Batman begins; when reality inspires fiction

Rating: 9/10 (20 June 2005)

When I went to watch "Batman begins" I was skeptical about the possibility of content deeper than what ordinary computer effects, unrealistic fights and futuristic weapons could offer. Instead I was Sruck by a lot of the details that were inspired by the tragic terrorist events in the Unites States. Without any explicit reference,the art director,Christopher Nolan, has developed a series of topics that bring us from unrealistic human flights in a bat costume and improbable car chases back to recent events: don't the training camps on the top of the mountains in a frozen lake recall those of Al Qaeda in Afganistan? And the ethnicity of the local population that "hosts" the camp is distinctively different from the inhabitants of Gotham? What about the train going into the main city skyscraper, the Wayne building, with the sounds of the people screaming in the background: isn't it reminiscent of an airplane flying into the Twin Towers while people are screaming and running away? Note that the Wayne building is the center of economic power much like the Twin Towers; it is not a hospital as pointed out by Wayne senior himself; not a building to help sick people, the weak and nowadays neglected side of society. Instead, it is the place where rich people are looking for better ways to become even richer. What about the "terror motive"? All throughout the movie ordinary people are terrorized by something that actually doesn't exist in reality but only in their own imagination: is our society like this now? This doesn't mean that the terror crusaders don't exist; they do, and after training, they come back from abroad to brutally destroy the entire society by using its latest technological innovations in order to impose their own idea of justice, their own order, their own morality. They have been trained to apply these ideas by decapitating people, as the Talebans and Al Zarkawi do.
But the movie makes a step forward past reality and offers a solution; only by imposing civil justice, and not by taking revenge as initially suggested by the killing of a killer (c.f. death penalty), can peace be recovered, order restored and the weak (e.g. like the kid near the end of the movie ) defended. The art director suggests how to cure this society and find its way out of terror. Before defeating the crusaders, we have to cure the cancer within our society (c.f. Falcone and the police corruption) because this is how terror has found its way in and even propagated to our water supply. We have to heal these "internal diseases" such as the savage economic power which splits the society into two groups: the extremely rich people (like the Wayne family) and the very poor ones (like the homeless and beggars in the parking lots), where the former live, "literally" and economically, on top of the latter and no middle class people exist in society.
Only by dealing with these problems can we recover light & love which shine through in the last scene of the movie. Both disappeared after the killing of the Waynes giving rise to darkness, rain, hate and revenge. We can do this without rejection of or discontinuity with the past (the house will be built brick by brick as it was before). Before that, we have to find the courage to move on and destroy what is bad as Batman did.
Finally we can fairly say that this movie is more about reality than about fiction. It makes us think how these two are entangled even tighter because of unprecedented technological developments.