Ever wondered how shy, retiring Bruce Wayne became the psychopathic Batman? Wonder no longer: Batman Begins tells you how.
We start with young Bruce getting scared by bats, move on to parents getting killed (tied in inextricably with fear of bats in a nice way), move on to Bruce “finding himself” and as a young man (Christian Bale) goes off to understand the criminal mind. He gets thrown in an Asian jail, and after he fights off a ridiculous number of inmates who attack himâ€â€showing that he already has the rad movesâ€â€he’s rescued by Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson) who takes him to the super-secret (and multi-ethnic) ninja cult the League of Shadows. There he learns all sorts of super-secret ninja moves and decides to go back and save Gotham. Well, after he destroys the League. You’ll understand when you see it.
Wayne assumes the persona of a completely unconcerned party boy billionaire by day (or early evening), while fighting crime and kicking asses at night. He finds an inventor genius (Morgan Freeman) in the basement of Wayne Enterprises who makes him cool gadgets. He fights the evil crime lord of Gotham, Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson, with a hilarious accent), and the evil psychiatrist Dr. Crane (Cillan Murphy). He helps out Detective, soon to be Lieutenant, James Gordon (Gary Oldman). And he’s really, really conflicted about what to do about friend-from-childhood-turned-grownup-babe Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), who’s the incorruptible Assistant DA. Meanwhile, the guy who’s running Wayne Enterprises (Rutger Hauer) is attempting to run it right off the edge of a cliff.
It’s good stuff. Very cool photography, from the mysterious Asian lair to the streets of Gothamâ€â€I thought the panoramas of Gotham were quite good, because you’re expecting New York. Some of the fight sequences were annoying, because you can’t quite tell who’s doing what to whom, but in a few cases it really worksâ€â€such as when we see Batman’s effect on bad guys from the perspective of the bad guys (who really don’t understand what’s going on). The visual effects and gadgets: excellent. The script: I thought it was extremely stylized in all the right waysâ€â€people in a comic book do not stand around having “How are you?” conversations; they have grandiose statements of purpose.
You know, the more I think about this movie, the more tempted I am to see it again. But I only get one movie a week these days, and I can’t waste it on repeats. But I totally would, that’s how much I enjoyed it.
Now, on to the questions foremost in your mind:
Christian Bale: hot. I’ve always thought he’s kind of weird lookingâ€â€still do, actuallyâ€â€but in this movie, definitely hot. Hot, and creepy. (Anyone else think of Patrick Bateman at least once during this film? Show of hands.) But more than that he’s totally believable as a guy who seriously has more on his mind than where his next party is.
Katie Holmes: yick. I know that the whole TomKat way-too-overexposed relationship has predisposed me not to like her (mostly because I think, “Hon, there’s something you oughta know”) but also because she’s 26 and looks, oh, 17. Bale is 30 and looks like he’s a decade older than herâ€â€do Asian crime vacations really age a man so much? She’s the Assistant DA by way of the prom. I know she can’t help look girlish and therefore unserious. I just think she’s horribly miscast here.
Supporting cast: totally excellent, even with Wilkinson’s accent. Although I’m confused by one thing: a commenter on Smart Bitches) mentioned Cillan Murphy as an archetypal Regency hero and I gotta say: thank you for playing, but no. Talk about your creepy guys. Brrr.
Best line of the summer: I’m willing to wager there will be no lines to top, “You know how it is, you’re at a party, someone passes around the weaponized hallucinogen…”
But wait! This movie also contains the second best line of the summer, which the newspaper headline about Wayne’s birthday party.
Worst line of the movie: this is a spoiler, so be warned!
When Batman dispatches the Main Villain at the end of the movie, he says, “I won’t kill you. But I don’t have to save you.” And the Main Villain goes to his death. Really left me thinking, What the fuck? Is this part of the Batman mythos? Have they, in fact, excised any compassion from Bruce Wayne? Is he finally being judge, jury, and executioner? It bothered me very much.
Other than that? Definitely much more worthwhile than a “summer movie.” Check it out.
Yeah, I didn’t care for the line, but the sentiment rings true. He didn’t directly kill R’as, but his inaction did lead to what would appear to be his death. Seems like a technicality.
Not that the Demon’s Head is dead, of course. Not even a faked corpse to poke at. When he said “We sacked Rome,” he wasn’t talking about the legacy of the order. it was more, “Me and some of my ninja buddies burned it down, man.”
It’s been a long while since I read _The Dark Knight_, but if I’m recalling correctly…yeah, it is part of the mythos that sometimes Batman wants revenge and takes it upon himself to pass judgement and kill — only later to brood about it.
It occurred to me last night that Christian Bale looks like Bruce Wayne as drawn by artist Tim Sale, which probably means nothing to you. 🙂 But Sale has been a popular Batman artist over the last decade.
Batman has gone through periods of being a vicious bastard. In the earliest days he even sometimes carried a gun. But I think comics writer Mark Waid nailed it in Kingdom Come when Superman observed that “more than anything else, Bruce Wayne is someone who doesn’t want to see anyone die.”
In the comics, Ra’s al Ghul is immortal, so he may be back in the films.
Also, in the comics it’s pronounced (I’m told) “Raesh al Ghool”, and that’s how it was pronounced in the cartoons, too. Not sure why they changed it for the film.
Until past the TV series, Batman was a boyscout who would never have participated in the death of an evil doer. He would have deferred to the judicial system to do justice. To salvage a salable character after selling him out to high-camp, he was, as they say, reinvented as a darker, nastier bat. Sure, letting justice happen by not intervening is much in the current character. My own take so far is that I won’t see the movie until it’s at my local brewpub theater when I can pay five bucks for admission and chug a quart of beer while the comic book unfurls before me. That’s how I handled my last couple comic book movies and how I hope to handle this one.
it was a fantastic film and i think Cillian Murpy as really good as that mad dr. guy. it was sooooooooooo good. i loved it
Googled you looking for that hallucinogen line…good review, but I think the point you’re missing about Batman “killing” Ra’s is that Bats has more life-and-death matters to worry about at the time than rescuing his nemesis – and that’s really Ra’s – from a train wreck.
And Ra’s will be back if Nolan and company pull the Lazarus Pits idea into the movies. Maybe in the third movie they already have planned.
Random_Tangent’s comment summed it up for me: Ra’s never dies. He’s part Osama, part Dracula.
I don’t know — that scene with Ra really bugged me. It felt so completely wrong, like Batman had become a murderer. Even if the guy never actually dies. But I don’t know a lot about the whole Batman mythos beyond “The Dark Knight.”
I was thinking about this some more…it’s a kind of triage, Batman not saving Ra’s. Remember, Bruce Wayne saved Ra’s once, in Asia, when Wayne slid after Ra’s and caught him when he was about to fall off the mountain.
And after Gotham has been quarantined following the terrorist incident that Ra’s engineered, Bruce Wayne – now Batman – has a whole city full of drug-crazed murderers and rapists to deal with, since the doors of Arkham Asylum have been set wide open.
So, Batman would probably be thinking, “I’m going to go out on a limb for this guy again and be his rescuer? After what he did to Gotham? For every minute I spend hauling him off the train, I can save ten innocent people, and 10>1, so seeya Ra’s.”
Of course, Batman can’t take on all those Arkhamites just then – that’s the whole rest of the new Batman film series right there, cleaning up that mess. It wasn’t made clear in Begins, but very likely the Joker is going to be among the escaped inmates, and he’s a nightmare. And Ra’s is big on revenge…that’s his whole thing, revenge for his wife’s death, so he’ll be back too.
Anyway, that’s my take on it. Bruce Wayne’s biggest slip-up in Begins was wrecking all those police cars trying to save Rachel Dawes. Bad PR, you know?
Discussing the Batman myth involves so much more real-world thinking than the Matrix mumbo-jumbo that infests the Internet. Check out my Xanga blog, comment, etc., LOL no one there does.