“Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

I almost didn’t write this review. I seriously toyed with the idea of putting Batman Begins off for another fortnight and devoting an entire post to the sheer insanity that was Warner’s near decade-long attempt to get a fifth Batman movie made after the neon coloured Chernobyl that was Batman and Robin.

This was right around the time I started following movie news and let me tell you, friends, listening to the proposals coming out of Warners in the late nineties was like having your ear pressed to a cell wall in a lunatic asylum.

“Coolio as Scarecrow! Ghost Joker! MADONNA AS HARLEY QUINN!!! AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!”

Some of these proposed films, admittedly, do sound pretty interesting, like the Batman versus Superman movie starring Colin Farrell and Josh Hartnett, Darren Arronofsky’s Batman Year One or a version of Batman Beyond with Keanu Reeves as Terry McGinnis.

But the one thing that all these proposed movies have in common is that they really, really want you to know that they were going to be DARK. Black. Psychologically tortured. Darkness. No parents.

It’s honestly a little macabre how much they wanted you to know that Batman was going to have a thoroughly shitty time when this movie finally got made. Which is unfair. I mean, Batman didn’t decide to let Akiva Goldsman write the script for Batman and Robin, why should he have to suffer?

Thankfully, we were spared the spectacle of a sobbing, psychologically scarred emo Batman by the appointment of Christopher Nolan as director, a man who has no time for your puny human emotions.

All kidding aside, I’ve seen nine of this legend’s movies and five of them are on my all time greatest list.*

So here’s a quick question for you. Do you feel that Ant-Man or Legend of Ultron are noticeably different in tone and visual style to the comic book movies being made today? No, right? Well consider that the same amount of time has elapsed between those movies and now as between Batman and Robin and Batman Begins. Which is nuts to me because they are so clearly coming from entirely different eras of movie-making. I think this is probably why the whole Barbenheimer phenomenon happened. We’ve been stuck in the current era of movie-making for so long that Oppenheimer and Barbie felt less like movies than escape hatches.

Anyway, the movie begins with honestly a pretty baller move; no opening title, just the bat symbol being formed by a swarm of shrieking bats at sunset.

Little Bruce Wayne is playing in the garden of stately Wayne manor with his friend Rachel when he trips and falls into a disused well.

He’s terrified by a swarm of bats but is rescued by his father who explains that origin stories build character. We flashforward to the present where the now adult Bruce Wayne is serving time in a prison in Bhutan. After getting into a fight with some of the other inmates he’s sent into solitary confinement where he finds a man named Ducard waiting for him. Ducard asks him if he’s so desperate to fight criminals that he’ll lock himself up with them to fight them one at a time. Bruce replies that there were seven and Ducard quips that he counted six.

Rewatching Begins almost twenty years later, it’s easy to see why it was such a big deal. It feels like a proper grown up movie with it’s excellent direction, moody cinematography, stacked cast of phenomenal actors and legendary score. All of this makes it much easier to ignore the script. Now… I mean, it’s fine. Actually, it’s remarkably solid. This may be one of the most influential screenplays of the 21st century given how many stripped down reboots copied it. But there’s also some real dumb shit in here that kind of gets ignored. Like, the simple chronology of this scene. It’s a cool reveal, sure, that Liam Neeson is waiting in Bruce’s cell for him, but logically how did this work? The editing makes it suggest that Bruce was dragged straight from the prison yard to the cell, so how did Ducard know which cell to be waiting for him in? Additionally, if Ducard saw that Bruce was only fighting six inmates, he must have been in the yard when the fight broke out, so how did he get to the cell before him? The implication is that the prison staff are working for Ducard but then, were the guards just marching Bruce around the prison in circles so that Ducard had time to get into a suitably dramatic place to hide in the cell? Seems a bit try-hard, no?

“Surely a man who pretends to be a mouse wouldn’t begrudge me a little theatricality?”

Ducard offers Bruce a place with the League of Shadows, an international order of vigilantes that fights crime. Bruce has to bring a blue flower to the peak of a mountain where he finds a mysterious temple ruled over by Ra’s Al Ghul played by Ken Watanabe. I always assumed that the decision to not have an Middle Eastern Actor play Ra’s was due to 9/11 being literally four years ago, but apparently in the comics Ra’s was born in North Africa to a family of East Asian nomads (Chinese, though, not Japanese) so the casting is actually somewhat comics accurate. I don’t know if that was intentional, but I just thought it was interesting.

Anyway, while Ducard trains Bruce we learn what brought him to Bhutan. As a child, Bruce’s parents took him to see a production of the opera  Mefistofele but a scene involving lots of dudes dressed as bats caused the kid to freak out and he asked to be taken home. Outside the opera house (which is apparently one of those run-down, crack-den opera houses in the bad part of town) Bruce’s parents were confronted by a hoodlum named Joe Chill who shot both Waynes. A traumatised Bruce was looked after by a young cop named Gordon and Chill was quickly caught and imprisoned.

Now, I got issues with this revised origin story and maybe not the one you think. Yeah, I prefer not knowing who killed the Waynes. I like the idea of Batman’s ultimate enemy not being some random dude but CRIME ITSELF. I also feel like, given how exceptional a job the police do here, taking care of Bruce and catching his parents’ killer within the same night of their murder, it doesn’t really make as much sense that Bruce would then decide to become the world’s greatest vigilante. I mean, the police actually seem to be pretty on the ball in this universe. But whatever, Joe Chill is canonically the killer of Batman’s parents in the comic, and the way the movie uses Chill to narratively connect Bruce to Falcone is elegant enough so I’ll overlook that. No, it’s actually more the fact that they were at an opera and not seeing Zorro in the cinema. Batman is a character with a pretty big relatability problem but the idea of going to the cinema with your parents is so universal across social class that I think it works better than the relatively high-brow trip to the opera. It’s also a nice way to acknowledge Batman’s literary debt to Zorro. Now, I know why they did it. Overcoming fear is the movie’s big theme so having Bruce feel guilt because his fear inadvertently led to his parent’s death, sure that works. But it’s a simple fix. You keep the trip to the cinema. You just make it a double-bill of Zorro and one other movie.

Get it? Get it? Because he’s a bat…you get it.

Anyway, years later Bruce returns home from college because Joe Chill is up for parole. He’s greeted by Alfred, his family’s trusty…why am I explaining this, you all know who Alfred is. He also meets his childhood friend Rachel who’s all grown up and working for the DA who arranged Chill’s parole which Bruce, understandably, is none too happy about. She explains that Chill is going to testify against Carmine Falcone, who’s running all of the crime in this shit town. Bruce and Rachel are horrified when Chill is shot down before their eyes in the courtroom. Driving home, Bruce reveals to Rachel that he had actually planned to shoot Chill himself and muses whether he should be thanking Falcone. Rachel goes on a tirade, saying that Falcone is the source of the misery and crime that claimed his parents’ life and then leaves him outside Falcone’s restaurant so that Bruce can thank him personally. Disgusted by what he almost did, Bruce throws the gun away and goes in to confront Falcone.

Falcone tells Bruce that he’s a pampered rich kid who doesn’t understand the first thing about real suffering and then educates him by having his bodyguards beat the privileged snot out of him.

Bruce then decided to rectify this with a little poverty tourism in the Far East, joining criminal gangs and ending up in prison in Bhutan and we’re all caught up.

Bruce learns that the League of Shadows use the blue flower to create a fear toxin to weaken their enemies. On his graduation day, he learns that he’s going to have to execute a criminal and then he’s going to be sent back home to Gotham to basically destroy the entire city as the league has decided it’s too corrupt to exist and Bruce is all “…..hang on”.

So committed to preserving precious human life is Bruce that he selflessly starts a fire that leads indirectly to the death of Ra’s Al Ghul and the complete destruction of the temple. Bruce saves an unconscious Ducard from going over a cliff and leaves him in the care of some local peasants while he returns to Gotham to pursue his war on crime.  

Back in Gotham, Rachel is butting heads with one Doctor Johnathan Crane, a psychiatrist who’s been getting Falcone’s thugs declared insane so that they get sent to Arkham Asylum instead of prison. Of course, in real life it’s far more preferable to get sent to a prison where you actually have a set sentence than a mental institution where you get out when you’ve managed to convince everyone that you’re not crazy which is actually really hard to do without seeming crazy.

Anyway, let’s talk about this Cillian Murphy, the guy who everyone in Ireland knew was awesome before all you Johnny Come Latelies.

I think it’s a damn shame that Murphy’s Scarecrow has kind of been overshadowed by Heath Ledger and Tom Hardy’s more memeable villains because Murphy is the best thing in this. This is such a fucking good villain. The arrogance, the reptilian stillness, the icy menace. You can absolutely see why Christopher Nolan took one look at this guy and said, “yeah, he’s going in regular rotation”. Also as a long time Scarecrow fan I love this. I think Crane is one of the very best Bat-rogues. I think he actually makes a more logical choice to be Batman’s arch-enemy than the Joker. And as a Scarecrow fan I love how effortlessly Crane wrecks Batman’s shit in their first encounter. Takes him apart like it’s nothing, it’s so cool.

Annoyed at having Rachel breathing down his neck, Crane tells Falcone to put a hit on her and tells him that “his employer” is going to be coming to Gotham.   

Meanwhile, Bruce shows up at Wayne Enterprises which is now run by William Earle, played by Rutger Hauer and a character I always feel strangely sorry for. Like, what exactly did this guy do wrong? I mean sure, he stuffed Morgan Freeman in the basement but he seems to have done a great job running the company for Bruce while he was off training to be Snake Eyes. And when this nepo-baby just shows up asking for a job he gives him one in the exact section he wanted no questions asked. That section being a storeroom of unused prototypes where Bruce meets Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) who is so checked out of his job he doesn’t mind the new kid helping himself to all the cutting edge military tech lying around.

“Do what you want, I’ll just be over here making doll house furniture.”

Bruce sets his sights on young Jim Gordon, who he identifies as the one honest cop left in Gotham. The two form a tentative partnership, with Gordon telling Bruce exactly what he needs to bring down Carmine Falcone. Bruce intercepts some of Falcone’s thugs who are bringing mysterious drugs into the city and we get our first look at the Batman suit.

It’s fine. I think the helmet is a little…off. I dunno. Decent effort.

Anyway, Batman stops the shipment and rescues Rachel from the hit that Falcone put on her. With Rachel and Gordon on his side, Batman is able to get Falcone arrested who promptly pretends to be crazy so that he can be sent to Arkham. Crane visits him and Falcone threatens to expose their whole operation unless Crane can get him out. To this, Crane has one question.

Crane then goes to clean up Falcone’s mess by destroying evidence of the operation where he meets Batman and gasses him, sets him on fire and basically leaves him crying to Alfred that the bad man did a bad thing.

Alfred manages to rescue Bruce and brings him home. He then calls Lucius Fox who is presumably confused because he is not a doctor but is a good enough sport to work up an antidote anyway. (I guess bringing in Leslie Thompkins would have been one too many supporting characters but I really hate the “doctor and scientist are basically the same thing” trope.)

Bruce realises that the fear toxin is a strengthened version of the effect of the blue flower and asks Lucius to make more of the antidote.

Rachel angrily insists that she be allowed to have her own expert assess Falcone to see if he true-true cray-cray and Crane takes her down to the basement so that she can see his illegal operation where he’s dumping scads of fear toxin into the water supply. Why all of Gotham’s water runs under a mental hospital is not explained. Crane doses Rachel with a fatal dose of fear toxin. Batman arrives and sprays Crane with some of his own medicine which causes him to see Batman as The Creeper from Jeepers Creepers.

Bruce has to get Rachel out of the Asylum without getting caught by the cops. This leads to a really cool chase scene with the new Batmobile, the Tumbler, which Alfred later says resulted in no casualties because that’s what he needs to sleep at night.

After treating Rachel and getting Alfred to return her home, Bruce attends his birthday party and one of his guests offers to introduce him to “Mr. Ra’s Al Ghul”. Bruce is naturally a little surprised by this but it turns out that Ducard was actually Ra’s the whole time.

Ra’s proceeds to lay out his ridiculously overly complicated plan. See, the League of Shadows recently high-jacked a ship containing a device that causes water to evaporate…

Oh my God, they stole this plot from sixties Batman! All it’s missing is Commodore Schmidlapp and a scene at the off-brand United Nations!

So the plan is to vaporise all of Gotham’s water which contains the fear toxin which needs to be breathed rather than ingested to work. Okay, fine, I guess. But I still don’t get how it’s vaporising all of this water without killing every living human being in its radius. We’re mostly water, you know. And yes, I guess I am saying that the sixties Batman movie displayed greater scientific literacy than this one.

Ducard uses the monorail that Bruce’s father built as the delivery system for the microwave emitter. With Gordon’s help, Batman is able to blow up the rail bridge and lets Ra’s plummet to his death saying “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you”.

The day after, Earle learns that all of Wayne Enterprises stock was secretly bought by Bruce and that he’s now out of a job.

That’ll teach you to trust Old Money.

Rachel visits the smouldering ruins of Wayne Manor where Bruce is randomly hitting a piece of wood like a fucking caveman who can’t understand why the house isn’t fixed yet (dude, just call an architect, this is not a one-man-and-his-butler job). She tells Bruce that she waited so long for him to come back but that the man who returned home was someone else. But she hopes that when Gotham has no need of Batman she’ll see Bruce again.

The movie ends with Gordon showing Batman the brand spanking new Bat-signal he’s had installed and telling about this strange new criminal who’s appeared with a flair for the theatrical. One who likes leaving mysterious cards…

Oh crap, Mr Monopoly has escaped from prison to begin a new reign of terror!

***

At once an incredibly influential movie and something of a rough draft, Batman Begins is a solid opener for an exciting new chapter in the bat’s cinematic journey.

The Dark Knight Detective

Counter-intuitively I think Bale’s Batman peaked with his first appearance. He nails Bruce Wayne, possibly the best live action portrayal. And while his Batman isn’t perfect, he’s still got the voice under some kind of control.

His Faithful Manservant

I like my Alfreds posh as a matter of personal preference, but if you like the rough-around-the-edges working class former military Alfreds that pop up occasionally, Michael Caine is the best version of that.

Fear Incarnate, Fear Walking the streets of Gotham…

Much as we must forever lament not seeing Coolio or Howard Stern as the Scarecrow (yes, those were both seriously considered, don’t do drugs, kids) I’m confident in calling Cillian Murphy’s venomously beautiful, deliciously chilling Scarecrow the best thing in this whole show.

“Perhaps, Detective, it is time that you and I finally settled this!”

On the other hand, I’m not really a fan of the reveal of Ducard as Ra’s. It reeks of “twist for the sake of having a twist”. Nothing is really changed by the revelation, the story would proceed exactly the same if Ducard just returned to Gotham to avenge the real Ra’s death. And, while Neeson’s the man, there will never be a Ra’s Al Ghul as iconic as David Warner in the animated series.

The Comish

Although technically not yet a comish. The Lieutenantish? While certainly treating the character with more respect than the Burton/Schumacher movies did, Oldman’s Gordon is honestly a bit of a wet cabbage. I get that he has to be less cool than Batman, but in the comic this is based on Gordon is a former marine who can take down Green Berets without breaking a sweat.

Our Plucky Sidekicks

I feel like Katie Holmes got overshadowed by Maggie Gyllenhaal but she’s really good in this. Maybe her best performance. Or are there great Katie Holmes performances out there I’m overlooking? Let me know in the comments. Or don’t. You don’t work for me.

Batman NEVER kills, except: 

I’m sure they’re all fine.

Seriously, I’m glad this movie at least acknowledges the idea that Batman does not and should never kill. That said, I can’t get on board with the “I don’t have to save you” rationale. Yeah you do. You’re Batman.

Where does he get those wonderful toys?: 

This movie actually explains (maybe over-explains?) just where exactly he gets those wonderful toys. In keeping with the stripped down, back to basic approach, Batman actually has very few gadgets in this movie that you couldn’t get in an army surplus store. With the notable exception of:

It’s the car, right? Chicks dig the car:

I feel this might be controversial but…I don’t like the Tumbler. Yeah, it’s genuinely cool that they built this thing from scratch and it can actually go that fast. But…it’s ugly as shit. Am I crazy?

FINAL SCORE OUT OF TEN:

NEXT UPDATE: 07 September 2023.

NEXT TIME: Disney doing dark fantasy in the eighties? When has that ever not worked?

*Prestige, Memento, Inception, Dark Knight and Oppenheimer in case you were wondering.

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Published on August 24, 2023 00:59
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