Jump-cut to a year later, and I’m fresh off seeing what director Christopher Nolan did with Goyer’s script, seeing if the finished product managed to be as effective as the script. I’ve yet to hear any real pans of the movie, and you certainly won’t hear one from me—the movie is indeed the best BATMAN movie I’ve ever seen.

Rather than go through a straight review of it, which would essentially include a more visual description of the script review I did last May, I figured I’d run through all the various elements that go into a BATMAN movie and see how they all worked.

As always, of course, if you’d prefer to avoid hearing specific details of the movie, you might want to avoid the rest of this.

The Origin

We get to see a bit more of young Bruce Wayne this time around; the movie offers up not only Bruce’s childhood and the loss of his parents, laid out in a series of flashbacks while post-college Bruce trains with Ra’s al Ghul in the Himalayas, but we also see young Bruce and his friend Rachel Dawes. Rachel would grow up to become budding Scientologist Katie Holmes, even while young Bruce survives his tumble into a bat-laden cave outside stately Wayne Manor and grows up to be Christian Bale.

The origin itself alters just a bit from the comic book origin that’s been taken as gospel since Frank Miller first fine-tuned it in BATMAN: YEAR ONE. In this movie, young Bruce is given an added layer of guilt to deal with, even as he’s also fueled with determination to avenge his parents’ death. I didn’t really see the need to add the guilt, since that makes his origin a bit more Spider-Man than Batman (not that Bruce had any powers to help prevent this tragedy). Batman is fine as an obsessively driven protector of the righteous, but this addition didn’t detract from the movie, anyway.

The Hero

Finally, an effective Bruce Wayne. While Michael Keaton did a nice job with his scattered, distracted Wayne in the first movie, no one in any of the previous movies quite captured the real dichotomy of Bruce Wayne before. On one hand, he has to pull off the rich, spoiled and disinterested Wayne of high society (Bale’s training as Patrick Batman, er, Bateman, was the perfect practice for this part) but he also has to be solid in his portrayal as grim and driven avenger. And he has to have the jaw to work in the cape and cowl, too. Bale does all these things. There were a couple moments where his Batman let loose with an almost Palpatine-like voice change once he had the suit on—that was a little jarring—but regardless, Bale sells the role completely, better than any Bat that has come before.

This Batman is closer in spirit to the original Kane creation in 1939—there, Batman faced down criminals and gangsters, but not many other costumed foes. He also meted out justice in an extreme fashion, even carrying a gun. This Batman might not kill you, but as he points out, “I don’t have to save you.” Somehow, the other actors that played the character could never quite pull off the menace the character requires. Bale does, offering up a believably dark hero while at the same time pulling off the carefree playboy mask of Bruce Wayne, too. He’s as good at playing both sides here as Christopher Reeve was at playing the fumbling Clark Kent and the heroic Superman.

The Hired Help

Alfred, dry-humored soul that he’s been ever since Frank Miller’s THE DARK NIGHT RETURNS book in ’86, again got some of the movie’s best lines, if the crowd response was any indication. Michael Gough from the previous movies might have seemed better suited to servitude than Michael Caine here, but this Alfred was more sympathetic. And he was played by Michael Caine, which earns him points even sight unseen.

The Co-Workers

Bruce’s other helper in the movie is Lucius Fox, played by Easy Reader himself, Morgan Freeman (I assume Morgan’s done some other work since leaving THE ELECTRIC COMPANY years ago, but that’s still how I remember him most fondly). Fox, who I first noticed in DETECTIVE COMICS arc written by former BATMAN screenwriter Sam Hamm back in 1989 (his initial appearance predates that book by another decade), serves not really as Bruce’s mentor as much as his supplier. Fox, too smart and too decent to stay in an influential position in the now-corrupt Wayne Enterprises, sees his desk moved back and back, like Milton in OFFICE SPACE. And much like that character, he also finds a way to get his revenge. In this case, that doesn’t mean blowing up the company and moving to a tropical island, it means helping Bruce, recently returned to Gotham City, get outfitted in all kinds of obsolete, high-tech machinery and weaponry. Without Fox, Bruce might have ended up just roaming the city and fighting crime while dressed in a bum’s overcoat.

Freeman isn’t given too much to do—mostly, he just facilitates Bruce’s transformation into Batman, outfitting him with everything from the exo-skeleton to a microfiber piece of cloth that goes from limp to rigid with a small jolt of electricity—but he makes the most of what he’s given, as always.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to complain about Gary Oldman in anything, really (although I do wonder why he ever agreed to do that one episode of FRIENDS), but if I had any complaint here, it’s that he just seems too old to play the young Gordon. He was on the job when Bruce’s parents were murdered when he was a little boy, and years later, after now-grown Bruce returns to Gotham, he’s still there on the job, looking about the same age as he did before. But he’s so much better than Pat Hingle, Gordon in Burton’s BATMAN movies that his age really doesn’t deserve mentioning. I would’ve cast him, too.

The Love Interest

Maybe it’s because of all the Tom Cruise nonsense, or the fact that it was only a couple years ago that Katie Holmes was doing her weekly patented tuck of her hair behind her ear as Joey Potter on DAWSON’S CREEK, but I never would’ve thought she could successfully pull off the part of Rachel Dawes, love interest to Bruce Wayne and crusading Assistant District Attorney. And yet, she did—she’s still tough to buy as a high-ranking person in the D.A.’s office, but she hits all the requisite notes and even brings some weight to her role. More importantly, she really does seem the one pure soul left trying to bring some semblance of order to Gotham. I usually look forward to the end of the Batman movies for the sole reason of knowing that the female character usually exits the scene—I couldn’t say goodbye to Basinger’s Vicki Vale soon enough—but here, they leave it open for Katie’s character to make a return appearance in a sequel, and that actually wouldn’t be so bad.

The Cave

Finally, a Batcave that looks like it has the space to accommodate the eventual giant penny. Young Bruce literally stumbles into the cave as a boy, which kicks off his obsession with bats. Once he got over his fear of them, this would come to be a good thing by not only inspiring his decision to become a symbolic bat, based on Ra’s al Ghul’s earlier recommendation that he choose a symbol that criminals would remember, but also by using the bats as cavalry when he needs a cover to escape from the police (a la Miller’s BATMAN: YEAR ONE). The cave’s location under the Wayne mansion makes even more sense later when we learn what Bruce’s Civil War-era relatives were up to. The underground waterfall is nice touch, making the cave finally look like a cave and not just a movie set. Although the waterfall blocking the entrance has to make for some bad water spots on the Batmobile every time he takes it out for a spin.

The Suit and Toys

It never really made too much sense that this millionaire playboy who wanted to fight crime not only had the know-how but also the sheer hours required to develop all of his weaponry and Bat-suit and what-not. But now that Lucius Fox was around to give Bruce access to all of this armament that Wayne Enterprises had developed for the military but never put into production, well, it makes much more sense. And by showing all of this, it even more grounds Bruce as a regular guy who finds extraordinary means to fight crime. More than ever before, you realize that anyone could be Batman if they had not only the drive but also had a friend in high places like Lucius.

We also see that, once again, Ra’s al Ghul played more of a direct role in the creation of this particular Batman, not only inspiring him to choose a symbol to become, but also showing Bruce the importance of certain features on the suit, like the gloves.

The Batmobile is much less car-like than ever before, but it still has the necessary “Bat-flourishes,” like the fire from the exhaust pipe. The military Tumbler, as it was called, makes for a much more sensible Batmobile than a sports car, because now it gives Bruce the ability to go through things if he can’t go around them. And the rooftop-to-rooftop jumping ability isn’t bad, either. Even the sound the car makes while cruising the streets of Gotham was engaging.

The Villains

Well, the bar for Batman villains in the movies is pretty low, but even still, finally, they worked out nicely. Nicholson’s Joker might have been okay in places, but I can’t really remember because the only memory in my head is that awful bit at the museum with Prince’s music in the background. I liked DeVito’s Penguin, even if he wasn’t really the comic book version, and Catwoman was more of an anti-hero than a real villain. But from there, the slide downhill was amazingly fast. Jim Carrey not only wrecked the Riddler, but his antics seem to have also forced Tommy Lee Jones to act like a cackling buffoon in an effort to keep up. I still wonder what Billy Dee Williams might have done with Two-Face if given a chance. And let’s just stop right there in a discussion of past Bat-villains before we get to the outright parody of characters played by Arnold and even Uma.

Part of the problem with the villains in these movies is the outfit. Spandex, as we’ve seen, just doesn’t quite work on-screen, so it was nice to see two villains who never relied on spandex even in the comics. Ra’s al Ghul was always more of an eco-terrorist than he was a costumed villain, so, outside of the radical goatee, he wasn’t required to wear more than nice suits. And it helped that the actor playing him has a certain gravitas that made him even more plausible. And since he forms the entire basis for Bruce Wayne’s conversion to Batman, he’s not only important as a villain but also necessary as a kind of twisted mentor to young Bruce Wayne.

The same is true in regards to the Scarecrow, as played by Cillian Murphy. Murphy, who seemed properly meek as the good Doctor Crane, took on a nice air of menace with just the addition of the Scarecrow hood. He was helped even more by his hallucinatory gasses, the ones that made people see maggots swarming around his mask once they were under its influence. Thankfully, neither villain devolved into histrionics the entire time. This was easily the most grounded, almost plausible Batman movie, too.

Tom Wilkinson as Carmine Falcone, the city mob boss who has helped turn the entire place corrupt, doesn’t really distinguish himself as he has in movies past, but he’s not really meant to. He services the plot and gives Bruce a good first target when he returns to clean up the city, before he finds out who’s really pulling Falcone’s strings. Plus he’s also very necessary in helping create the Bat-signal…

There aren’t an abundance of cameos for the longtime fans like you might get in an X-MEN movie, but the couple you do get work nicely in the context. Especially the one at the end, the one that sets up a first sequel so nicely, the entire theater broke into applause when they saw it.

The City

Burton’s Gotham City was striking, one of the best things he brought to his movies. But it was also a distorted, comic book version of a city that just started to see too ridiculous as the movies went on. Here, Gotham is a blight on the country, a formerly great city whose immense levels of corruption have infected the very city, giving the overcrowded streets a feeling of decay even in the buildings themselves. Gotham is an industrial town, an angry, sick ‘burg that nevertheless still has signs of the greatness it used to have. The train that runs aboveground through the entire city, a contribution from Bruce’s father, Thomas, is the centerpiece of the city, functioning as a halo around it when Bruce is young and the city is prospering, and then looking like a crown of thorns once the city goes to seed. As much as the gothic version of Gotham worked in Burton’s movies, I prefer the version out forth here, that of a festering city desperately in need of someone to help return it to its former glory.

The Plot

As I mentioned, Batman’s origin is tied much more closely to Ra’s al Ghul than ever before, and while al Ghul’s motivations are initially puzzling and seem almost contrived, at the end, they all make sense. This is, really, the way it should be—Ra’s al Ghul has always been a puzzling Batman villain, not really evil in the obvious sense, and he and Batman agree on a lot of things, but their methods are polar opposites. This is what initially sets Bruce on the path to becoming Batman, after things go bad while he’s training at Ra’s’s fortress, and it’s what comes full circle later on in the movie.

Some comic book movies spend too much time on the hero’s origin to get to the real plot, but the good thing about BATMAN BEGINS is his origin is the entire plot. So everything that happens helps build the mythos.

I’m usually annoyed that so many comic book movies feel they have to go almost James Bond-like by the end, having the villain devise some ridiculous contraption that will have dire consequences for an entire city, or more, if the heroes don’t stop it in time (which they always do). X-MEN had this problem, and even SPIDER-MAN 2’s ending was a bit undone by this. BATMAN BEGINS features a smaller-scale version of this same plot point, but again, it works in the context of the movie and doesn’t feel at all too overblown.

Really, from start to finish, all of these factors considered, BATMAN BEGINS deserves a place at or very near the top of a list of the best comic book movies made. I had great confidence that this one would deliver, because from the start, from Goyer’s script to the excellent casting to the assured direction of a competent director like Chrstopher Nolan, there wasn’t one misstep in sight. So it’s great to see that sometimes making all the right moves can actually result in a great movie. Warner Bros., who did the best they could to kill the public’s appetite for comic book movies with the CATWOMAN debacle, has actually done the opposite here, in giving the public a look at exactly what a good comic book movie can be. And they’ll follow this up with Bryan Singer’s SUPERMAN. Meanwhile, Marvel Comics, who once seemed untouchable as far as comic movies go, is offering up FANTASTIC FOUR and then Brett Ratner on X-MEN to compete with Warner/DC. Good luck, guys. Better rush SPIDER-MAN 3 intro production if you don’t want to be completely surpassed by DC.

The End

As the film winds down, the commissioner and Batman meet in their familiar meeting spot, on the rooftop of the police precinct, where Gordon, sympathetic to Batman’s efforts and probably thankful for the help, muses about Batman’s appearance leading to some new costumed villains showing up on the scene. One in particular leaves a certain calling card, and Batman, with a simple, “I’ll look into it,”is off, leaving the audience wanting to see more. And with that, the Batman franchise begins again.

Next Week: The AFI’s Life Achievement Award for George Lucas

/chris

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