Batman Begins: The Thread

OTM. It's like watching Lucifer cavorting.

None at all. You first see a slew of bats against the sun, then young Bruce on the grounds of the estate, etc. etc.

DIDN'T YOU GET THE MEMO?!?

Did I mention that I loved the theme of Bruce Wayne's eternal quest not so much for justice but for daddy-approval and daddy-surrogate-approval. Maybe I identified a little much with that.

Being a big movie-title-paying-attention-to dork I think this might have fucked up my appreciation of the first 15 minutes or so. I kept thinking "is this still all pre-credit stuff? where's the cool title sequence?" The subtle bat thing in the sky was really nice though. I definitely have to see this again since I seem to have missed the boat the first time.

I thought there was too much Linus Roache, really, especially since the inspiration is supposed to be the deaths of both Thomas and Martha Wayne. It was a little naff to treat his mother like window dressing. I also wondered why he was so non-to-the-manor-born.

Glad I called the Ra's - Ducard thing way back, though it was obvious. Made for fun viewing.

Wayne Manor infiltratted and fucked up worse than Batman Forever. Memo to filmmakers - Bruce Wayne is meant to be an extraordinarily paranoid man. I loved the power of the sequence, and obv. his b-day is a good excuse, but still, I'd like to see the badguys really work for their arson habits next time.

The word "fear" (insert Scritti gag). Totally overabused.

Jim Gordon was originally from Chicago, right? Coulda had fun with that, what with where the city scenes were filmed.

The Bateman-Batman interweave (btw, Brett Easton Ellis made that joke himself in the book, 14 years ago). I could see the differences and the resemblances, but I still kept thinking (or wishing) Bale would say to someone "Not if you want to keep your spleen" or declare himself "a massive fan of the Talking Heads".

Engorged ham. Sorry, I'm with 'em on this one.

Falcone was disposed of a bit too quickly for someone who'd been top dog for decades. There was a plausible enough reason for him to be at the bust when it went down, but I thought it could've enhanced the detective procedural references the filmmakers have been talking up (Serpico, The French Connection etc) if Batman had worked more to take him down.

Holmes felt unnecessary right until the end when she protected the boy and tasered the Scarecrow. Something in those scenes really brought the heart into the film, and it didn't feel shoehorned-in in a "we're just trying to give the love interest something to do"-way. Though in her last scene, I kept waiting for her to say "It's you, Peter Parker. It's always been YOU!"

Cillian was far more pouffy than the Joker! How'll Crispin keep up if he scores the role? Liked the "morphing" mask a lot.

The 3 core guys in the Bat-circle were good. I liked Bale's energy, which made him appear like a confident, rookie Batman to Keaton's more assurred, stoic caped crusader.

Fight scenes hurt my eyes, mostly because of the hayfever. I loved the final ninja training sequence.

Nice nods to Bruce's obsessiveness (gets up, drinks the health juice, falls to the floor and push-ups ahoy).

Fear-gas Batman was so cool. Playboy Bruce was classic.

I really wanted them to include the end of Batman: Year One issue one where as a pre-Bat vigilante, he fucks up, barely makes it home, and then decides on his new guise when the bat flies by, or crashes through the window (liked the bat appearing indoors, and the new cave, which had a nice work-in-progress touch - can anyone say "way sexier lair in the next one"?). Partly because Frank Miller is so cool (though the original 1938 version, where he's all like "That's it! A bat! I shall become a bat!", is somewhat rofflelicious). Kind of made up for it with the brilliant bat-summoning tho.

Sequel thoughts: they could still get Dick Grayson as Robin to fit! Read the Robin: Year One collection, which also features ninjas, crime and violent beatings.

I am looking forward to the DVD.

Did anyone else think that Oldman was creepy when he was touching young Bruce's face? Until I realised he was Commissioner Gordon-to-be I had him pegged as an evil stumbling block for the young Wayne.

The bat thing in the titles really was superbly done, too.

Also, Johnny Depp as the Joker in the next one (should they go that way) seems like the best choice.

HAW

i was worried for the first 20 mins or so with the rather cheesy liam neeson parts, but it all came good in the end.

Hurrah! can't wait for the next ones, Bale is brilliant!

If Returns is 4/5 for me, Begins is certainly a 3.5.

and xpost: sure, it's a lot easier to do cuts in a public transportation sequence where everything is CGI.

i don't see many blockbusters, that's true enough.

was blown away. much better than i expected it to be. loved how it got down into his character. much darker - and scarier - than i expected. I liked the whole liam neeson part, didnt mind katie holmes all that much. Action scenes i felt were almost not choppy enough. when they did pan out, it felt like they were pandering to the post-matrix mentality of arena-rock style fight scenes. batman has to be obscured, not easily visible, and he was almost too visible here.

also, the cgi parts felt a little to slick and well, cgi'd. and the music wasnt great, but wasnt a distraction. hallucination scenes were totally great. loved the tie-in to the Liam Neeson crew at the end.

on the whole, I'd say it compares favorably to the first one or two. I havent seen them in ages, and if i did my opinion could change, but this one was just really really good.

best bruce wayne ever, perhaps the best alfred. murphy was very creepy and well done.

also loved the use of many actual bats.

shit. the whole thing was just really enjoyable.

the best thing was the bat/maggot mask. fucked up.

Christian Bale was just superb. His gruff Batman voice could have been absurd but ended up being a masterstroke. Watching him, you never forgot for a second the weight of his past bearing down upon him.

Cillian Murphy's beauty and the scarecrow's horrificness (damn the hallucinogenic sequences were done so well) - yikes!

Astonishing, really.

First of all, let me state that I do not hate fun. I belong to the minority of people who actually thought Batman Forever was a good film, due to it's deliberate camp and playfulness. (I never saw Batman and Robin, so I have no comments on that.) But I do think there's room for dark and serious interpretations of Batman as well; if any superhero deserves them, it is Batman. However, if you choose the serious road, you have to accept all the baggage that comes with it. With Batman Returns Tim Burton found a great balance between darkness and playfulness, so that the film was serious enough not to be camp, but not serious enough to feel "real". It was a modern fairy tale, and one of the great things Burton did there was to focus as much on the villains as on Batman. Batman Begins, on the other hand, puts the focus pretty much on Bruce Wayne, and chooses seriousness over play and fantasy, and that is where both it's strengths and weaknesesses stem from.

I like how Batman's origin story was told to such great detail. His motivations, his history, his inner conflicts; watching all this unfold was extremely enjoyable. Similarly, the scenes which dealt with the practicalities of becoming Batman - preparing the equipment, the suit, the Batcave - where among the best in the film. Batman's story, however, is essentially a revenge story, and this where the film's seriousness betrayed it. In general, superheroes are vigilantes, and so is Batman. Vigilantism is extremely problematic, but most superhero stories sidestep the issue one way or another. It is exactly because these stories are non-realistic that they make the audience forget the more serious implications of superheroics. But because Batman Begins is such a serious film, it doesn't ignore the problem of vigilantism but tries to tackle it full-on.

The Batman of the film is not "pure" hero but a violent avenger. He lets Ducard fall to his death and does nothing to save him. Some would say that doesn't make him a killer, but remember that he himself asked Gordon to shoot the monorail down. So he is, in essence, responsible for Ducard's death. Also, earlier in the film it looked pretty clear that Bruce Wayne was about to shoot the guy who killed his parents, despite the fact that the killer repented. However, the film cleverly dodged the question whether he would've done it or not by letting someone else shoot the guy. In addition to that, during the car chase scene Batman endangers the lives of several innocent policemen by crashing their cars. For a while I thought the film was really gonna show Batman as a not-so-respectable character after all, since the shooting scene was followed by Katie Holmes saying, "Your father would've been ashamed of you!" (spot on!), and the car chase caused Alfred to chastise Bruce for not caring about other people's safety. But those threads led nowhere, and in the end Batman was supposed to have been a triumphant hero, even though he had both literal and metaphorical blood on his hands.

The problem with the serious approach to superheroics is that in the real world most folks would not like the idea of a superhero taking justice into his own hands. Of all the revisionist superhero writers only Alan Moore seems to have realized this: in his Watchmen citizens protest against superheroes. Non-revisionist superhero stories, such as the two Spider-Man films, are able to sidestep politics exactly because they are so clearly non-realistic, and because they focus on other issues than revenge and vigilantism. Batman Begins, on the other hand, has the same exact as flaw as Dark Knight Returns. The Miller comic was the first Batman story to say, "Take me seriously!", but what if you did so? You found out all the vigilantist, downright fascist implications a "realist" superhero story has. And the same applies to Batman Begins, even though it doesn't hold it's right-wing sympathies on it's sleeve as visibly as Miller does.

Funnily enough, as serious as the story of Bruce Wayne was, the same didn't seem to apply to his opponents. Liam Neeson played Ducard with all the sternness of a drama actor, not realizing that that was in direct conflict with how ridiculous, downright goofy, the whole idea of the League of Shadows, it's goals and ways of getting there was. That was another major flaw in the film: Neeson simply wasn't a good villain. He was too solemn, too little over-the-top for that. And he didn't even have a costume. Cilian Murphy's Scarecrow would've been a much better main villain, but he was given precious little screen time. In fact, I think the film wouldn't have needed a villain at all. The whole "Gotham is in danger, can Batman save it?" latter part of the film felt too short, lame, and kinda tacked on, when the main focus was on Batman's origin story anyway. Ideally, the film should've presented only the origin story, so that it would've ended when we see Batman in costume for the first time. But I guess the big showdown at the end was necessary for commercial viability.

Summa summarum: Batman Begins was an interesting enough reintroduction to the character of Batman, hopefully the sequels can offer us better villains and less dodgy politics.

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