Product: Batman Begins (Two-Disc Deluxe Edition) (2005)
Rating: 2.0
Major dissapointment from Christopher Nolan
Okay, I'm obviously in the minority, but here goes...Christopher Nolan's Memento is one of my favorite movies. I would go so far as to rank it alongside The Godfather and Vertigo. I think it's that good. It is clever, original, and well written.Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins is none of the above. True, it promises a character study of what drives a man to dress up like a bat and fight crime, and it does do a decent job of delivering on that promise. That aspect of the movie was interesting and reasonably wall done. But it's also just window dressing. Batman Begins is really just another dumb, big-budget action movie, an empty spectacle we've seen twenty times before.The writing was particularly disappointing after the brilliance of Memento. Once Batman takes on the massive criminal plot threatening Gotham nothing really makes much sense. The characters never have conversations -- they reel off what someone must think are witty one liners, or they make deep statements about becoming one with your fear and what you are on the surface defines you. Or something like that. It all ends with that big action movie cliche -- everything's okay because the bad guy dies a just death -- while ignoring the fact that there are hallucinating, homicidal zombies roaming the streets of Gotham. In my book that's a loose end.But I go on. My point is that Nolan has gone from making a truly original film to dressing up tired action movie cliches. I have to assume that the pressures of making a franchise movie drove things in this direction (although Spider-man II shows how good a big-budget superhero movie can be). Batman Begins was just a huge disappointment to me. I would have expected this had Jerry Bruckheimer's name been on it (or Joel Schumacher's), but I expected so much more from Nolan.