A Remedy for Indifference

I’ve had my eye on Batman Begins ever since I caught wind of the inspired casting choice of Christian Bale as the lead. Film geeks have been saying for a while that Bale would make the perfect Bruce Wayne, and with his turn in Equilibrium, we knew that he would also make an excellent caped crusader. As the rest of the cast was revealed I realized that this wasn’t going to be another retread of the awful Schumacher films. I figured anyone who would pick such a perfect cast would know what they’re doing, and in the end I guess I was right.

Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins deserves all the gushing praise that it’s getting because it is an exceedingly rare film. It is certainly the best film version of Batman ever put on screen, it’s even better than the animated Mask of the Phantasm, which Batman geeks have regarded as the holiest of Batman films. The film spends the majority of its time building the persona that would become Batman, something that has never been effectively done in any of the previous films. In the past, we’ve seen that Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed and we assume, somewhere along the line, that this drove him to become the vigilante Batman. In Begins, we actually get to see how his parents death, along with his bat-phobia (there has to be a fancier word for that), have tortured a maturing Bruce Wayne. We see him confront his demons and deal with his fear with the help of Liam Neeson in an excellent performance as Ducard. When Batman finally appears in the film, we know exactly why he exists. This is somewhat similar to the first Spiderman film, but Batman Begins spends much more time giving us an emotional connection to its main character.

In the end, this film is about the construction of the Batman persona and Bruce Wayne’s evolution as a secret vigilante crimefighter. Some have mentioned that the villains are sidelined, but I feel that this is a much-needed change from the previous Batman films, which focused too much on their cartoonish villains. The villains in Begins are anything but cartoonish; they are all grounded in the film’s own sense of reality. This realism works for a Batman film, after all he doesn’t have any superpowers in the traditional sense. What he has is loads of money which he uses to create a hero identity from a more realistic angle. The film works for me because I’ve always been a sucker for the Batman character, and it gets Batman perfectly. It also works as a wonderful drama since the cartoonish elements are played down, this differentiates it from every other comic-book film released to date. It’s definitely the best Batman film ever made, and I would argue that it’s the best comic film thus far. I hope Nolan and his entire creative team, especially the major actors, return for another sequel or two.

Rotten Tomatoes Score at the time of this review: 81%
Review I most agree with: Roger Ebert
Reviewer I’m most disappointed with: Stephanie Zacharek (Salon.com)