Now, look. I know Batman & Robin was bad. Let me say that again—the movie was bad. So bad! Truly, apocalyptically, Batman-and-Robin-escape-an-exploding-space-shuttle-using-its-doors-as-surfboards terrible. But it also gets a few things right that, in their reaction to this movie’s failings, many of our new Batman films are missing.

I’ll focus on the big one: the Batman story, at its heart, is about family. That’s at the core of everything Batman & Robin does. The eponymous characters spend much of the movie struggling to work together, with Bruce’s arc underscoring the crux of the conflict. He spins in stubborn confusion when Robin complains that the older man doesn’t trust him as a partner, but he develops a new understanding by the end of the film: “You weren’t really talking about being partners, you were talking about being a family.” Bruce doesn’t just need to learn to work better with others, he needs to learn how to trust them enough to form real familial bonds again. 

Alfred’s illness raises the possibility of another loss for these two orphans. How will Batman and Robin deal with that, on top of the deaths of their parents? They take in Barbara (who will later become Batgirl) because, in the 1997 film, she’s Alfred’s niece—and she’s come to take care of him because he first took care of her. When she stumbles upon Bruce Wayne’s secret identity, it’s by hacking files Alfred meant to send his brother, hoping to keep the care of the Waynes and their mission in his family. Underneath its frenetic plotlines and blatant toy commercials, Batman & Robin had at least a little bit of heart.

Lately, a lot of Batman adaptations overlook the family-oriented aspect of the character. The focus has shifted toward Bruce as a lonely, brooding, traumatized man, and toward the concern that Batman’s presence in Gotham just might incite more violence than it prevents. Don’t get me wrong—these are interesting angles to explore. It was a refreshing turn for Batman movies to interrogate some of these questions in a thoughtful way. But, as the LEGO Batman movie points out, at the end of that road lies a sad, nihilistic story about a Batman who is more villainous than the actual bad guys.

As filmmakers try on new versions of Batman, they should be careful not to reduce 80+ years of the character to a single take. Let’s follow an adaptation in which Batman walks the line between hero and villain with a cheaper-by-the-dozen-style Batman film that highlights the man’s serial adoption problem—which has led to his taking in at least six adopted children and legal wards. The Bruce Wayne of the comics may beat up on a lot of bad guys, but he’s also never met a scared and lonely child he didn’t make a part of his family.

The Batman hints at this direction—a ray of hope in a movie that requires maximized screen brightness and a dark room just to see. Though Pattinson spends the majority of the film in the suit, we get a couple scenes of him as Bruce. In his interactions with Alfred, we see him confront again the possibility of losing someone he loves, and he is reminded how important family is to him. Both in and out of the mask Pattinson clearly captures Bruce’s identification with the orphaned son of one of Riddler’s victims, and even without words we feel the way Bruce’s heart goes out to the child. There’s some solid groundwork laid here to explore in the future, especially since the movie indicates heavily that Bruce’s arc is taking him towards embracing his public persona and working for Gotham’s good out of the mask, as well as in it. If that’s the case, Reeves’s next installment may be poised to combine the complexity of post-Batman & Robin depictions of the character with some of the heart we lost in the backlash, adding a new dimension for future explorations of Batman on the big screen.