I wanted to like it, honestly!

Rating: 2/10 (15 June 2005)

I wanted to like it, honestly!
I've been a huge Batman Fan all my life. And yes I still have a copy of Batman Year One. Love it. But unfortunately....
Take a seemingless endless budget, and allstar cast, great special effects, set design, costume design, and add in a monkey for a script writer / director. What do you get? A movie a bunch of hopefull Batman fans go to, and end up grimacing at every line of dialog. You get a movie that is trying hard to be a psychological thriller, but seems to have been written by a 8 year old. The movie lacks any consistency, and any real understanding of what it is trying to do. By then end of the movie, you are stuck wondering , what the bleep was the point of any of this!?!??! You get a beautiful to watch, yet, literally painful to follow mess.
What happened? In earlier Batman movies Burton went for a more campy vision of Batman.
Well the fans wanted something darker, something along the lines for the more realistic "Batman: Year One". So Hollywood decides to cash in on another attempt at Batman, in the height of the whole Comic book movie craze. And someone decided this meant diving into Bruce Wayne's psyche, and showing his "transition" to Batman. In Burton's Batman, they just showed enough of a story we all know and let us settle the rest in our imagination. In Nolan's version everything is so blatant yet not thought out enough to stop it from completely contradicting itself. We are beat over the head again and again with Wayne's inner conflicts. There are several excellent ideas throughout the fill that just keep falling flat on their face, either because of not getting fleshed out properly, or just simply from contradicting themselves. Little about the movie makes any sense, from the characters philosophies, to training with live metal swords and no head gear.
Burton's movies were at least consistent. They worked within themselves, creating a world that gelled together. He stayed true to his vision of Batman, and came up with some solid, consistent movies.
With Batman begins, expect to go from a great scene, to sitting there and just thinking, what the bleep did I just see. The scenes with a child Bruce Wayne are just painfully bad. Expect no consistency, no vision, no cohesive story.
So what is this film worth? It is a typical shallow action based comic book hero movie with little true substance behind it. Expect ridiculous leaps of faith as far as what is physically "possible", expect stupid car chases where the "hero" almost gets dozens of people killed and tears of the city, expect anything but a good story.
Production value 9/10. Story and script 2/10. Overall 4/10.