Batman, the movie, finally.

Rating: 10/10 (20 June 2005)

I know about Batman Begins for quite sometime, ever since it was known as "Batman Year One", a name that irritated me to no end.
I thought the retelling of Batman's first year reached its peak in Batman Mask of the Phantasm (which stands beside Begins as the best of the Batman movies). It explained how he got the idea for the costume. How did he find the Bat Cave? What drove him to lead that life, etc.
This movie, a ridiculously great movie, added with the history of the Bat-mobile and even how he paid for it all without letting anybody else get suspicious.
It also helped that we get to see his parent's murder being played out, along with some extra storyline that punched like the whole Spider Man "I could have stopped him" scene. And Batman's father finally becomes a character with as much depth as Mufasa of the Lion King. (and his death would make you angry just as much).
You'd think that since this is the retelling of Batman's origin, you might get to see Batman as a kid whining and crying over his parents' death all over again (like all the other incarnations). Sort of. But instead of sadness and even anger, this movie is all about fear. And you have to look at the story at a whole different level to understand that THAT was the emotion Batman had. In other incarnations, Batman was such a mysterious and "cool" figure. He puts the fear into the criminals, not the other way around. So that whole thing was very interesting to me.
I just want to add something about the signature bad guy of the movie. For a long time I didn't know if there were going to be any signature bad guys. Then I saw the first trailer. It had Batman being trained in some foreign country on top of snow mountain. "Great, it's going to be that kind of movie."
The truth was: by that time, I was just bored with Batman. I love Spider Man's mythology more than Batman's (still do) . The new version of the animated series almost turn me off from Batman completely (his disregard for Batgirl's safety and tough love for the new Robin made me want to pull my hair out and scream at the TV). And that series: Batman Beyond, though good (70% of the time), show me more of that Universe than I ever wanted to see.
Then suddenly I saw a headline on the internet: "First picture ever of Batman Begins' villain Scarecrow.
My body started shaking. I was like...WHOA! Even though it was the story about Batman's first year, they are using a fresh villain? I was looking forward to see the live action version of the Scarecrow. What they will do to the character can't be as bad as what they did to Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy right?
And so I saw the movie. This Scarecrow is even cooler than the one in the cartoon. And that is when I realized: When I saw Batman Forever, I wasn't seeing "the Riddler" on screen. I was seeing Jim Carrey's *take* on the Riddler. Mr. Freeze is the same thing. I didn't see Mr. Freeze. What I saw was: Hey, wouldn't it be silly and fun if Arnold Swarznegger was Mr. Freeze? No such thing happens here. This is definitely Scarecrow and he blended in with the Batman's dark universe quite nicely.
But there are some problems. For a signature villain, he had way too little screen time. He had about as much screen time as Boba Fett in the entire Star Wars saga.
The main villain here, Ra's Al Gough, is no stranger to the Batman's Universe, but is one of those characters I do not expect to see in movie form (the same way I do not expect the Rhino to be the bad guy in Spider Manm 3). Well, they did made some changes to his character and left out half of the storyline concerning him, but he fits with the storyline of this movie, so I guess that was all right. I wasn't too gung-ho about Ra's Al Gough being truth to the comic as I was with Scarecrow since the classic-ness of the two characters are way at the different level.
Anyway, this is not just another artistic interpretation of the Batman legend featuring character Batman (like all the past movies). This is a long overdue movie about Batman.