Overall Rating
 Awesome: 48.27%
Worth A Look: 25.87%
Average: 16.4%
Pretty Bad: 5.54%
Total Crap: 3.93%
21 reviews, 307 user ratings
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| Batman Begins |
by Jason Whyte
"Not just a great comic book movie....a great movie, period."
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In 1989, we had Tim Burton kick-start a film simply entitled Batman where we were cinematically introduced to Bruce Wayne as he battled crime in Gotham City. That film has more two-and-a-half star ratings than any other film in history it seems, as most felt that it lacked a special something that made a great movie. Myself, I remember buying the VHS tape at 10 years old and driving my parents insane with my (still) awful Batman impersonations along with cranking my receiver to unheard-of decibel levels.But anyway. 1989 was a time where it was cool to have Prince songs, Tim Burton was at the top of his game and Driving Miss Daisy somehow won over Born on the Fourth of July. Today, the movies are a bit different; mostly sequels or remakes dominate the box office dollar with a quick release to the DVD format. The future releases of Batman films to a 1992 “okay” sequel and then a re-imagining that resulted in the clunkers Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997), the latter film being the core reason why we haven’t seen a Batman movie in nearly seven years.
The series needed something fresh. Batman vs. Superman was green-lit by Warner at one point a few years back, and thank my lucky stars that it wasn’t going to go ahead. Even one-note directors like Brett Ratner (who is now doing X-Men 3 without a script) were being hired to push along the series. Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and instead they hired a guy who directed the brilliant Memento to give a fresh wash over the franchise.
The result is nothing short of extraordinary. Ten minutes into watching Batman Begins, I found myself in a daze that few recent motion pictures have had over me. I was involved. I cared. My “critic notebook” was nowhere to be found as I sat and stared dreamily into the screen, at complete attention into a new and exciting look into Bob Kane’s world of the Caped Crusader. This is not only a great Superhero movie, quite possibly the best one ever made, but this is the kind of film that you remember at the end of the year when doing a Top Ten list.
The story focuses less on the villains of Gotham (although they are here) and goes back to the beginning of the story of Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and the mental change he goes through when his billionaire parents are killed when he is a child. We follow him as he progresses through his young adulthood and how he goes across the world searching to find meaning to his life. He winds up in a prison where he is met with Ducart (Liam Neeson) who brings Bruce to a hidden fortress where he trains with ninja assassins.
The first hour of storytelling is wonderful, with various editing techniques to take us back and forth through the time frame. We learn about Bruce Wayne’s past quickly and efficiently, we meet his love interest Rachel (Katie Holmes), we see how much Alfred (Michael Caine) has an impact on his young life and we also see how the horrors of crime that start to plague Gotham make Bruce realize that there are bigger problems going on. The use of the time frame shows us the happenings almost by subject instead of a linear approach. When the action moves back to Gotham, we are so invested in Wayne that when he is angry about the state of the city that we feel and sympathize with him. Suddenly we realize why he decides to put a costume together to fight crime.
What’s brilliant, even important, about this movie is how the Batman franchise is rebooting itself. It wants to start fresh. It wants to take its own, unique approach to the material at hand and give us characters that we can give a damn about. Batman finds a friend in Officer Gordon (Gary Oldman) who is thankfully not one of those characters who can’t believe there’s a guy dressed in a bat suit around the place fighting crime. Officer Gordon accepts it, deals with it quickly and helps Batman out.
Christian Bale. I have grown up with the 31-year old actor, with my first ever experience of watching a movie in an old roadshow palace (the now-a-playhouse Stanley Theatre in Vancouver) watching Empire of the Sun when I was 7 years old, then running into him again years later as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and then giving the best performance of last year as an insomniac, slimmed-out psyche in The Machinist. The intensity of Bale’s persona is important to Bruce Wayne who is such an affected character to begin with, and it ranks right up there with his best work.
I could spend paragraphs also talking about how wonderful Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Tom Wilkinson or Cilian Murphy are (the last two play the main villains in the story) but the most important thing to note is that the right people have been casted for the right roles, and they all take it as seriously and with realism.
The film’s director is Christopher Nolan, who is famous for the art-house masterpiece Memento, which was the highest ranked film on many critic’s end-of lists in 2001 (it wasn’t my #1, that honor still going to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, but boy was it close) and his fine follow-up Insomnia. In both those films, Nolan was fascinated with its lead characters that had deep psychological problems, and his depiction of Bruce Wayne is just as shell-shocked.
The mere technical aspects of the film hark back to a time and place where everything wasn’t CG this and digital that. This is the most beautifully realized film of the year. Computer graphics are used in the film, but sparingly; a massive amount of sets, models and miniatures were instead used to create the dank, dark (but not too dark) world of Gotham. The use of effects is integrated so flawlessly that we forget that we’re looking at sets and props just accept the world around us. And even if many of the outdoor sequences were shot in Chicago, we’re smiling at the notice, not cringing. Even a particular shot of Lower Wacker Drive made me reminisce of a similar shot in The Blues Brothers where Jake and Elwood were flying over police cars.
In a day and age where frames of celluloid are run through computers and all of the color timing and correction is performed (the technical term is a Digital Intermediate, or “Digital Grading.”), Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister have taken a step backward. Shooting with an anamorphic negative with no digital grading; the film has a timeless look that will look just as wonderful 20-30 years from now. And at this point in time, no matter how many new Star Wars or Rodriguez films you throw at us, film still looks better, and the visual beauty of Batman Begins is living 35mm proof.As you can tell, I loved every inch and curve of this movie. Of course, there are a few nitpicky areas here and there (some haphazard editing, a few moments with Katie Holmes) but the most important thing is you don’t have to be a fan of the comic books or the earlier films to appreciate a movie like “Batman Begins”. If you love film and visual storytelling; if you love where film can take you emotionally and make you care about what is happening on screen and still be damn entertained by the whole endeavour, this is a movie worth seeing and it should be seen in a theatre, on the largest possible screen. And more than once.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=12435&reviewer=350
originally posted: 06/27/05 02:31:14
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DC Characters: For more in the DC Characters series, click here.
Trilogy Starters: For more in the Trilogy Starters series, click here.
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USA
15-Jun-2005 (PG-13)
DVD: 18-Oct-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
16-Jun-2005
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