By 
I just saw Batman Begins today. It’s a good movie, and it washes away the stink of the Schumacher films. The best thing about the movie is that it concentrates on Bruce Wayne rather than the caped superhero or crazy villains. (This is something that the current comics need to fix as well; Batman is so busy running around the world, he’s pretty much abandoned his Wayne identity.) Batman Begins attempts to show that Wayne is flesh and blood, and how he develops his skills and tools to fight crime. The script takes patches of continuity from various Batman mini-series and weaves them together to come up with an explanation. David Goyer, the screenwriter, has done this sort of thing before on Blade, where he pretty much took the names and powers of the characters and put his own spin on them. There are bits of Miller's Year One and Loeb's Long Halloween, but it's not as satisfying as either of these graphic novels.
Goyer and Nolan make a number of mistakes in Batman Begins. Ra’s Al Ghul should have been a terrific super-villain who has lived for centuries thanks to the Lazarus pits; here he’s portrayed as Batman’s opposite number, someone who suffered from crime and chose to take an even more extreme path than Wayne. I don’t really care for the notion that Ra’s is Wayne’s mentor in the martial arts. It was much better in the comics that Wayne had learned the skills on his own and had won the respect of Ra’s as a worthy adversary. It also that bugs me is that Ra’s isn’t Middle Eastern (political correctness due to our current situation in Iraq) and that he isn’t bent on cleansing the world in a holocaust. He wants to wipe out crime by making Gothamites kill each other? I thought the holocaust plan much more sense in a twisted kind of way.
One of the other problems that Batman has always had is the lack of a steady romantic interest. Goyer came up with Rachel Dawes, an assistant district attorney, who was Wayne’s childhood friend before his parents were killed. Rachel doesn’t seem that interesting to me. Maybe it’s because Katie Holmes plays her and the recent Tom Cruise thing has soured me on this chick, but I think her acting is weak and she’s just not as cute as she used to be in Dawson’s Creek.
I had some minor quibbles with the police in the film. While it’s good that they portrayed Gotham’s cops as corrupt and on the take, they made Flass a much weaker character than in Frank Miller’s story. Miller’s Flass is a strong bully, a tremendous adversary that Gordon needs to overcome; here he is more like fat, disgusting Bullock. There’s a scene where Batman is surrounded by the police, but instead of fighting them as in Year One, they merely summon the bats and he gets away all too quickly.
No film is perfect; all superhero films seem to have some weaknesses. Batman Begins does an awful lot more right than wrong. Part of the magic is the perfect casting of Christian Bale as Batman, Michael Caine as Alfred, Gary Oldman as Gordon and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox. Showing the origins of Batman, the Batcave, and the Batmobile is a really cool deal. There is a chase scene involving the Batmobile which is very exciting. I always wondered how Batman would deal with helicopters following him out of town! Although wouldn’t they comb the area for tire tracks afterwards? The Scarecrow is the only “costumed” villain in the movie and he’s wonderfully played by Cillian Murphy. He’s a good psychological foil for Batman and he leaves you wishing we had seen more. It’s a good movie, not quite the crowd pleaser the first Batman movie made by Tim Burton had been, but good enough to reinvigorate Warner’s superhero franchise (the ending leaves you a teaser as to what's coming if there is a sequel). Next year: Superman Returns! Nuff said.
Leave a comment