MEMO: Batman is a ninja.

[sub_divided]

So don’t say no one ever told you, okay?


The Dreaded But

It isn’t a good idea to start reviews with a but, but…
I know I’m dismissing the genre whose fans this movie was made for, but…
And probably insulting them too, but…

I don’t usually like superhero movies. I’ve got a relationship with them similar to my relationship with American Jet Li movies—I want to like them, I try to like them, I go to the theaters expecting to like them. Every time a new Jet Li movie is announced, I think, this is it! The one American Jet Li movie that won't suck! I’m wrong, of course. (Unleashed! Unleashed is a movie where Jet Li doesn’t have to talk! He can not possibly screw that up, I’m going to see it and it’s going to be awesome.)

Got a little off-track there. The point was, I don’t usually like superhero movies. BUT, I loved Batman Begins.

Cheese! Only not.

Batman never struck me as a particularly campy franchise. The sixties TV show invented the on-screen POW!, sure. And, granted, it is wildly improbable that a single man and his butler could construct an elaborate underground base all by themselves. I never really thought about the kung-fu or the Batmobile or the utility belt either. Robin wears circus clothes. Hmmm, and aren’t practically all of the super villains lunatics? I suppose when Jim Carey had a major role in a movie, that should have tipped me off. Come to think of it, Arnold Schwarzenegger had a part too.

Still, I never thought Batman was particularly campy. It must have been because the rest of the Justice League was so much worse. Superdog! The Wonder Twins! Compared to them, Batman is positively dignified. There is also nothing worng with cheese, provided it is suitably over-the-top, (Says the woman who thought The Chronicles of Riddick was, like, the best movie ever, and who also liked Kung-fu Hustle. I like dumb movies, what can I say?)

That said, Batman Begins takes a realistic approach to the Batman franchise. Most of the cheesiness is concentrated in the first thirty minutes. (Ninjas! Secret cults! Chinese monasteries! Okay, I’m done.) And it’s brilliant. Christopher Nolan deserves a medal for the screenplay and another for his direction, because I never realized how *hard* it would be to fill in all the logical inconsistencies until I saw him do it. Ever wondered how a pampered little rich boy came to know the streets so well? Why the *legitimate* police work with Batman, a superhero who obviously has a few screws loose and doesn’t even have any superpowers? How Bruce can stay out late every night and still run the biggest company in Gotham? What Wayne Enterprises actually manufactures? All of these questions are answered by Batman Begins.

Technique

Here’s what I liked about the execution:

-Very few bad lines. I think Lieutenant Gordon has the only truly awful one.
-Good acting from all comers. We all know that Chistian Bale rocks, right? Michael Caine, Cilian Murphy, Linus Raoch, and Tom Wilkinson were just as good. Katie Holmes was good, no matter what anyone says. I’d add Morgan Freeman to this list, but he was playing his default role, Saintly Magical Black Man, so that goes without saying.**
-Cilian Murphy gets an extra mention because he was just that awesome.
-Repetition of lines and scenes. Not always in an obvious way, just in a way that rewards you for paying attention. Gives BB some thematic consistency, too.
-Gotham is not always dark! Unlike the comics or the animated series, the sun does shine in this movie. Occasionally.
-Gotham is still Gotham, though. You can think of the city as the co-star.
- Christopher Nolan really gets across the distinction between Bruce Wayne and Batman, the fact that Bruce Wayne doesn’t put on a mask to become Batman so much as Batman puts on a mask to become Bruce Wayne. He also convinces us that it’s noble of Batman to act like a womanizing jerk. Aha.
-Some of this is stated explicitly, but the dialogue is good enough and there’s enough circumstantial evidence that the scenes that explain the themes don’t feel like heavy-handed exposition. Err, for a comic-book movie anyway. (Spiderman, I’m looking at you!)
-I liked the last line. "jumanji" endings have always been my favorite.

**(When is the last time you saw Morgan Freeman play anything other than the patient, helpful, tactfully silent supporting character? Driving Miss Daisy, reprised? I remember trying to convince K that Freeman is the W.B. Dubois to Will Smith’s Frederick Douglas, but I don’t remember whether I succeeded. Smith’s Legend of Bagger Vance character sort of destroys the argument anyway, or maybe it is the exception that proves the rule.)

Characters

The characters were the best part of the movie! Bruce Wayne, though still tortured, isn’t as crazy as the animated series likes to imply he is. That’s because this movie gives him 1) legitimate reasons for resorting to vigilantism, and 2) legitimate reasons for dressing up like giant bat. Also legitimate reasons for being obsessed/afraid of bats.

Speaking of legitimate reasons, what about Katie Holmes? You may have heard that she’s the love interest. This is true, in a way. Wait, don’t leave! I can explain why this isn’t bad. Actually, I already explained to issen4 so why don’t I just copy and paste here:

Katie Holmes is Bruce's childhood friend, and later a prosecuting attorney. How to phrase this so that it isn't a spoiler...one of the questions Batman is asked, repeatedly, is whether Gotham is even worth saving. Think City of God levels of corruption, squared. According to this movie, the reason Batman works outside the system is that the system is broken. Well, one of the reasons anyway.

Katie Holmes is important to the story because she's proof that Gotham can be fixed. She's one of the few good people who hasn't given up on it! She also represents a normal approach to doing good--good within the system--as opposed to Batman's somewhat fucked up approach. She is also a reminder of the person Bruce Wayne used to be, before he left Gotham to learn to be Batman. She is therefore essential to the story on a very basic, thematic level, as well as being a plot device.

XD it's not that Batman Begins does away with the standard superhero cliches--girl in trouble, must rescue!--it's that it transcends them. Rachel is a genuinely likeable character. Actually she's probably the most admirable person in the entire movie. And she's much, much more important as a symbol and a friend than as a love interest.

So there you have it. A sentence or two (or three, or four…) for each of the rest of the cast, because this is getting long-winded.

Alfred. In the hands of a master, snark can be a powerful weapon. XD
Carmine Falcone. The mob boss was my favorite character, because he manages to be both ignorant and profoundly, profoundly wise. He’s funny, too. And scary.
Cilian Murphy. Wonderfully creepy. Words fail. I’m using the actor name and not the character name so that those wishing to watch without knowing who the villain is, may. Hint: he isn’t the Joker, but he is a master of manipulation.
Daddy Wayne. More than anyone else, he’s just a very, very good person. I can see why little Bruce is so attached to him.
Gordon. Comes in second on the “good people” list. In this movie he’s prematurely old, very thin, the last good cop whose partner is one of the worst. He gets one of the movie’s best lines:

PARTNER: When you don’t take a share, it makes the rest of us nervous.
GORDON: You don’t have to worry, I’m not a snitch. *pause* In a city like this, who would I tell?

The Other Villain I’m actually not very fond of him. See last section


The Return of the Dreaded BUT

Of course, there were a few things that I disliked about the movie as well. I didn’t like who the other villain was. Lame, lame, lame. Additionally...this won’t be a spoiler, will it? There's that secret cult, right? They claim to be responsible for the destruction of Rome. They’re also ninja. Maybe they weren’t always ninja, but what the heck? Actually I both dislike and like this aspect of the movie. Nothing like thousand-point-five-year old cults a sense of grandeur to the proceedings!

Bruce Wayne's parents may have been a little *too* good. It's hard to believe that the owners of the company that owned Gotham weren't at least a little a *little* bad when you see how bad Gotham is. I recognize that the movie didn't want to go there, though, even if I still think it would have been interesting.

I am also so, so, so put off by the science in this movie. It sucks. It is not even remotely plausible. In any other Batman movie I wouldn’t care, by WHY OH WHY did Nolan go through the trouble of making a semi-realistic Batman movie—psychologically realisitic, economically realistic, logistically realistic—if he was going to butcher the science like that? It would have been so easy to come up with something less likely to make me cringe.

SPOILER IN WHITE:
Like a crop duster, for instance. Or even a sonic emitter! Microwaves will vaporize people before they’ll vaporize water trapped in metal pipes. The wavelenths aren’t short enough to penetrate metal or concrete! The rest of the bad science falls well within bad-science-in-movies limits, and I don’t begrudge it. But MICROWAVES? COME ON NOW. [/end physicist’s rant]




I take back everything nice I ever said about object-oriented programming. I swear, if I have to look through one more function that calls a function that calls another function that calls another function that calls another function, and all these progressive calls do is add levels of abstraction so that by the time we get to the original function the only variables are IntArg1, IntArg2 … IntaArg27, and I am supposed to magically know what these are...it will have been a typical day at the lab. Sigh.