Batman Begins: The Thread

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I feel kind of embarassed about it but I liked Constantine WAY better than this movie. Batman Begins should have been better with the amazing cast but Constantine was just so much more fresh and different. Batman Begins was a little too good and by-the-books and ultimately just predictable and dull. The criticisms of the mind-numbing action close-ups are OTM. Katie Holmes was pretty bad.

I think it's insane that anyone would genuinely argue that this was a better movie than the first Burton Batman. Perhaps too much time has passed and people are forgetting the impact of seeing that first Batman for the first time.

"a little too good" oops. My point there being that it was too boringly faithful or something. Too much what you might be expecting from a modern Batman, so that there were no real surprises.

Batman Begins is probably the 1st Batman film audiences will be emotionally engaged with. It seems so right to take things back to a place of primal, thematically confident origin. The quickly cut close ups in the fight scenes didn't bother me like they do in Bruckheimer films, as this method of covering the action is actually motivated in Batman Begins, since Batman is feared (and described) as a kind abstraction. I was actually specifically impressed while watching it that Christopher Nolan was able to motivate a feeling of viewer disorientation in this way.

I got that in spades, but that might've been because I saw it on an IMAX screen. Not recommended for movies with a lot of cutting and hand-held camera.

That said, Theodore's thoughts on Burton v. Nolan here are pretty apt, I think. There *is* nostalgia at work here, and the slam-bang nature of the first Burton film's trailer didn't really match up with the end result, where the Nolan trailers here are pretty much OTM in terms of the feel and impact of the final film.

Batman Begins is probably the 1st Batman film audiences will be emotionally engaged with. It seems so right to take things back to a place of primal, thematically confident origin. The quickly cut close ups in the fight scenes didn't bother me like they do in Bruckheimer films, as this method of covering the action is actually motivated in Batman Begins, since Batman is feared (and described) as a kind abstraction. I was actually specifically impressed while watching it that Christopher Nolan was able to motivate a feeling of viewer disorientation in this way.

-- theodore fogelsanger (tf28390...), June 18th, 2005.

otm

Anyomne who's been involved in violence, whether street level or the more refined sort of a martial arts bout, will report that it looks a helluva lot more like Nolan's version than The Matrix.

My argument to a large degree rests on taking Nolan's insistance that there was no real second unit director--that the film cost so much and took so much time because when it came down to designing shots and actually shotting film, he was always running the show.

On a second viewing, there's a wonderful sort of two-part invention thing going on in the monorail scene that obliterates the stance that Nolan cannot direct easily-pased action.

The shot of the train, its raidly moving place in the city, Gordon's movement of the Batmobile to its ultimate location, the train breaking in two, cut to Liam steeling himself for his ultimate fate--this is all done in classic, clean form.

The final human battlebetween the two within the train is a nightmare of flaing arms, falling bodies, blur edits and so on--the violent din of their last battle, a visual echo of their first fight, their relationship's real beginning, on the lake.

It's really quite brilliant, really. Elegant, even.

I mean he's addressing two events from two aesthtically consistent POVs, staying true to his design schemata.

We need clean, fairly basic filmmaking to know what the hell is going on with the monorail--long shots of the rail, the place where it will fall, etc--Gordoon--moving the car into position *under* the rail--etc.

While we need the emotional cacophony, the drama of the man to man violence--which, as I said, is an action continuation of their relationship as characters.

It's more 'real' and less pornographic--that is, an invitation to fetishistically enjoy the violent act via visual manipulation.

The Matrix films play with spatiality and time to allow us to deeply wallow in the trajectory of the bullet and multiple ways we can view the spectacle, building anticipation of the inevitable cumshot of it hitting someone, and subsequant, literally 'cool' ways to show that impact. Cool, because the violence has become completely abstracted and decoid of human drama.

Bruckheimer just piles on endless visually saturated shots of whatever moving somehwere really fast until the inevitable fussilade of camera angles showing whatever getting blown up by something colorfully and then onward to the next reiteration. It's Videodrome on amphetimines and with the aesthetic sense of a low attention span serial killer.

Nolan's approach is the only one I'd label admirable.

And one that will invite a fair amount of reverence. Which probably best explains why I felt left out in the cold by this one.

Maybe because that would make the widely-acknowledged subtext a little too creepy.

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I guess that's why it bored me. I'm not really looking for realistic portrayals of violence when I go see a comic book movie. I would have gladly sacrificed some of that realism for a little more style.

But 'realism' is a style. I mean, this is *way* stylized--and in several modes.

When first I heard that Nolan was intent on NOT making a comic hero film, I was like, Oye, great.

But he's done just that--it's almost sui generis it's so, um, sui generis.

basically I liked most of the scenes that didn't actually have batman in them, and there were a lot of notable performances. and while I never really liked Burton's batman's movies, it's apparent to me now that he did bring something special to the table. I'm thinking back to the indescribably sad army of penguins in Batman Returns.

C Bale = great bruce wayne, hilarious batman. his batman voice was too overdone, and the actual batman mask had the unfortunate effect of making his head look like a giant, engorged ham.

This much is OTM.

Still, this one was pretty darned good as these things go. I'm anti-Burton, though, and always wanted a Batman movie that played more like a crime thriller than a superhero thriller, so I was an easy sell on this one.

Oh, come on. There's effective and ineffective pornography, and there are effective and ineffective fight scenes. The fight scenes here were more inscrutable than in Gladiator, and that's hard to do. D- on the fight scenes.

Loved the movie, though, I should say again.

I actually liked that way that was handled a lot -- other movies were much worse at making the Batman rasp sound forced/camp. In this one, I understood explicitly that the reason he was talking that way was to disguise his voice. An improvement.

I forgot to mention how awkwardly the origin story was handled. It somehow managed to feel overly long and yet rushed at the same time. I felt like the whole audience was sitting there impatiently wondering "OK, when is the action going to start" but at the same time, the filmmakers seemed to be aware of this problem so the dialog and editing were pushed along to compensate. The pacing wasn't slow enough to create a real sense of mystery and tension but it took long enough to get to the real action that the beginning felt like it dragged.

Which reminds me - what are they going to call the sequel? "Batman Continues" is unbearably lame.

I don't mind the long exposition, either, but I agree that the pacing in the first half-hour or so was strange and disconnecting. A bit of deliberately disorienting Memto pacing in a movie that had no use for such fanciness.

Loved it. Did I say that already?

I feel the opposite way. The back-story gave us plenty of plotting and not enough atmosphere. I would have loved to see more scenes of Bruce Wayne brooding in his prison cell or crouching Wind-up-bird-chronicle-style at the bottom of his well. Instead we were told what happened to him rather than seeing it for ourselves. All of that awful you have to become your fear / embrace your fear / I'm afraid of bats / bats are scary crap was completely unnecessary. Same with the awful closing line about the man beneath the mask and I-yam-what-I-yam no, you are what you do, etc.

Sure they can -- the same way I can still admire "Batman Forever" as a gay-Kilmer-camp-fest and love it dearly (and somewhat oddly), and still think this was the Batman movie that that should have been made the first time.

(More seriously, there are things about the Burton Batman films I loved and others that sucked or felt forced both at the time and now as well.)