It lasts only two minutes: a 30-second climb and then a diving, looping, veering, tilting descent. That descent, on the well-hyped new Batman the Ride, at Six Flags Great Adventure theme park here, is a thrill-rider's delight. Smooth but sudden twists, unlikely curves and 360-degree rotations both vertical and horizontal wreak havoc not with something as prosaic as the stomach, but as delicate as the ear's semicircular canals: it leaves your head spinning.
But Batman the Ride seeks to be something more than a highly evolved roller coaster. It orchestrates its inevitable waiting time - likely to be considerably more than an hour on a weekend afternoon - toward two goals. One is praising the Time Warner conglomerate that owns Six Flags and that generated "Batman" and "Batman Returns"; on the way in to the ride is a memorial plaque to Steve Ross, the architect of the Time Warner merger. The ride's other objective is to revive the sense of foreboding urban squalor that made the "Batman" films seem so familiar to a New Yorker. Beyond its vertiginous thrills, the Batman ride aims for psychological effects.During the wait, claustrophobia builds up. The first half of the maze is set in "Gotham Park," with quaint but gallowslike lampposts and a convoluted path, enforced by black iron railings, that mirrors the twists of the brooding black structure looming above. Because the ride's cars hang down from a monorail, the passengers' legs dangle, making the train look like a helpless centipede as it zooms by overhead.
Part 2, about 25 minutes' worth, moves under the ride. Between black chain-link fences, topped with barbless barbed wire, and under an industrial ceiling of exposed black pipes, passengers-to-be view an art-directed urban wasteland: a police car smashed into a gushing hydrant, a scrap yard of metal parts and used tires, a graffiti-covered wall. Just outside, screaming riders regularly whiz by, a close-up preview.
The ride, then, is deliverance back to open sky, even as the orange safety harness is clunked down over your shoulders and an attendant gives the short seat belt a tug. The ascent provides a nice view of the flume ride and the trees surrounding Great Adventure. And then the view doesn't matter anymore.
An upside-down loop shows you your own legs; a left, a right, a twist, another vertical loop, a turn on the axis and what's billed as a simulated zero-gravity roll bring severe disorientation to your internal gyroscope. Because you're hanging under the track, you can't see what's coming, only feel the angles and watch blue sky give way to black metal, again and again, until the vehicle coasts back to its starting point.