An excellent adaptation from the comic-book

Rating: 10/10 (15 June 2005)

I must admit it: I had my greatest expectations when I knew that Christopher "Memento" Nolan was going to direct a new Batman movie. The Dark Knight was always my favorite comic-book hero, and I was expecting a great movie adaptation since the last decent Batman movie: Tim Burton's "Batman Returns" (1992). But my expectations where greatly overwhelmed when I began to see "Batman Begins": surely, we don't have the the gargoyles and pointy towers that underlined the name of Gotham City in Burton's movies. We don't have the yellow and black Batman's symbol. But we have something far great: a dark, corrupted and violent city, where half of the authorities have been bought by the mafia, and the other half is waiting to be bought. Here, the Gothic atmosphere is given by the inhabitants of Gotham and their corrupted shadow leaders, not by the architecture. The plot of the film and the atmosphere reminds me a lot of the comic-book "Batman: Year One", written by Frank Miller, where the origin of the Dark Knight was re-written from a more modern perspective than it had back in 1940. Both the comic and Nolan's movie show us the events that pushed Bruce Wayne to wear the cape and the mask of a bat to fight against crime without killing. The emphasis is put in Wayne's physical and psychological development: he must achieve a state of perfection in both aspects of himself to control his own fear and use it like his most powerful weapon against the criminals. Even when we have a spectacular display of special effects, the power of Nolan's film is in his characters and they relationships. That's why the character of Jim Gordon (who was put aside in Burton's films) has taken a more relevant role. One of the most important relationships of the Batman comic-book is the friendship between Batman and Gordon, the only friend of Batman that doesn't know his secret identity. Anyway, I could write paragraphs and paragraphs about how Nolan achieves to create the darkness that has taken the hearts of Gotham's inhabitants, how he successfully writes an essay about the decadence of the civilization and the heroics efforts to save it, and the way he rescues the shadowy Batman of the comic-book, a hero tormented by its past and his uncertain balance between sanity and insanity.