Christian Bale's infamously gravely Batman voice now looks considerably worse after subsequent movies with the Caped Crusader. Bale portrayed Bruce Wayne in all three movies of The Dark Knight trilogy, in which director Christopher Nolan brought Batman down to Earth for as gritty a story as possible. Bale's performance as Batman has generally been praised, with Bale embodying the selflessness and determined heroism that is central to Bruce Wayne as a character.
With that said, Bale's performance in The Dark Knight trilogy did not completely escape criticism, with the harsh growl of his Batman voice being endlessly parodied and among the less beloved elements of Nolan's Batman films. Since the end of Bale's tenure as Batman, Ben Affleck and Robert Pattinson have each played their own different iterations of Batman on cinema screens. That has also had a noticeable side effect on the legacy of Bale's Batman voice.
Bale's Batman Voice Has Aged Badly After Affleck & Pattinson
In Ben Affleck's Snyderverse portrayals of Batman, his version of Bruce Wayne uses a specially made voice modulator designed to make his voice sound almost demonic to the criminals he pursues. Later, in Matt Reeves's The Batman, Robert Pattinson's Kurt Cobain-inspired Batman takes a much more low-tech approach by simply lowering his voice, with Pattinson's Bruce Wayne being rather soft-spoken even out of the cowl. In the case of Affleck and Pattinson's Batmen, both come across as genuinely intimidating and frightening with their voice changes, but this also puts Bale's Batman voice in a much worse light.
With his aggressive snarl as Batman, Bale's Bruce Wayne is clearly making a conscious effort to strike fear into the criminals he fights. However, in light of Affleck and Pattinson's Batman voices, Bale's efforts to sound scary seem much more excessive and over-the-top. Bale's Batman voice, at times, even makes the words he is speaking sound somewhat distorted. This is particularly noticeable when he is shouting, most notably when the Dark Knight ruptures the mask of Bane (Tom Hardy) and demands the location of the detonator to a neutron bomb during the finale of The Dark Knight Rises.
Why Bale's Batman Voice Sounded Like That
Per Christopher Nolan in an interview on The Dark Knight Trilogy: Ultimate Collector’s Edition, Bale's Batman voice came about from his observation that Bruce Wayne and Batman essentially needed two different voices to stand apart as different entities. As Nolan states, "He decided that Batman needed to have a different voice than Bruce Wayne; he needed to put on a voice that supported the visual appearance of the character.” Thus was born Christian Bale's Batman voice, for better or worse.
For as much criticism as Bale's voice as the Caped Crusader has taken, it has never dampened the overall strength of Bale's Batman performance. Even with his raspy vocalization, Bale's Batman has many quotable lines like "Nice coat" and "Swear to me!" Nonetheless, Ben Affleck's Batman and Robert Pattinson's Dark Knight each show an overall stronger approach to the vocal side of Batman, so Bale's voice in The Dark Knight trilogy is something that will likely be remembered as one of his few missteps in the role.
