Product: Batman Begins (Two-Disc Deluxe Edition) (2005)
Rating: 3.0
Batman Begins: A Rough Start
An insouciant Bruce falls into a backyard well and crashes against a pile of unforgiving rock, only to discover -- or rediscover -- the terror of cacophonous bat wings knifing through the space where he lies prostrate. Timely Dad, the esteemed and hugely affluent Thomas Wayne, quickly descends the well shaft, offering therapy in the form of mechanically compassionate eyes and bite-sized moralisms, and Bruce's crying subsides. But the bats aren't terrible or awe-inducing. The fall may have stung -- even required impressive quantities of antiseptic - but the bats remain uneventful and even superfluous, passing so abruptly and formlessly that attention shifts (contrary to the film's intentions) excitedly to the abyss beyond them, where real childish exploration could happily begin.In Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins the obvious too often shapes experience. Bat-fear becomes an unfounded fetish for young Bruce, as Dad seems increasingly eager to reinforce his son's effeminate response to inane danger: whimper, clutch the hand of a deferential loved one, and crawl beneath the bed sheets until a God-like father simplifies life into machismo folly by brandishing marital gifts signifying nobility and a penchant for female objectification. So Bruce cries and cries -- a tragic commentary on the meekness of privileged children -- until he mistakes costumed actors for bats while attending the opera and (surprise!) cries his parents into an alley where a token criminal shoots them. Never mind Dad's parting words, whispered to his son with unfittingly eerie stoicism, or Mrs. Wayne's (did she have a first name?) wooden disorientation. Bruce exercises restraint when the viewer expects him to implode; ostensibly unmoved by the finality of his parents' departure, he gazes - almost listlessly -- beyond the immediacy of the crime scene, and the viewer loses him during this moment of uneven malaise - or is it eighty-year-old resignation?After the formalities of a funeral, a pinch of plot-moving dialogue, and Alfred claiming surrogate-Dad status, the film indulges a fully mature Bruce (Christian Bale) self-imprisoned in an off-the-map Asian penitentiary, veritably linking adulthood aimlessness with the alleyway slaughter of yore. Importantly, Bale's character isn't convincing as a necessary extension of a traumatic childhood and gripping phobias. His physical prowess, brooding glances, and witty quips better argue for a curious intellectual in search of higher meaning, a man rejecting the vacuousness of his inheritance and formal education to evolve into something more authentically self-determined. And when locked into this unnamed despair, Bale entwines primordial violence and youthful ambition and introspection to shine considerably brighter than any previous incarnation of Bruce.When Batman finally emerges (ungodly long gestation be done!), everybody's enamored - though only temporarily. Too quick for the eye to capture, he twists his way through a gaggle of stunned gun-wielding cronies with grace and uncanny precision while sound creates a palpable impression of terror. His greatest skills culminate in an assault equal parts feasible, heroic, and bone-chillingly invisible. Unfortunately, close-ups soon destroy Batman's sexy elusiveness, as Bale doesn't have enough freakishness to settle into the costume, whose short inward-turned ears appear laughably feline. The Voice ranges from hoarse to overly echoic and scares only when divorced from Bale's over-sized round jaw and curled tongue. And Batman transforms into something unfamiliar: the Batmobile, in desperate need of an ethical overhaul, upends traffic and devours property at a militaristic rate. At its helm, Batman becomes an uneconomical sensationalist willingly jeopardizing hundreds of lives to secure the safety of childhood friend. Suddenly, dangling corrupt cops from scaffolds during fits of malice seems arbitrary and cheaply manic, and were it not for the mechanics of a standard good-versus-evil plotline, tripartite Bruce would spin the movie out of control.Nolan deserves credit for bravely attempting to harness Batman's psychological genesis - a directorial first. The visually incessant symbols of Bruce's childhood may strive to provide a believable superhero impetus, but the all-too-dissonant first two Bruces push the film into irreconcilable universes -- unnecessary emphasis on origins reveals Batman as too fundamentally fantastic for real-world explanations and psychoses. The story becomes invariably entangled in various levels of diffuse contradictions and believability, losing its narrative fidelity and force.