Reeves' production gives a preview of what the sequel's story could be
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| Image Credit: Prime Video |
Still more than two years away, very little is known about The Batman Part II other than the returns of Robert Pattinson and Matt Reeves. One of the only rumors circulating the internet about the movie is that Clayface, Basil Karlo, will be the villain of the story, but in his classic version. Now, another production of Batman can serve as an introduction to this. Clayface is the main villain of the second episode of Batman: Caped Crusader, an animation that came out this Thursday (1st) on Prime Video and that has, among its producers, none other than Matt Reeves himself.
He was directly involved in the production, and now he has already shown what interests him in the character. In the comics, Clayface, like many other characters, has been the name given to many villains, but it is the original version created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane in the 1940s that Reeves loves. In the comics, Basil Karlo was a makeup artist and actor in B movies, especially horror movies, who fell into a life of crime. Karlo became a serial killer when he discovered that the horror film that made him famous was going to be remade.
To get revenge, he takes on the role of "Clayface", a villain he had played in his career, to execute the members of the new production. In the silver age of comics, in the late 1950s, he was reimagined as a shapeshifting villain, capable of changing his shape and appearance with powers and the form of a large pile of clay and mud. In Batman: Caped Crusader, we have a return to the original idea, and it is speculated that it will be used as the basis for The Batman Part II.
How Batman: Caped Crusader points to The Batman Part II
Unlike the films, which are set in modern times, Batman: Caped Crusader is set in the 1940s. There, Basil Karlo — whose name is a mix of Basil Rathbone (Sherlock Holmes actor) and Boris Karloff (a great icon of classic horror films, especially Frankenstein) — appears (almost) in his classic form. Here, he is a successful actor, but he doesn't have the face to be a Hollywood heartthrob. In his quest to achieve this, he takes a chemical substance that allows him to mold his face like clay, but which ends up leaving it deformed.
Even so, he can, with the help of costumes and effects from the film studio where he works, impersonate other people to commit crimes. The story of The Batman Part II, as with the original, is conducted with two feet in reality, but the second episode of Caped Crusader — which, again, is produced by Reeves — shows how the director can work it in the cinema: Karlo offers the filmmaker the perfect opportunity to hold up a mirror to Pattinson's Bruce Wayne and examine questions of masks and identity, something already raised in the first film, especially when Batman confronts Paul Dano's Riddler in Arkham.
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