Fresh start.

Rating: 5/10 (19 June 2005)

Well, the fan-boys are swarming on this review page for *Batman Begins* -- hundreds upon hundreds of 10-star reviews, calling it a masterpiece. Calm down. It's good, but not THAT good. But then again, given the standards of comic-book movies, *Batman Begins* is indeed a 10-star movie, and is the biggest surprise of the summer. You'll do far better here than suffering through the conclusion to George Lucas' overblown space epic. In general film terms, however, it's merely recommendable, rating somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. It's not a masterpiece; it's simply a good time at the movies, and during the withering heat of summer, that's surely good enough.
The movie exceeds Tim Burton's original, in my opinion, if only because it's less like a comic book and just simply more interesting. The interest comes from the Caped Crusader's back-story, which director Christopher Nolan and his writer Goyer expand to the far reaches of the Asian steppes. There, a pre-Batman Bruce Wayne, consumed with anger over the murder of his parents by a common criminal some years earlier, finds himself in jail for petty crimes. He's bailed out by a macho mystic named Ducard (Liam Neeson, once again adding heft to a movie before prematurely disappearing), who advises Wayne to join a crime-fighting cult called the League of Shadows. Wayne is put through the paces of vigorous, violent training by this ninja cult, but ultimately rejects their "do what is necessary" dogma. Wayne has a more "nuanced" philosophy: he won't be an executioner, and he won't destroy a civilization just because it's corrupt. The rest of the movie treads along more familiar paths.
*Batman Begins* is heavily influenced by current real-life attitudes and events. The Bush mindset of "do what is necessary" is shown here to lead to daft murderousness; the poison-gas plot reflects a post-9/11 fear of terrorism. The movie's recurring tag-line about how a person is not defined by what he is, but what he DOES, is another slap at our current leadership. You can be a god-fearing Christian; but do you commence illegal, unfounded wars and sanction the torture of our enemies? It's what you DO that defines you.
Nolan has wrought a fine, exciting movie that pushes the boundaries of, yet firmly stays within, the parameters of the summer blockbuster. Do NOT take very young children to this; the PG-13 rating is a "hard" rating, to be taken seriously. Cillian Murphy's trumped-up costume as the Scarecrow, enhanced by hallucinatory CGI, will give the kiddies nightmares. Despite the obvious nods to Lang's *Metropolis* and Scott's *Blade Runner*, Gotham is a realistic looking parallel-universe city that is imbued with a more vital intensity than Burton's Art Deco Gotham full of campy 40-foot-tall statues: the verisimilitude of the setting here enhances, rather than detracts from, the fantasy. Ang Lee's *Hulk* carried a grimness comparable to this film, but that movie was hampered by Lee's absurd insistence on reminding us that it was all just a stupid comic book (e.g., the split-screens designed to look like comic panels, and so forth). *Batman Begins* could be any madman's fantasy, existing with complete independence from its comic-book origins. Perhaps this is because the movie tells the story from the very beginning, thus freeing the material from its 60-odd years of pop culture baggage.
Other positives: the strong supporting cast, including the likes of Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Gary Oldman as Wayne's various pillars of support. Christian Bale in the lead role is quite good, as well: he plays Wayne with an air redolent of snotty privilege, but he really comes alive in that suit, radiating film-noir tough-guy cool and occasional over-the-top menace, using a sotto-voce growl that absolutely tickled me. Bale is the best Batman on record. Negatives? Katie Holmes as the pointless girlfriend (her whole plot-line should have been excised in the interest of controlling the excessive running-time); the fight-scenes are shot too close and further mucked up with too many rapid-fire cuts (no surprise there, given current stylistic trends); the climax is an overwrought waste of dough, cribbing from *Spider-Man 2*'s runaway elevated train, to say nothing of the ludicrous and baffling complexity of the villain's attempt to evaporate Gotham's water-supply. Also, the subject-matter as a whole is rather silly: a billionaire fighting crime in a bat-suit. But the movie's bracing grimness and sense of outright horror manages to minimize the silliness. In my review of *Hulk*, I posited the notion that that movie wasn't good because it forgot to have fun. *Batman Begins* isn't "fun", precisely, yet it works. I guess the key is that this movie never seems wholly outlandish. Plausibility + spectacle trumps mere spectacle every time.
A solid 5 stars out of 10 (higher, if you're already predisposed to this sort of material). Go see it.