BEGINS
Movie Reviews
You want my opinion? Obviously you do, you wouldn’t be on my site if you didn’t. In my personal opinion, Joel Schumacher ruined the “Batman” franchise with his atrocious “Batman and Robin” (1997). His characters were made of stone; they had no fluidness to them. Not only that, George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger were terrible. The movie made me sick basically.
Now, finally, Batman can spread his wings and soar into the movies proudly. “Batman Begins” is exploding with rousing, pulsing action, backed with complex dialogue. Point number one: this movie is smart.
Another cynical point of view I have is the whole thing about superhero movies. Up until “Spider-Man 2”, I had nearly given up hope that Hollywood would manage to make a modern comic book movie about a real, living, breathing human being that had the same problems as us, but was forced to deal with them while protecting the innocent. That’s the whole reason for superheroes – they are heroes. They do the impossible for the good of humanity. What most of these action directors fail to realize is that if the character isn’t real to us, then there is no hope in having a solid story involving anything besides villains and how the hero is going to stop them.
Sam Raimi (“Spider-Man) and Christopher Nolan (“Batman Begins”) have found the missing link between real and make-believe. They have bridged the gap in establishing a hero that feels genuine to us.
What “Batman Begins” has that so many others don’t is a fantastic script. Nolan co-scripted this with David S. Goyer. They create these wonderful scenes with astonishingly detailed dialogue. For much of the first and second act, we have two people chatting, and it’s just as engaging as the explosive third act. You don’t find that often – especially when a caped crusader is the central character.
Christian Bale is a very good Batman. He’s actually not who’d you would expect to play this character, and I think it is because of the way he talks. Bale has a slight overbite that makes his S’s garbled. When Bale puts on the Batman voice – low and raspy – he doesn’t sound like a superhero. And that’s the genius of it; that’s why this Batman is so real to us.
As for a supporting cast, well, Nolan must have had a say in that as well because everyone is A-list. Right down to characters that have a mere ten minutes of screen time we have actors like Tom Wilkinson as a rough-and-tumble New York mob boss Falcone. Liam Neeson is Bruce’s trainer, Ducard. Michael Caine is Alfred. Morgan Freeman is Lucious Fox, the Wayne’s warehouse caretaker. Gary Oldman plays Jim Gordon, one of a very few Gotham police officers who is not crooked. Katie Holmes is Rachel Dawes, Bruce’s childhood playmate and potential love interest. Cillian Murphy (“28 Days Later”) is Dr. Jonathan Crane; Murphy is an exciting up-and-comer, and I’m anxious to see him in more starring roles. Even Ken Wantanabe turns up. They all absorb their character, and then are kindly enough to share it with us. There are many notable performances here.
“Batman Begins” takes its time telling the story. We have a good forty minutes of back story for Bruce Wayne. Before this, our only glimpse of Bruce’s parents dying was some stylized, flashy mugger sequences. They meant absolutely nothing. Here, Nolan makes us watch, painfully and brutally, as a child witnesses his mother and father’s death. The score by duel composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) is superb in this particular moment.
After that, we stay with it. We accompany Bruce to the mountains where he trains in the ways of a Ninja. When he returns we see that his family’s company had been inventing many new “toys” for the military to test out. Since they were too expensive to mass produce, most of them stay put. All this explains how he makes the transition into Batman. In the other films we had his parents’ death, and then boom, action, action, action. Now we have some plausibility.
Nolan’s film is a fantasy, no doubt about that, but he executes it as though it were totally true. We know it’s all preposterous, but he makes sure that what should be real is real. Beside the fact that Christian Bale lacks a good, raspy Batman voice, we ought to be proud of how remarkably detailed this is. *** ˝