What were they thinking?

Rating: 5/10 (26 June 2005)

OK. Admittedly not a bad movie if you are just going to see a movie. Not one I would recommend highly, but lately there haven't been many good movies coming out. The main problems of course come to the hardcore comic fans.
Once again we see a good story on paper, turned on it's ear, raped, rewritten, and released to try and make a little money. So what's wrong? Lets start a list shall we?
1) Childhood friend...what? where the heck did this come from? oh I know, they needed a female character to give it a little bit of a romantic twist. So where is this in the original story? nowhere. 2) Lucias Fox. Since when was he a tech boy? Lucias ran Wayne Enterprises from the beginning, as I recall he was a friend of Thomas, and a good man. 3) The original batmobile wasn't a tank or a bridge layer or anything fancy like that. Batman has basically a modified black Masarati, a very expensive sports car admittedly, but nothing more than that. 4) The cave's discovery was not until much later in Bruce's life, if you go by the other movies it's just after his parents death, though in some cases it wasn't meant to occur until he had already been trained and was looking for an identity to fight crime. 5) Al Ghul did not appear until much later in Batman's life though I have heard references to him being involved in Bruce's initial training (though this isn't revealed until much later) 6) Scarecrow was not Batman's first enemy, in fact the whole premise of Scarecrow and Al Ghul joining forces is preposterous. 7) Bruce was not placed in an Asian prison, nor did he go out seeking fights while he was training, he was looking for balance to bring the chaos of his parents death into perspective. Later events lead to him becoming the Batman.
Anyway, if you ignore those facts it was a decent movie, well written if it were a different character than Batman it wouldn't be as hyped and therefore wouldn't be as popular, but once again this isn't the story of "Batman" it's a "What If" story in the vein of the old Marvel Comics series.
Personally I wouldn't suggest paying theater prices to see it, but Batman Begins would definitely be worth a rental once it comes out on DVD.