Batman rewatch: Has Batman & Robin gotten better or did everything else get worse?

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You could toss out Arnold Schwarzenegger's last 30 years of movies without losing anything better than the sick joke of Sabotage, and then you'd never have to watch him torpedo Batman & Robin again. He's not the only problem with the 1997 flop. But many of its catastrophes are now defensible, if not celebrated.

Joel Schumacher outlandished his Dynamic Duo's world. Diamond hockey laser duels in a museum full of disco-ball glaciers, a high-tech observatory balanced in the skyscraper hands of a Chrysler-sized Greco-Roman statue, so much voluptuous decorative foliage: This was production designer Barbara Ling's effervescent Mega-Gotham. And costume designers Ingrid Ferrin and Robert Turturice lathered every uniform with three layers of exoskeletal flair. Freeze the right frame and you could be looking at the posters for Thor: Ragnarok or Wonder Woman 1984, and few scenes knock right on Birds of Prey's door.

Consider the motorcycles. Barbara (Alicia Silverstone) sneaks out of Wayne Manor to make underground money in a downtown neon gangland. Coolio plays the Banker, who runs the local street races. Nicky Katt plays Spike, a deathbike marauder wearing flagrant lipstick beneath red-black eyeshadow. There is a puffy yellow mohawk on his helmet, and his leather jacket pokes out stalagmite shoulders. He looks like Super Street Fighter II Turbo smelled. The motorcyclists roll through a warehouse and along a concrete river, and then turn right onto a hundred-story skybridge.

There's no coherent sense of space, and did somebody say Coolio? Schumacher was gay, and the Batman & Robin reconstruction project depends on tantalizing subtext. Subversion gives a free pass to incoherence, and our century loves treasure-hunting last century's secret queer history. Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) resembles a drag queen. That would've been a conventional insult in the horrible 1990s, but I mean it as a compliment. (Let's finally make hair horns happen!) Today, she would have a solid social media following dedicated to Lash Positivity, and Amy Klobuchar's people would've begged her for an IG Live interview. Meanwhile, Elle Macpherson plays the beard-iest Batman love interest, arm candy for parties who barely knows her one-year boyfriend. "I'm not the marrying kind," Bruce tells her. "There are things about me you wouldn't understand." Is this even subtext?

Because Ivy cares about climate change, she will soon be the story's only recognizable hero. "Forget the stars, look here to earth!" she pleads with Bruce Wayne (George Clooney) as he bankrolls a new space project. "You spoil her lands, poison her oceans, blacken her skies. You're killing her!" Subtract the homicidal tendences and she sounds like any teenager hoping Bezos doesn't blow billions on his space colony while the rainforest burns. The people of Gotham cackle when Ivy promises "a day of reckoning." Viewed today, that laugh sounds like the firestorm outside your window.

Does Batman & Robin deserve to be rescued? Clooney built his second act by disowning it. The late Schumacher sounds nonchalant but defensive in his DVD commentary. "There was enormous pressure on us," he explains, "To create more inventions in the film that could be turned into toys." He insists he wanted to adapt Batman: Year One, the acclaimed Frank Miller-David Mazzucchelli gutter battle book. This was the political thing to say, before Miller's acolytes crushed two decades under their bootheels. Now it's torture when Schumacher swears he wanted a "much smaller, intimate, darker, younger Batman." WE. HAVE. GOT. THAT. COVERED. But who will give us Poison Ivy stripteasing out of a pink gorilla costume, and call it a kid's movie?

That's pure Blonde Venus burlesque. And the ultimate salvage job on Batman & Robin won't even require camp reclamation. In 1997, the gigantic sets and collectible henchmen were toy-commercial embarrassments of merchandising madness. Now you treasure the glorious (lost?) art of physical set design and non-mocap costumes. Digital effects age bad quick, and some wonderful recent superhero movies already look precarious. But when Batman, Robin (Chris O'Donnell), and Batgirl motor through a frozen Gotham, rocking silver-plated costumes and driving various sexy Bat-snowplows — well, those toys were real toys.

But there is a lot of CGI, which looks awful and epitomizes the ambient laziness. Silverstone comes "all the way from England" with zero attempted accent. When she casually mentions how her parents died in a car crash, the camera's in an extreme long shot, more interested in the shrubbery. Schumacher's only stylistic idea is to go diagonal. The whole notion of Batman and Robin warring over Poison Ivy keeps fizzling out. Clooney doesn't commit to the whole sudden-onset passion, which is lame. (O'Donnell commits too much, which is somehow worse.)