Batman Begins: The Thread

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.)

From me, it's not revisionism. I thought they were crap then, too. If you have some idea that the love for them was unanimous, that's your problem.

I didn't find it especially compelliing, but I did find it exactlty what you do not -- necessary. Backstory is something that, even in the Burton movies, Batman lacked.

Burton, for all his talents, made not only cartoons, but fairly boring ones, when the day was all over with.

It's driving me crazy! In 2005, after some good and bad Batman films, after X-men and Spiderman, post-Matrix and a billion other by-the-numbers "dark & gritty" sci-fi movies, is this Batman movie really that much of an achievement? Is this really the best they can come up with? The jump between Superman and other previous superhero films and the first Burton Batman was immense! Plus Burton managed to find a middle ground between the darkness and the camp (which, you know, some people actually like). And to return to this discussion about the back story, the Burton movie managed to convey who Batman was and what motivates him just fine while still managing to be fun.

All of the dialog about conquering your fears was necessary? Because, you know, I got the point perfectly well when all of the bats flew at him as a kid. But I felt like I was being reminded about it every 10 minutes for the next hour.

1. Denny O'Neill/Neal Adams
2. Frank Miller (and sometimes David Mazzuchelli)
3. Alan Moore/Brian Bolland
4. Matt Wagner

All told, pretty slim pickins from the history of the character, true, but it's what I've liked and it ain't hardly fun.

Let's assume, as I do, that a superhero needs a cultural context in order to be super. And when they get updated, they need an updated context in order to work properly.

X-Men -- Loved the gay subtext. Best and cleanest update ever. Spiderman -- the message about "responsibility" is a little muddled, and the second movie was wise to keep everything firmly in the ridiculous, even though the reason people read comic books is not to feel ridiculous. Matrix -- ok, whatever. A great potential myth that pissed on its own fire. Quickly, no less. Matrix doesn't belong in this conversation. Not that you really put it there.

But Batman can still work. There is real potential in Batman, like I said before, in the fear of urbanization. The crime and density and alienation and the feeling of being alone and weird and friendless -- these are HUGE themes, and Batman can conceivably cover all of them very well, if written properly.

Superheroes are us, or they are nothing.

ok back up here... despite my love for burtonbatman and stuff, superman i & ii are still WAAYYY better movies. supes 1 is still my favourite superhero movie of all time, i think.

Also, sweet jeebus, I have no idea what you folks are bitching about wrt the origin cross-cutting. It seemed pretty clear that the scenes in Asia and the scenes in Gotham were happening at two different times, and the script was pretty explicit on when these transitions between Asia and Gotham were going to happen (cf. Qui-Gon asking "well, what do you fear?" and then, hey, kiddie bat flashback, or "well, why can't you exact your revenge?", and then hey, Jack Ruby flashback). Yeah, bitching about the few misgivings folks are having for a flick that they're generally impressed w/ might be nitpickery of the worst kind, but COME ON PEOPLE.

If you're gonna bitch, bitch about the convenient action-movie tropes that the overall excellence of the movie managed to disguise - "hey, there's Officer Gordon chatting w/ Commissioner Loeb right at the spot where the Batmobile lands after jumping the bridge into The Narrows!" Or, "Wow, it sure was convenient for Batman to get gangtackled by those tweaked civilians right under the train line just as the train was passing!" Or, "Gee, it's a good thing Alfred was able to take out that League of Shadows thug w/ one swing of his driver!"

(PS Ned: you are completely, totally, utterly wrong about the death scene. XOXOXO.)

But oughtn't the utter silliness of the whole concept be played for fun rather more, as done with "Dr Who", say. Rather than treated so portentously. They were laughs, certainly, but I'm not sure how intentional they were. But this should only be done very carefully, as wasn't in the post-Burton Batman films.

Certainly much more to my taste than "Star Wars", though I'm not sure it would measure up against "Spiderman II", which of this sort sounds the most I'd like (need to see that urgently). But seriously, a genuine sense of the absurd would have made it all even more palatable.

- establishing a credible origin for Batman in terms of moral center, skill set and equipment
- establishing Batman's allies within the system
- establishing the origins of Batman's Rogue's Gallery and escalating the criminal core of Gotham to its costumed insanity point

It delivers very well on all three, all the while telling you a complete story but leaving you wishing the second installment was just around the corner AND putting these plot points forward with well-realized characterization.

Also, playing the concept for fun kind of undercuts the inherent trauma of an 8-year-old watching a thug gun down his parents in a dark alley.

I agree that the approach is difficult to pull off, but maybe I'm just feeling something of a residual fondness for the old TV series, which used to be on when i were a kid, so like. The very first Batman movie, from 1966 lest we forget, ought not to be considered a completely invalid approach to the franchise.

Yes, there were a few chuckle-worthy lines and bits (Wayne. "A guy who dresses up as a bat... has to have issues"), but there could have been more without detracting from the overall mood. Yet, it certainly stands as way better than "Batman Forever" and "Batman and Robin", must be said.

And I was certainly never suggesting they play the actual trauma for laughs, though I actually found that the Opera scene rather successfully tread that line between silly and dark.

(i was responding to this. i agree & i really reject the idea that nolan's batman invalidates anything!)