The prince

Rating: Null/10 (27 August 2012)

This seems more important in retrospect as the start of a modern saga that aspires to go beyond competently engineered thrills. At the time, the introduction of mature logic and what seemed like 'real world' dimensions in this niche was something new, and fresh after Schumacher's ice-capades. So, because it was conceived as something grounded on the same world and life as ours, I will focus in this comment on that set of dynamics.
Everything is rested and elaborated from a basic notion of theatricality and deception as diversions from the real thing. This can be said to be the essence of the real world of adults, primarily so far as politics and economy is concerned (both central tenets in the film). The way it goes, is that you are supplied with a narrative of convenient truths in (more or less) absolute terms of good and evil that obscures the actual dynamics that move the world. And since the time it was made, we have felt our own Depression, still are, and the fabricated narrative that toys with the lives of millions.
But the real thing here is a story about a boy.
The Nolans are primarily writers, so you can trust that at least what concerns simple storytelling has been mulled over and methodically sculpted in collaboration. You could take Batman out of it, and it's not a bad story by any means. You can imagine, if you will, that the story begins with the death of the parents, and the timeline is jumbled so that the guilt-wracked boy in his mind can make himself out to be responsible; if only he hadn't been afraid at the opera and wanted to go home. At any rate, that boy has suffered a terrible loss and has to find ways to cope with new and dangerous dimensions it has opened in him.
That is rendered as a breathless fall into a rabbit hole that unleashes private demons (visualized again a bit later on a stage as indirectly causing the loss). That fall quite literally creates the batman-universe, and that universe is Jungian in the most simple terms, so suddenly around him spring mentors, ogres, the whole shadowy cosmos of juvenile imagination. In that universe he has every means at his disposal to be someone else.
He has to have a quest now that allows him to play-act the trauma, one that expressly transforms and liberates blocked energies in the soul.
Exactly how he's going to do that is something he learns in the Himalayas, because that's where mystical knowledge resides dontcha know: he is going to embody the image of childhood fear, he is going to quite literally become the painful memory, but that is going to be only theatricality and deception that diverts attention from the utmost goal, the essence of the thing.
Now here's the deal. Nolan's smoke and mirrors including 'important' political allusions to our current state are every bit as daft as Marvel, in spite of the glum coating. They are disposable theatrics, but they were going to be wrapper anyway. And we are beginning to press against the limits of Jung's narrative logic, and it shows here. But it's the essence of the thing what cheapens this.
What do I mean? The boy is no ordinary boy. He is, we learn, from a long genealogy of good doing battle against evil, down to his great-great-grandfather in the Civil War and we assume beyond. His parents are everything exemplary and noble about humankind, not a single flaw in sight (and incidentally, filthy rich). That is not just his own memory, it's what everybody else thinks. And both the fact that he is from that lineage and that lineage apparently did nothing wrong to amass a fortune, and the fact that the son can do what he does not because he renounces the riches but because he has them, all these things cannot help but matter in the long run.
So we have the same old myth of valiant prince-hero slaying evil in his soul and out in the world, but presented in context of the 'real world', and a real world that is hanging in an even more precarious balance than it was 10 years ago, it seems both extremely conservative and inadequate to cover even basics of contemporary narrative.
The antagonists are also actors who theatrically deceive, and one is a pawn of the other. They should have balanced the scales. But, Nolan has hit another narrative dead-end with his Ra's Al Ghul. This is particularly egregious because he's meant to represent a balancing force, and Nolan still thinks in terms of character-based decisions. He gives us a secret society and a masterplan, kiddie stuff.
Everything in this film is a character attached to a story (the kid - the parents - the great-great-grandfather - the League of Shadows).
There is no real transference to where the film can have its own fabric and energy, its own deceptive machinery. You can read this the ordinary way, and there is no challenge. Nolan is just not a very exciting filmmaker who can push the medium.