I saw, as I suspect most of you did, Batman Begins this weekend.
It is the best Batman movie yet. I left the theater wanting the same crew to make another movie immediately.
Excellent cast. Christian Bale actually looks like Bruce Wayne looks in my head, the first such in forty years.
Cillian Murphy will win the Oscar for Outstanding Achievement in Being a Substitute Johnny Depp. (Of course, Depp's already played the Crane role, Ichabod instead of Jonathan, like there's a difference.)
Too much blows up for no particularly good reason.
When you look at comic book movies like Superman, you see a movie that takes its subject matter from comics but whose creators metaphorically say "We're expert movie makers, we know how to make movies, we don't need anything from the comics." We're in a Golden Age of superhero comic book movies now, with X-Men, Spider-Man, Batman Begins, et al., because the movie makers are taking more than just the idea from the comics; they're taking story and production design and art direction from the comics. They're looking at the history of the characters and they're taking the best for their movies. Gary Oldman is David Mazzucchelli's version of Jim Gordon, just for an example.
Spoilers ahoy!
As others have noted, a microwave emitter effective enough to boil water in mains will fry any human in its path.
Christopher Nolan appears to have a genius-level grasp of movie structure. He actually understands and deliberately uses the Law of Conservation of Movie Actors in a way that impressed me (in the relationship between Ducard and Al-Ghul).
Posted by Greg at June 21, 2005 1:44 PM
May I pick a minor yet hugely irritating nit?
I found the presence of new-style, post-2000 money in the origin flashbacks hugely irritating. Are period bills really getting that hard to find? Because I can't buy the bulk of the film as being in 2030 or so, either...
This obviously takes place in an alternative universe (as opposed to merely a fictional one.) They make reference to "the Depression," yet this is obviously not the 1930's. The time scale is not even good to qualify the early 90's recession as it, and it was never referred to as a Depression either. This is simply a world where an economic crisis popularly called the Depression took place about 20 years ago. They can have their anarchonistic money then.
Chris is absolutely right with this one. What's more, the "Depression" seemed to be localized to just Gotham (which seemed odd to me at the beginning, but made more sense as Ra's plot unfolded). I mean, if we can accept that its occurring in a world where there's a city named "Gotham City", can't we just assume that they changed their money earlier and just forget about it?
One of the things that I loved about the film is how they transitioned from "real" to "unreal" through the course of the film. Things start out fairly rooted in reality, but as the movie goes on things get wilder and wilder and more and more fantastic until we end up with Ra's "microwave transmitter" plan - a classic bit of super-villainy that could have come straight from one of the comics.
And yet, they made it work. The transition worked so well I didn't even realize it ocurred until I was thinking about it later. They did a fantastic job with this movie, and I can't wait for a sequel.
I liked it. I sort of wonder if there's some neo-con subtext in the whole thing, like the way they are carefull between differentiating between Batman's version of bringing justice to a troubled region, and Ra's Al Ghul terrorism. (fear gas that makes the population consume itself?) Also the way Ra's is a long running tradition versus Batman the newcomer.
It was Batman trying to stop a large vehicle from crashing into a building central to the city that made me think of this. Which is a bit of a stretch, since the train isn't going to cause any structural damage, but that's the imagery.
But I like it. Most superhero stories and their creators acknowledge the implications, but sort of shy from them, or condem them. That this movie embraces them is sort of cool, even if I don't like the neo-cons.
Actually, the microwave emitter wouldn't fry people. It would make them explode like popcorn. Very bloody popcorn.
Well, thanks to a combination of professional and personal pressures on my time, I finally got to see this today. I saw Revenge of the Sith Saturday, so I guess I'm getting caught up. Better late than never, right?
Anyway, in terms of atmospherics, Nolan hit all the right notes. This felt more right than Burton's vision of Batman and Gotham and far more right than Schumacher's vision of Gotham.
Casting? Another home run. I particularly liked Michael Caine (but who doesn't), Gary Oldman, and Cillian Murphy, but everyone was right for their part.
That said, I thought the movie was pretty crappy. The pacing was attrocious. We spend the first hour or so meandering through dime-store philosophy on vengeance, justice, and fear, coupled with flashbacks just so we can be sure we get it. Then another half hour or so of Bruce Wayne wandering around Gotham announcing his intention to be Batman. I get it, Nolan -- I bought a ticket to a movie called Batman Begins. I know he's going to become Batman. Do I really need to see him spray-paint his Bat suit? I don't think so. And I really don't need to see him do it a good 10 minutes before I even see him put the damned thing on.
Another problem was the fights. It's not particular to Nolan -- it's a sin every action movie of the last 10-15 years seems to have committed -- but jerking the camera around and putting a cut every 40-50 frames does not make the fight scenes more exciting and comprehensible. It makes them impossible to follow.
In short, this movie badly needed an editor.
But that's not all it needed. It also seriously needed a script doctor. And that's leaving aside the whole issue of filming a Batman movie in which Batman doesn't appear until more than halfway through the film. Simply put, parts of the movie made no sense whatsoever. This ranges from the big stuff to the little.
First, there's the master plan. Let's leave aside the fact that, as many have pointed out, a microwave weapon powerful enough to vaporize the water in the city water mains would also vaporize the water in the city inhabitants. Put that out of your mind. Recall what the master plan was -- Crane dumped the fear toxin in the water, ready to be activated when Ra's al Ghul blew into town with the microwave. He'd been doing so for weeks. Now, I'm not the most scientifically-minded Curmudgeon, but I'm pretty sure that you don't need a high-tech microwave to vaporize water. Are we supposed to believe that during the weeks leading up to the attack, nobody had made a kettle of tea? Taken a hot shower? It defies logic.
Speaking of defying logic, what was up with Lucius Fox? He apparently keeps inventing spectacular things that the army is uninterested in, and so he winds up as the only employee in Wayne Industries Applied Sciences division? What the hell is up with that? And the excuses he gave for why his inventions weren't being sold? I mean, I understand the army not wanting to outfit each soldier with a $300,000 battle suit, but you'd think there would be certain circumstances under which they might be of some use? We paid $14.5 million each for Apache helicopters back in the early 1970s, and those were two-man copters. And the Batmobile? What was wrong with that? It was useless because it turned out that after you drove it over rough terrain at speeds in the neighborhood of 100 m.p.h and jumped a ravine, you couldn't deploy a bridge behind you? Well, that's just a useless invention! Throw it away! But be sure to keep the division that created it operating with just one man.
As long as we're on the subject of the Batmobile, it was an absolutely ridiculous Batmobile for Batman's mission. Sure, Bruce -- when I'm chasing criminals in an urban environment, I want a mini-tank that will smash up the city's infrastructure and endanger bystanders. I mean, the chase scene? Why didn't Batman just start shooting at the police cruisers (and any pedestrians he might have passed). For all the care he was taking, he might as well have done so.
I also think that the use of the Scarecrow in the movie was the biggest waste of a Batman villain since ... well, they've been wasting Batman villains at least since they misuesed Two-Face in Batman & Robin, so I guess it's just carrying on a noble tradition. But really. The guy got taken out by Joey from Dawson's Creek with a Taser. That's not a villain; that's a schmuck.
And last but not least, there's the themaatic journey Bruce Wayne undergoes, from the young man who wants to get revenge on his parents' killer by shooting him in cold blood, to the wiser man who recognizes that justice means saying things like "I won't kill you ... but I don't have to save you either?" Truly a heroic journey, or possibly a sociopathic journey.
Oh yeah -- most of the one-liners sucked. "Nice coat?" Give me a break.
I wanted to like this. I really did. Like I said, it did a spectacular job of capturing the atmosphere of Batman, and the casting was spot-on. It just needed about an hour cut from the film and another half hour added in, along with a bunch of spackle to fill the plot holes.
And in it's defense, not only is it not the worst movie I've seen, not only is it not the worst superhero movie I've seen, it's not even the worst Batman movie I've seen. So I suppose it has that going for it.