You might think that as the actor who first portrayed Batman on the big screen in the modern era, Michael Keaton might have taken the time to sit down and watch the critically acclaimed recent Christopher Nolan trilogy, starring Christian Bale as the caped crusader. But you would be wrong: in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly to promote his film Birdman (which riffs off Keaton’s own past in superhero blockbusters and subsequent slip from the A-list), the 63-year-old actor reveals he has never bothered to properly watch any of the new films.

“Chris Nolan is great, but I’ve never seen any of the Batman movies all the way through,” says Keaton. “I know they’re good. I just have zero interest in those kinds of movies. I mean, people are asking me, ‘Is Ben Affleck going to be any good?’ And my attitude is, First of all, why would you ask me? Second, he’s probably going to be very good, and third, frankly, it’s all set up now so that you’re weirdly kind of safe. Once you get in those suits, they really know what to do with you. It was hard then; it ain’t that hard now.”

Christopher Nolan and The Dark Knight Rises cast: ‘Gotham has become a cynical place’ - video Guardian

In a way, Keaton is right. Nolan’s superlative vision for Batman on the big screen made Bale’s job portraying the superhero rather easier. Yet the comments come across as dismissive, as if Tim Burton’s films were such archetypes of dangerous, pioneering film-making that they make all later Batman movies pale into insignificance by comparison. Perhaps Keaton is just fed up with being asked about Batfleck, but that’s not a fair way to look at things.

Many film fans argue that Keaton’s portrayal of the dark knight remains the best yet on the big screen. But you cannot be the best Batman unless you appeared in the best Batman movies, and watching in 2014, it is abundantly clear that Burton’s films leave a lot to be desired.

Where Nolan presented a Batman as close to reality as possible, Burton chose to reimagine the mythos as a sort of gothic fairytale world in which the supernatural plays a powerful part. As the first superhero blockbuster since the Superman movies, 1989’s Batman laid the foundations for a decade of sloppy, ill-considered comic-book films from studios that felt comfortable treating superheroes as throwaway kiddie confectionery rather than the powerful totems of 20th-century pop culture imagined by later film-makers.

Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman. Photograph: Warner Bros/Photofest

Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Batman is made to look like a camp pantomime villain when viewed in comparison to Heath Ledger’s sociopathic ticking time bomb. Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer are wonderful as the Penguin and Catwoman in Batman Returns, but the movie’s stagey, pseudo-operatic style means we can never accept them as anything more than supercharged cartoon characters.

Where later superhero movies, notably Nolan’s Batman films, played up their widescreen, real-world credentials, Gotham in both Burton movies appears to be a tiny citadel with a population of a few thousand at most, largely because the director shot them at Warner Bros’ studios in Burbank, California, and at Pinewood Studios in London. This is Gotham City, not Norwich City, yet the key early scene in Batman Returns in which Christopher Walken’s Max Schreck speaks at the turning on of the Christmas lights features an audience of no more than a couple hundred people. Even Alan Partridge would have been upset with the turnout, but in reality there is no room for anyone else to attend because Gotham’s main square had to be tiny in order to be squeezed on to a studio lot.

Building Batman’s car: the making of the dark knight’s tumbler - video Guardian

By comparison, Superman, shot a full decade earlier, always feels as though it is set in the real world because New York doubled for Metropolis. In choosing not to find a real city to represent Gotham, Warner Bros therefore set comic-book movies back 10 years. Joel Schumacher’s later Batman films may have been far more execrable, but if his predecessor hadn’t made such a mess of the character in the first place, they would never have been made.

Some will argue that the Batman films are decent enough for the period in which they were filmed. But Burton was working in the same era as the seminal Frank Miller graphic novels Batman: Year One (1987) and The Dark Knight Returns (1986), which collectively redefined the caped crusader as a ruthless, troubled and fiercely human inhabitant of the real world.

Yet on the big screen, the film-maker was going in completely the opposite direction. In Batman and Batman Returns, he cheerfully gave us villains brought back from the dead after falling into chemical slime, penguins with nuclear missiles strapped to their backs, and downtrodden secretaries resurrected and given impressive kung fu fighting skills after being licked by a bunch of alley cats.

Comic-book movies need a little bit of supernatural razzmatazz from time to time, of course, but we are talking Batman here: a superhero with no real superpowers beyond extreme wealth who could in theory exist in reality. In the wake of Burton’s films, it’s quite remarkable we ever got to see a version of the dark knight on the big screen that was able to finally jettison these fairytale fantasy elements. Nolan is rightly hailed as a genuine visionary of the milieu for his fearsome, virile superhero trilogy, and Keaton might do well to sit down and actually watch it some day.