When people talk about the birth of the summer blockbuster, they usually mention “Star Wars” (1977) or even “Jaws” (1975). But the first real modern blockbuster — the one that invented the summer movie season and defined what’s called a “summer movie” — was “Batman” from 1989.

It’s the film that changed everything. I’d argue that most of the blockbusters that followed “Batman” weren’t any good, and that therefore its influence has been, on balance, not for the best. However, that’s not the fault of director Tim Burton or of the movie he made.

I watched “Batman” again recently, having seenMichael Keatonreprise his Batman role in“The Flash,”and I was pleased to see that it retains its impact. I was equally pleased to see that my review has held up, despite it being written on deadline some 34 years ago by a mere lad of 30. I called it “a rare, beautifully made movie that offers you another world.”

The opening of the review alluded to the media blitz that preceded the film’s release, something you can’t forget if you lived through it: “The hype surrounding ‘Batman’ has been so intense and pervasive that it threatened to make everybody sick of the picture before it even opened.”

炒作不是前几周开始开放,但蒙特hs. The Batman logo was everywhere; you could barely walk two blocks without seeing a teenager in a Batman T-shirt. The most notable aspect of the advance marketing was the branding of the June 23 release date: “6-23-89.” You couldn’t escape those numbers. Almost everybody knew when “Batman” would be arriving in theaters.

Seen today, “Batman” transcends its era even while being a product of its time. Gotham City is meant to evoke New York, which was then a violent city, and so the movie begins with a family of three desperate to find a cab in a horrible New York neighborhood. Anyone who’d had the experience of walking out of a Broadway theater on Times Square knew what that felt like.

Yet something in the way Gotham City is presented captures something nightmarish and universal. As I said in 1989: “There’s a grayish olive tint to the cityscapes of Gotham. Misshapen towers. Buildings ornamented with garish trappings and gargoyles. It’s lightless, crammed and dirty. The temptation is to compare it to Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ because it’s just as disturbing. But it’s a different kind of city — not heartlessly efficient but decaying, soul-sickening, dead inside.”

My favorite aspect of the movie, then and now, was Keaton’s performance: “Wayne is a vengeful hero with a few screws loose and a few others too tight. At one point he stands in a crowd without looking for cover, more preoccupied than fearless, while the Joker’s men fire machine guns in his direction.”

The idea of a tormented Batman has since attracted actors such as Christian Bale, Ben Affleck and Robert Pattinson, but they’ve all come up short. Remembering Keaton’s essential seriousness, they’ve each fallen into the trap of making Batman somber. But Keaton was never somber or humorless, just distracted, quirky and preoccupied. He suggested emotional damage by being withdrawn, disconnected and weird.

Keaton’s weird introvert was well-matched by Jack Nicholson’s demented extrovert of a Joker. At the time I wrote:

“As for Jack Nicholson,” he’s so popular and imitated that it’s easy to start thinking of him as nothing but a flashy character and a ham, until you see him and remember that he’s a flashy character and a ham who is also brilliant. As the Joker, he is all over the place — cackling, flashing his teeth, waving his arms and wiggling his rear-end. He throws himself into the Joker’s clowning yet manages to be frightening by somehow letting us see the insane rage that’s propelling the goofy behavior. I was getting the creeps watching him.”

It’s a measure of Nicholson’s achievement that, before “Batman,” the Joker was just another villain, like the Penguin or Catwoman. But with Nicholson’s having revealed the depths of the character, the Joker becametheBatman villain, and since then two actors (Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix) have gone on to win Oscars for playing the same role.

That kind of thing has only happened two other times in more than 90 years. There was Marlon Brando (“The Godfather”) and Robert DeNiro (“The Godfather Part II”) who won Oscars for playing Vito Corleone; and Rita Moreno and Ariana DeBose for playing Anita in their respective versions of “West Side Story.”

That’s the good side of the “Batman” influence. The bad side is “Batman’s” flamboyant heir, the superhero genre, which started promisingly and has since become so tired and decadent. But that’s often the case: Great movies spawn bad ones, especially when they’re influential.

Fortunately, the original “Batman” is there to remind us just how exciting this genre could be.

Reach Mick LaSalle: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com