30 years ago, a superhero movie was not a guaranteed blockbuster. The last time Batman had been exposed to mass audiences, he had quipped around with Robin and danced the Batusi. But the beginning of a new era of superhero movies—dark, violent, and self-serious—began in 1989, when Tim Burton’s Batman hit theaters. Now that superheroes routinely dominate the box-office—and since the whole Batman franchise is on Netflix—I thought it would be interesting to revisit these prototypical superhero blockbusters to see how they hold up today.

The star of the first two Batman movies is Michael Keaton, and damn, does he kill it. Keaton’s casting was controversial enough to inspire 50,000 angry letters to Warner Bros. from fans. It’s hard to imagine Keaton being anyone’s first choice for the role—except Tim Burton, who had previously worked with Keaton in Beetlejuice.

It’s an eccentric but brilliant choice. Keaton is probably the best Batman ever, and he’s definitely the best Bruce Wayne ever. On screen, Keaton reliably comes off as very weird and very smart—the exact qualities Bruce Wayne should exude. And this is a different take on Bruce Wayne than the movies that would follow. Here, he’s a weird, rich recluse, and he’s not particularly famous—his parents’ murder has been long forgotten. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who didn’t know Batman’s origin story—but Batman casts the whole thing as a mystery to be solved by journalist/love interest Vicky Vale (Kim Basinger), and it works surprisingly well.

Batman’s big villain is the Joker, played by Jack Nicholson—such a casting coup that Nicholson is actually billed ahead of Michael Keaton in the opening credits. In 2018, the Joker is a horrendously overexposed character, so it’s almost preferable that Nicholson’s Joker barely resembles the character most fans are familiar with today. First introduced as a sleazy gangster named Jack Napier—who, in a controversial deviation from the comics, turns out to have murdered Bruce Wayne’s parents—Napier is reborn as the Joker, complete with an unnerving rictus, after he falls into a chemical vat.

Nicholson’s Joker has since been eclipsed by Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance in The Dark Knight, but there’s still plenty to admire about it. The best interpretations of the Joker find him dancing on the line between scary and funny, and Batman often hits that mark. We spend a lot of time with Joker, and he’s always pulling some kind of gag: cheerfully vandalizing a museum full of priceless works of art, or using a nerve compound to make a newscaster literally laugh herself to death. If you were ranking Joker performances on a scale from Leto to Ledger, Nicholson definitely lands closer to the Ledger side of the equation.

But as good as Nicholson is, Michael Keaton is better. He’s the first actor, and still the only actor, to capture just how weird you’d need to be to respond to a childhood trauma by putting on a costume and beating up criminals. Whenever Bruce sees the Joker, it’s like he goes into a fugue state. It’s not just recognizing the dude who killed his parents; it’s recognizing his own psychosis, manifesting on the other side of the law in a horrifying but fascinating way.