After the soul-destroying horrendousness of Batman & Robin in 1997, Warner Bros. kept trying to figure out ways to restart the Batman film franchise, which went from the hottest thing since sliced bread in 1989 to the poster-child for awful superhero movies eight years later. The planned fifth film in the 1990s series, Batman Unchained, to be directed again by Joel Schumacher, was scrapped when B&R failed like a big giant failing thing, and Warner decided to start over.
They finally did it with Christopher Nolan, fresh off his success with Memento.
Warner’s notion pretty much from the minute they decided to abandon moving forward with Unchained was to do an adaptation of Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli’s groundbreaking “Batman: Year One” story arc in issues #404-407 of Batman from 1987. Schumacher had expressed interest in doing that film, and in addition at one point Miller and Darren Aronofsky were attached to an adaptation of the comic. Warner later hired both the Wachowskis and Joss Whedon to write scripts for a “Year One” film, but neither wowed the execs. (I would’ve loved to have seen Aronofsky or the Wachowskis take this one. Whedon not so much—while I’d love to see his take on Superman, I can’t see him getting Batman.) M. Night Shyamalan was also at one point attached to direct.
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Finally, after a few other projects stalled, they hired Nolan and David S. Goyer in 2003. Nolan’s self-professed “jumping-off” point was a comics story by Denny O’Neil & Dick Giordano that appeared in the Secret Origins trade paperback in 1989. Using various bits of Bat-backstory over the decades, O’Neill wrote a story that told of Bruce Wayne’s adventures learning everything he could in the years between the death of his parents and his adoption of the cape and cowl. (Kind of what we’re seeing done in Gotham, only, y’know, not bonkers.) In addition, Goyer based his story not just on “Year One,” but also on the Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale miniseries The Long Halloween, which was a sequel to “Year One” that dug into the Falcone crime family.
Christian Bale had been champing at the bit to play Batman ever since he read a copy of Grant Morrison & Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum graphic novel. He was connected to Aronofsky’s version of the film, and he nailed his audition with Nolan. Others who were considered included Henry Cavill (who would later go on to take over Superman in the current DC Extended Universe), Cillian Murphy (whose audition was strong enough for Nolan to offer him the consolation prize of playing Scarecrow), Heath Ledger (who would wind up being one of the villains in the next film in the series), Billy Crudup (later to play Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen), David Boreanaz (who had already made a name for himself as the dark and brooding Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel), Josh Hartnett (who would go on to star in Sin City), and more.
Nolan generally wanted an A-list cast, as he felt it would lend more gravitas to the proceedings (a philosophy also followed by Kevin Feige at Marvel Studios), hence the hiring not only of Bale, but also Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Rutger Hauer, Katie Holmes, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Ken Watanabe, and Tom Wilkinson. This was Caine’s first film with Nolan, but far from the last, as he’s been in pretty much every Nolan film since. In addition, Nolan would work with both Bale (The Prestige) and Watanabe (Inception) after this.
“Bats frighten me—it’s time my enemies shared my dread”
Batman Begins
Written by David S. Goyer & Christopher Nolan
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Produced by Charles Roven and Emma Thomas and Larry Franco
Original release date: June 15, 2005
Young Bruce Wayne is playing in the yard of the mansion his parents own, along with Rachel Dawes, the daughter of the maid. They find an old arrowhead on the ground, then Bruce falls into an unseen hole in the ground and is badly hurt and also frightened by the many bats that fly out at him.
Adult Bruce wakes up from a nightmare of remembering that fall. He’s in a prison in Bhutan, where he’s made a habit of beating up the other inmates. He’s freed by a man who calls himself Ducard and says he works for Ra’s al-Ghul. Ra’s is the head of the League of Shadows, a covert organization that tries to maintain order and justice. Ducard trains Bruce in various martial arts (judo, ninjitsu, and kendo, at the very least) and also in how to be aware of his surroundings.
At one point, Bruce tells Ducard why he is training himself: he wants to be a force for justice after his parents were killed. When Bruce was a boy, he and his parents came into Gotham on the monorail that Thomas Wayne built for the city with his considerable monies, and saw the opera. But Bruce finds himself reminded of the bats, and asks to leave early. On the way home, they’re mugged, Bruce’s parents killed. Bruce is comforted by Officer James Gordon, and then is told by Detective Loeb that they got the guy who did it, Joe Chill.
Years later, Bruce comes home after being kicked out of Princeton in order to attend a hearing for Chill, who is promised early release in exchange for testimony against crime boss Carmine Falcone. As soon as the judge lets him go, he’s shot outside the courthouse—to Bruce’s disappointment, as he’d gotten a gun into the courthouse, er, somehow and was intending to shoot Chill himself.
Rachel, who is now an assistant district attorney, drives him down to where Falcone hangs out—along with several of the judges, politicians, and cops on his payroll, among them the judge who let Chill go. It’s likely that the hearing was a way to get Chill out in public so he could be shot and killed to protect Falcone. Rachel leaves Bruce there, to see the reality of life in Gotham for people who aren’t billionaires. Bruce confronts Falcone, but Falcone is unimpressed and has Bruce beaten up and left out on the street.
Jumping ahead to the present, Ducard has a penultimate test for Bruce, which he passes by fooling Ducard into thinking he’s somewhere he isn’t. But the final test is to kill a murderer—and that’s a line that Bruce won’t cross. Instead, he tries to escape; he sets a fire that causes the gunpowder Ra’s keeps to explode. Ra’s is accidentally killed by a falling ceiling beam after a prolonged fight with Bruce. Bruce pulls Ducard from the fire and then travels home.
The Wayne family butler, Alfred, who raised Bruce, is still living at the mansion, and welcomes Bruce home. Bruce has been missing for more than seven years and he’s been declared dead, so there’s that to untangle. He goes to Wayne Enterprises to find that CEO William Earle is going to take the company public. Bruce asks for a job to get to know the company he’ll inherit better, and Earle sends him to Lucius Fox in development—which is pretty much a black hole in the company where old projects go to die. Fox is a bit of a gadfly, and he questioned Earle once too often. Many of his projects are things they developed for the military that were either impractical or too expensive (or both), including a Kevlar bodysuit, a tank, and a smart cloth that can reshape itself into something rigid. Bruce takes one of each…
At Alfred’s suggestion, Bruce cultivates an idle rich goofy-ass playboy persona for public consumption, while he puts bat-insignia on the bodysuit and fashions graphite helmets with bat-ears so he can be the thing that he fears: a bat.
As Batman, he torments Falcone’s people, assembling evidence for Rachel, with help from now-Sergeant Gordon. He actually manages to tie Falcone directly to drug-smuggling.
However, Falcone has an arrangement with Dr. Jonathan Crane. Many of Falcone’s thugs have been declared insane by Crane after arrest, and sentenced to Arkham Asylum, and then released fairly soon by one of the judges in Falcone’s pocket. When he’s arrested, Falcone himself gets the same treatment—but Crane is concerned that Falcone might talk about him and their mutual big boss, so he uses a hallucinogenic on Falcone that makes him see his greatest fears.
Falcone’s drug shipments have been split in two. Half go to street dealers, but no one seems to know where the other half goes, not even Gordon’s incredibly corrupt partner Flass. When Batman tracks down Crane, Crane hits him with the hallucinogenic. Batman is barely rescued by Alfred, and he’s out for two days before Fox can synthesize an antidote. Meanwhile the DA discovers that Falcone’s impounded evidence includes one more crate than on the manifest—it turns out to contain a microwave gun from Wayne Enterprises that can vaporize a water supply. The DA is shot after discovering this.
Rachel comes by the Wayne mansion to give Bruce a birthday present: the arrowhead they found as kids. She then says she has to look into Falcone deeper, as her boss has been missing for two days.
When Rachel arrives at Arkham, she declares that she wants her own shrink to look at Falcone, not Crane, and Crane can’t let that happen, so he gasses Rachel right after he shows her that they’ve been putting his hallucinogenic in the water supply.
Batman is able to rescue Rachel and also interrogate Crane after giving him a taste of his own medicine. He says he’s working for Ra’s al-Ghul, but Batman doesn’t believe that, because he saw Ra’s die. He takes Rachel to the Batmobile and escapes after a lengthy pursuit from the cops.
Earle learns that the microwave gun has gone missing. He asks Fox about the weapon’s capabilities, and then when Fox starts asking questions, Earle fires him.
Bruce is holding a birthday party at his mansion, and Fox is there as well. After bringing Rachel to the Batcave and curing her, Bruce heads up to the party urges Fox to synthesize more of the antidote.
A woman introduces Bruce to Ra’s al-Ghul—a different person from the one Bruce met in Bhutan. Then Ducard steps forward—turns out, he was Ra’s all along. He feels that Gotham is beyond saving, and he plans to use Crane’s hallucinogenic to make all the citizens of Gotham sick with fear, and the city will tear itself apart.
Bruce pretends to throw a tantrum in order to get his party guests to leave, but Ra’s doesn’t care about them. He burns the mansion down, and leaves Bruce for dead, though he’s saved by Alfred.
Suiting up in the Batcave, he meets up with Gordon. Ra’s has freed the inmates from Arkham, and the GCPD has their hands full with the escapees. Ra’s is riding with the monorail to Wayne Tower to activate the microwave gun, which will vaporize Gotham’s water supply, thus making Crane’s hallucinogenic airborne. Batman gives Gordon the keys to the Batmobile instructing him to blow up the monorail before the train can get there. Meantime, Batman confronts Ra’s on the train. Lengthy fisticuffs ensue, and too late Ra’s realizes that the fight was just a distraction so he wouldn’t notice that Gordon blew up the tracks. Batman escapes and Ra’s plummets to his doom.
With Falcone arrested, Crane discredited (though still at large), and the League of Shadows broken, things are better in Gotham. Rachel has figured out that Bruce is Batman, and kisses him in the wreckage of the Wayne mansion before saying she can’t be with him because of his dual life. Many of the various charities and small corporations that bought shares in Wayne Enterprises’ public offering were actually owned by Bruce, so he’s now majority stockholder, and he fires Earle and replaces him with Fox. Gordon is promoted to lieutenant and has set up the bat-signal. He also tells Batman about some guy who’s been robbing banks and leaving Joker cards behind…
“Why do we fall?”
A great movie about Batman’s early days, with flashbacks to his origin, a love that can’t happen, lots of gangsters, and one of Batman’s iconic comics villains—I am, of course, talking about the 1993 animated film Mask of the Phantasm. A spinoff of the brilliant 1990s Batman: The Animated Series produced by Bruce Timm—which remains the best adaptation of Batman ever—Mask covers a lot of the same territory as Begins. Screenwriter Goyer insisted that he was more influenced by The Long Halloween than he was the “Year One” storyline, but I find it impossible to credit that he wasn’t at least a little bit influenced by the 1993 animated feature, too (which also took cues from “Year One”).
The thing is, almost everything that you see in both movies, Phantasm does better. Better Batman, better headlining bad guy, better love interest, better gangsters, better action sequences, better pre-costume attempt to be a vigilante, better surprise reveal of one of the bad guys. (Plus, there’s no scene in Begins that’s as devastatingly, eerily, scarily effective as Batman’s interrogation of Councilman Reeves in the hospital in Phantasm.)
Not to say that Begins is a bad film, but it’s nowhere near as good as its outsized reputation. Said rep is probably at least in part due to its competition which, as we’ve seen in this rewatch, was abysmal. 2005 was quite possibly the nadir of 21st-century comic book adaptations, with such gems as Elektra, Constantine, Son of the Mask, Man-Thing, The Crow: Wicked Prayer, and Fantastic Four. Plus this is the guy who did Memento! And it’s got Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine and Christian Bale and Liam Neeson and stuff!
There are elements that work. I like the idea that a lot of Batman’s best training came from one of his greatest enemies. Ra’s al-Ghul has always been a particularly compelling enemy of Batman’s, and Neeson actually plays him well—while he’s inferior to David Warner’s voice on the animated series, he’s better than either Alexander Siddig on Gotham (who’s actually good in the role) or Matt Nable on Arrow (who really wasn’t). I like Gary Oldman’s Gordon, who is very much like the Gordon of “Year One” (whatever Miller’s flaws as a writer, he always wrote Gordon well, as he’s the best character in both “Year One” and The Dark Knight Returns). I especially like how he doesn’t participate in the corruption but won’t rat on his fellows, either. But he has an innate goodness and desire to help people—you can see it etched in his pores, and you have no trouble believing that Batman focuses on it when he recruits Gordon.
I’m very fond of the notion that part of Batman’s training was in learning how criminals think. It’s borne of his conversation with Falcone, where the gangster points out to the entitled rich kid that he’ll never understand the behavior of a desperate person like Chill who’s driven to theft and murder. So he goes out to do so, and by the time Ra’s/Ducard finds him, he refuses to kill—he’s seen the desperation that Falcone said he couldn’t understand, and he won’t set himself up as executioner. I’m glad that Nolan understands this fundamentally important aspect of Batman’s character, and I also like that he went on a journey to get there, from taking a gun to kill Chill himself to eventually realizing that he can’t be the one to take a life the way Chill took away his parents’.
Having said that, Nolan tries to eat his cake and have it too, since he is creating a summer blockbuster, and our bloodthirsty society still insists that the bad guy must die in the end. So Batman lets Ra’s die on the train rather than try to save him, which is the opposite of how Batman would behave. Admittedly, this is the guy who burned his house down and was about to kill an entire city, not to mention his hinting that he may have been responsible for murdering his parents. That, at least, is left sufficiently vague—it could’ve been simply Ra’s trying to get a rise out of Bruce—but I’m really tired of all the attempts to add artificial meaning to Batman’s origin, whether it’s Jack Napier having been the one to do it in 1989’s Batman or the Court of Owls conspiracy in Gotham. What made it so devastating was that it was just a random act of violence, endemic of Gotham City’s problems. Making the Waynes a deliberate target defeats the purpose and cuts off Bruce’s own grief and narrative at the knees.
Also, you’ll notice that I’ve been saying “parents” a lot, though you’d be forgiven if, after watching this movie, you’d be surprised to learn that Bruce Wayne had a mother. Played by Sara Stewart, they may as well have just hired a blonde extra, because she has no dialogue, no character, no personality, no relevance to the storyline. None of Bruce’s memories are of her, and nobody ever even mentions her, it’s always “your father” this and “your father” that. Zack Snyder has come in for lots of flack for trying to make Golden Age writers’ inability to come up with more than one name for their flagship heroes’ Moms into a plot point, but at least Batman v. Superman acknowledged Martha Wayne’s existence.
The performances in this movie are generally good, though I found myself least impressed with the title character. Surprisingly for someone as famously method as Bale, I found his performance to be a little too surface-y without much by way of depth. Since the entire movie was about Bruce’s journey, it left me a bit flat. (Again, Kevin Conroy did way better with just his voice in Phantasm.) Michael Caine, at least, keeps the streak of superlative Alfreds in live action going—like Alan Napier and Michael Gough before him and Sean Pertwee and Jeremy Irons after him, Caine is rock-solid in the role of Batman’s lone support.
Though he isn’t actually Batman’s lone support, as he also has Fox and Dawes, neither of whom quite land. In the 1989 film, Joker famously asked, “Where does he get those wonderful toys?” and actually answering that question mostly leads to eye-rolling, as poor Morgan Freeman is stuck in the role of Magical Negro Q, providing Batman with Chekhov’s Armory, equipment that happens to be perfect for crime-fighting while dressed as a bat but wasn’t mass-produced for various plot-convenient reasons.
As for Dawes, the filmmakers allegedly wanted to have Harvey Dent in that role, but they found it wasn’t working, so they changed it to his childhood friend-turned-prosecutor, and I call bullshit. Except for the kiss at the end, you can swap out Dent for Dawes easily without changing a single line of dialogue or a single plot point, and you’d have bonus foreshadowing for the next movie to boot! (Having said that, Dent is one of the best elements of that next movie—but we’ll talk about that in a week…) I’m firmly convinced that the nonsense about not being able to do justice to Dent’s character was just that: nonsense. Just as the bad guy must die in the end to satisfy Hollywood blockbuster clichés, your macho male lead must have a love interest to fulfill other Hollywood blockbuster clichés, never mind that (the current storyline in the comics with Batman and Catwoman getting married notwithstanding) Batman and romance has never been a strong fit. You’d think Nolan would have learned from the sodden attempts at romance in the two Tim Burton films. (I hasten to add that none of this is Katie Holmes’s fault. She also came in for flack after this film as its weak point, but that’s a script problem, not an acting problem. She did just fine.)
You’d also think that Nolan would have not taken his fight-scene cues from the incomprehensible jump-cutting of the Burton and Schumacher films, but he does the same thing, making it pretty much impossible to follow what the hell’s going on during the action scenes. This is especially bad during the film’s endless climax, as we’re treated to the low comedy of Gordon driving the Batmobile, while the train Batman and Ra’s fight on seems to be on an asymptotic curve, getting closer and closer to Wayne Tower, but never arriving (it’s like Lancelot’s run toward the castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which isn’t a touchstone you want in your super-serious, realistic superhero movie).
Also, they don’t call it the Batmobile, because in a movie that’s about a rich guy who dresses up as a giant bat, in a movie in which the plot involves poisoning the water supply with fear gas and using a big ray gun to evaporate all the water to make it airborne, they thought using the word “Batmobile” would be silly. Right.
The secondary bad guys are hit-and-miss. Cillian Murphy is brilliant as Crane—he honestly deserved to be the primary villain of a film rather than Ra’s’s flunky—but Tom Wilkinson is incredibly bland as Falcone. Phantasm had much better bad guys. Hart Bochner was as good as Murphy in his role as Reeves; all three actors who played gangsters in the animated film—Abe Vigoda, Dick Miller, and John P. Ryan—were light-years better than Wilkinson; and as good as Neeson is, he can’t hold a candle to Mark Hamill’s Joker, still the best comic book villain ever realized on screen (and yes, that includes the guy we’ll be talking about next week). Dana Delaney’s Andrea Beaumont is a much better love interest than Holmes’s Dawes, and the reveal that she’s really the Phantasm is way more effective than the revelation that Ducard is Ra’s. (Here’s a hint, guys—if you don’t want us to guess that Liam Neeson is playing an iconic comics character, don’t give him the same facial hair as said iconic comics character. Back in ’05 I guessed he was Ra’s right away.)
Begins is a good movie, but it falls very far short of being as good as it could be. Declared the best Bat-movie ever made at the time of its release, it isn’t even the best Bat-movie with this plot.
However, it was a massive success. Nolan had envisioned a trilogy, with the beginning, middle, and end of Batman’s career, and next week we’ll take a look at that middle, with our rewatch of The Dark Knight.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is pleased that all five books in his Precinct series of fantasy police procedurals are now available from eSpec Books: Dragon Precinct, Unicorn Precinct, Goblin Precinct, Gryphon Precinct, and Tales from Dragon Precinct. Ordering links can be found here. He’s hard at work on Mermaid Precinct, and hopes to have it out this fall.
While Batman Begins was flawed, it was pretty good for the standards of its time. It was certainly the first time that Batman as defined in the modern comics has been gotten pretty much right in a live-action adaptation. It was a reasonably smart story, allowing for the inevitable summer-blockbuster tropes (the tacked-on explosions and chases, the tacked-on love interest), and had pretty good characterizations. It was respectful and literate toward the comics lore, naturally reinterpreting and rearranging aspects of it to fit it all into two and a half hours, but treating it well and bringing some new insights to it.
Although it wasn’t faithful enough in some respects. It was good to see Bruce recognize the cowardice of seeking vengeance with a gun, and refusing to become an executioner because it would be a betrayal of his father’s legacy, and of Rachel. (This was made Rachel more than just a damsel in distress; she was Bruce’s conscience, the one who directed him toward justice rather than vengeance. Too bad Holmes didn’t sell it better.) But his moral stand about refusing to kill was kind of undermined when he proceeded to blow up the whole damn place. And the real Batman wouldn’t have decided he “didn’t have to save” Ra’s at the end.
(By the way, the bit about Bruce wanting to shoot Chill but watching as someone else killed him comes from Mike W. Barr’s Batman: Year Two, as opposed to all the other stuff from Miller’s Year One.)
I liked the psychological focus, the recurring theme of fear. Batman is a character who embraces and uses fear, so it makes for good symmetry to pit the Scarecrow against him. It was also great to see the prominent roles played by Jim Gordon and Lucius Fox, two characters either underutilized or ignored in the previous film series. And it impressed me that Batman’s cowl stayed on throughout the climax, in contrast to the usual superhero-movie convention of getting the actor unmasked as much as possible. I wonder, how much of that was Bale’s lack of vanity, how much was the fact that he got plenty of face time otherwise, and how much of it was the point about which is the real face and which is the mask?
My biggest beef was the microwave gizmo. Sure, microwaves are a credible way to vaporize water, but it would take prohibitively much time and energy to vaporize it instantly — and why didn’t it vaporize all the water in the people’s bodies too? This was trying to be a smart, sophisticated reinvention of superhero movies, but it was forced to embrace too many silly action-movie cliches in the third act, and that really damaged the film. (I used to say that the problem with Batman Begins was that it was an indie art film trying to be a big-budget blockbuster, while the problem with Superman Returns was that it was a big-budget blockbuster trying to be an indie art film.)
Oh, also the elevated trains posed some credibility problems. How do people get up there, or down from there? You’d think a doctor like Thomas Wayne would’ve insisted on a handicap-accessible design, and this didn’t seem to be.
My biggest problem with this movie is the way they pronounced Ra’s. They say “rahz” when in the Animated Series it was “raysh.” So when I found out the character would be in Gotham, I was literally holding my breath waiting for them to say his name, and when they got it right as “raysh” I was incredibly relieved. Other than that, no real complaints.
Oh, and the internet has made quite a big deal of Batman rescuing a kid played by a very young Jack Gleeson, who went on to play Joffrey in Game of Thrones.
I agree with the idea that Phantasm is a superior movie, but its quite unfair to compare a live-action film with an animated one. The scope of what can be done with even early-90’s animation is far superior to having flesh-and-blood characters act things out.
And yes, I thought a lot of elements of this film didn’t work, but you can also see the conscious effort to jettison the Burton/Schumaker baggage, which presumably took up valuable runtime that might otherwise have been devoted to improving weak spots.
begins wasn’t nearly as well regarded as it now is until The Dark Knight came out and somehow increased Begins rating by being so good
John: I disagree completely. It felt like the entirety of 2005 was spent by people writing hagiographies of Christopher Nolan for this film, and all I could think was, “I saw it already, better, a dozen years ago.” If anything, The Dark Knight coming out and actually being better was the first thing that muted the undeserved praise Begins gets.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Christopher Nolan is a master filmmaker. This is a great Batman movie (though I wonder what an Aronofsky Batman would look like).
Is Phantasm available anywhere for streaming? I’ve never seen it, despite being a huge fan of the Animated Series.
@2 You just made me laugh really hard. I just rewatched Begins a few months ago, and I remember thinking to myself, “Why does this kid look so familiar?!” And I usually pride myself on my ability to recognize people, heh *shakes head*.
Denise L.: Both Vudu and Amazon have it to stream. Netflix only has it on DVD.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@2/JasonD: I gather that both “raysh” and “rahz” are acceptable in different Arabic dialects, though I forget which ones. According to standard Arabic pronunciation, it would apparently be more like “rrah’ss,” with a rolled R and a glottal stop after the vowel. So “rahz” is actually closer to that.
On Arrow, the way they approach it is that characters aligned with Ra’s al Ghul say “raysh” while those against him say “rahz.”
@4/John: My recollection aligns with Keith’s. This film was praised to high heaven when it came out, and I sometimes felt I was one of the few who found it badly flawed (although my opinion of it has lowered on repeat viewings).
One thing I forgot to mention that I really did like was the way it handled Batman’s debut like a horror movie scene from the perspective of the gangsters, with Batman as the monster. People complained that you couldn’t see what was going on in the fight, but that was the point — conveying that sense of disorientation and confusion the gangsters were feeling as they were taken out one by one by this relentless unseen force.
Yeah, this was mostly a vast improvement over the previous couple of movies, but was far from perfect — I definitely agree that the final fight sequence went on for entirely too long.
(I do have to admit, though, that the Ra’s al-Ghul reveal at the end surprised me a bit; but that’s because I don’t remember ever running into the character when I was reading the comics.)
EDIT: @9: That’s one of my favorite things about the Batman: Arkham Asylum game — lurking in the shadows on a conveniently-placed gargoyle, picking off the thugs one by one and watching & listening to them as they become increasingly panicky.
A good writeup about Mask of the Phantasm. Hope you get to the Nolan movie someday. ;-)
While Josh Hartnett might well have made a better Spirit than either Sam Jones or Gabriel Macht, he didn’t play the part.
Yeah, I screwed that up. Hartnett starred in Sin City not The Spirit.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
How ironic this review should come at the same time Morgan Freeman is… well… you know. Dammit, Morgan.
That being said, I don’t think the term ‘Magical Negro’ works well in this context since it has a racial and ancient culture-related meaning. There are other ways to say the character mostly works as a plot device (and this is lessened to a degree in The Dark Knight where Fox starts acting as Bruce’s most serious objector of conscience), but I don’t quite believe that is one of them, really. Fox’s race has no real impact one way or another into the plot– the character could have been Asian, Latino or Caucasian just as easily.
I have to admit that I LOVE this film. Especially how, in the first fight, Batman uses movie monster tropes to fight the hench-types. This is how I always imaged Batman would operate, scaring his foes. Not jumping in and beating everybody up at once. When did he turn from the Words Greatest Detective to the Words Greatest Thug. I found it nicely shot and I enjoyed the “realistic” look the film had.
Oh, and my favorite Batmobie…after the ’66 Batcar of course. When watching the Tumbler scene, I found myself thinking how much I want one of those.
The unholy convergence of Grimdark, Gritty faux-realism, serious business, and origin story fever comes for the Batman franchise. This is the movie that killed the DCCU, because they keep trying to use it as their touch stone and it gets increasingly dated and out of touch with every passing year. It was a superhero movie for people ashamed to be seen watching superhero movies, and that is an ever shrinking demographic.
I’m not sure I have a lot to say about this movie, despite enjoying it. Krad is more generous towards the first half hour than I was. I watched it thinking that the film didn’t seem to have a hero or protagonist for me to root for, and it was only when Bruce refused to execute the League’s prisoner that I thought “Ah, at last!” I wasn’t familiar with Ra’s al Ghul, so Ducard being him was a complete surprise. Batman having a big support network worked. Keeping Batman as a shadowy figure who we rarely get a good look at was an interesting move. It may be from the comics (not sure) but Bruce’s public persona being an obnoxious jerk has never really felt like Bruce Wayne to me. To me, he’s “millionaire philanthropist” Bruce Wayne, not “adolescent playboy” Bruce Wayne. In fact, the public Bruce Wayne we see here, and to a degree in the next film, is someone who no-one could ever believe ran a successful company.
I think the lack of mask-losing is because with Batman you don’t really need it. You can see the eyes and mouth, you don’t actually need anything else to get the actor’s expression. The only time I can ever remember Batman losing his mask during a film (not seen the DCU films) is when Michael Keaton’s Batman removes it at the climax of Batman Returns, and that’s only to make it clear who’s talking.
Recap gets one significant (or perhaps not significant, since it’s dealt with rather cursorily) detail wrong: Although Crane is arrested at one point, Scarecrow escapes during the chaos of the fear gas being released during the climax and is still at large at the end. Gordon even references the fact in the last scene!
I really enjoyed this movie and put it before any other Batman that I had seen before it. As I had not seen the animated movie you are referring to, your main objection is lost on me. I agree with #14 above though. When can you have a competent black man in your film and have him not be a “magical negro”? It seems to me the character of Fox is a brilliant person and there is no attention at all paid to his race. In fact, yours is the first objection I’ve heard of it. If they had cast a white actor, no one would have looked twice, but they cast Morgan Freeman, all of the sudden its a race issue? I don’t get it.
@17 cap-mjb regarding “millionaire philanthropist” Bruce Wayne versus “adolescent playboy” Wayne… Wayne playing at being a playboy is a common portrayal of him. We see this in Year One that krad referenced. And if we trace back further, we see that this is likely inspired by Don Diego and possibly Lamont Cranston.
Maybe the disconnect comes from the source of Wayne’s wealth. I think originally he was meant to be old money, living off the income of his property. More and more though, we see Wayne being a member of the “working rich”; I guess because having the resources of a corporation behind him is handy for writers? In the first case it is easy to believe in the playboy blind, but in the second it is more difficult as the head of a large business needs to be sharp and formidable in his own right.
I thought Batman Begins was meh. I remember moderately enjoying it when it came out, but I wasn’t bouncing on the balls of my feet when I came out of the theatre in the same way that I was after watching, say, Wonder Woman or Spider-Man: Homecoming.
But I don’t think Mask of the Phantasm was all that much better. I haven’t seen either movie since they were first released, but at the time I think I saw MOTP as being a loose adaptation of Batman: Year Two, which was also mediocre. For animated Batman movies, I think far and away the best one is actually Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, which despite the title, heavily features a prime Bruce Wayne (and Bat-family).
I’ve only seen a couple minute clip of Mask of the Phantasm, so the film as a whole may very well have many virtues. However the poor quality of the visuals killed it for me in that clip, and with film being such a visually oriented media I don’t see how it could be salvaged from that.
Oh this movie. Magnificent. Must confess, growing up I was never into Batman…so never read the comics or saw the animated series or even the 90’s movies. So Begins was my intro into Batman and for that, I shall be ever grateful. I actually didn’t even see it in cinemas…but later on in the fall of 2005, my college roommate played this movie over and over and over again…so I saw it many times and came to love it. Maybe it’s not the “perfect” Batman per the source material, but I greatly enjoyed the movie due to the fantastic cast and Nolan’s directing. Love Katie Holmes as Rachel. And I thought Bale was fantastic, even though the voice was a bit strange. I think part of the reason I love this movie is because of the slow build. And I also love the mythic undertones that permeate the film.
Quality film.
@16/random22: “It was a superhero movie for people ashamed to be seen watching superhero movies, and that is an ever shrinking demographic.”
But the reason it’s a shrinking demographic is because movies like this finally made superhero stories respectable for mainstream audiences, and once that door was opened, later productions were able to ease those audiences into the wilder and weirder stuff.
You can see the same dynamic in the Arrowverse. At first, Arrow was a very Nolanesque show, grounded and street-level with no superpowers or fantasy elements or masks or code names. But in season 2, they began easing into the idea of superpowers with the Mirakuru super-soldier formula, and then the next year they brought in the Flash and superpowers en masse, and then the universe expanded to include time travel and parallel Earths and aliens and magic and now it’s got the full panoply of comics craziness. But it had to start with the more mainstream stuff to get in the door, to make mainstream audiences and network execs receptive, before it could phase in the more geeky, hardcore stuff later on.
Before then, Smallville followed a similar trajectory — at first consciously avoiding anything comic-booky as much as possible and reshaping Clark Kent’s backstory into a Dawson’s Creek/Roswell mode, but by the end being a full-bore Superman/Justice League show in every respect except for the lack of the actual Superman costume and flight powers. And since then, the MCU did it to an extent too — starting with the relatively grounded idea of an inventor in a high-tech armor suit, then folding in gamma mutants and Asgardian alien-gods and WWII supersoldiers and aliens and eventually magic. And on TV, Agents of SHIELD started as a very ABC-type show about ordinary human federal agents, then added more comics characters and superpowered characters and embraced the SF/fantasy elements more and more fully.
@18/Jason: “When can you have a competent black man in your film and have him not be a “magical negro”?”
The issue isn’t that he’s competent, the issue is that he exists to be a deus ex machina for the white hero and little else. Lucius’s role in the comics was as the guy who ran Wayne Enterprises, to explain how that company could function when Bruce was too busy fighting crime to run it himself. He had his own life and role to play independent of Bruce Wayne, which was kind of the whole point of his character, that he did the job Bruce didn’t. Remaking him into someone whose prime function is to provide Batman’s gadgets was an invention of this movie.
“If they had cast a white actor, no one would have looked twice, but they cast Morgan Freeman, all of the sudden its a race issue? I don’t get it.”
Lucius Fox has been black since Len Wein and John Calnan created him in 1979, so if they’d cast a white actor in the role, a lot of people would’ve rightly had a problem with it.
23. ChristopherLBennett
“Lucius Fox has been black since Len Wein and John Calnan created him in 1979, so if they’d cast a white actor in the role, a lot of people would’ve rightly had a problem with it.”
I think you’re missing my point. Q in the bond films is a white man in every iteration and no one cares, Morgan Freeman, as Fox, plays much the same role here, and suddenly its a race issue. I had never heard of the character before seeing this movie, so the change in his role from the comic origin is lost on me. Is constantly worrying about these tropes in media getting in the way of appreciating good storytelling cause we’re constantly keeping score?
I disagree with those who criticize this movie for being “grimdark.” It’s dark, as most Batman adaptations are, but I don’t find it especially grim in any way. There’s humor sprinkled throughout this trilogy. It’s just usually done within a serious situation, like the scene where Bruce pretends to be drunk and tells off everyone at the party in order to save their lives.
The grimdark label seems to be blowback from some of the more recent, painfully serious superhero outings. But it’s not really fair to lump the originator of a trend with all the copycats who came afterward, and which were not as deftly handled.
I really, really like this movie (hmm, that reminds me, should rewatch it with the sequels). I think this is the movie that made me REALLY like Batman, and made him my favourite among the DC’s characters (though I’m still a Marvel girl first and foremost).
And how did I not know Cillian Murphy was here?! But, then again, when I last watched it, I hadn’t yet met Tommy f***ing Shelby …
Wasn’t Lucius Fox a Q type character in the Bruce Timm series? I seem to remember Batman having a black mechanic, but I may be thinking of another character.
Regardless of whether Bruce Wayne is old-money rich, or working entrepreneur rich, I still wonder where he sources all his materials. He ends up throwing a ton of those bat shurikens around (lovingly lit in the reveal in Begins) and I don’t see him scouring the city cleaning up after himself. So he’s constantly needing new ones.
Any more with more accessible maker-tech stuff, he might actually be able to laser cut these in his basement and then hand sharpen them but before? Someone knows they’re cutting bat shaped bits of metal and that makes a paper trail.
@27/SoullessMinion: No, B:TAS portrayed Lucius Fox (voiced by Brock Peters, and later by Mel Winkler in the revival series) as he was in the comics — an occasional supporting player who ran Wayne Enterprises and had no idea Bruce was Batman. You’re thinking of Earl Cooper (Paul Winfield), the title character of the episode “The Mechanic.” He’s an original creation of the episode’s writers (teleplay by Randy Rogel, story by Laren Bright and Steve Perry).
29 — Ah, thank you.
I’m not a big Batman fan, but this one was pretty good. Not perfect, but it hung together well and was enjoyable to watch. I do agree, though, that the animated show was better than any of the movies at capturing the spirit of the comics. And now that I think of it, the animated Superman from the same era was also pretty good.
cap-mjb: Derp! You’re right about Crane. I’ve edited the post accordingly. (This is especially dumb because Murphy comes back in subsequent movies….)
Jason: As Christopher said, Fox is a character from the comics, but he’s the one who ran Wayne Enterprises — which is what he became at the end of this film, but this movie decided to turn him into Q for some reason. And his inexplicable new role is to be Batman’s all-purpose helper guy, not only providing his equipment, but somehow also having the skill to synthesize an antidote to a poison, which is a completely different set of skills than the engineering ones we’ve seen to date. He basically is a cipher whose sole purpose is to provide our hero with science support. I got a 100% Magical Negro vibe off him watching it yesterday, and I stand by the characterization, especially since the characterization mutes his original comics character into deus ex mechanic. At least Alfred and Rachel have actual personalities — Fox is just there as a crutch for the hero.
cap-mjb & vinsentient: In fact, Bruce as a goofy-ass, idle-rich, playboy type is how the character was originally written. That’s how Bruce was portrayed in Detective Comics #27, and then the surprise twist at the end of the story is that, in fact, the Bat Man is really this pipe-smoking douche who’s been hanging out with Commissioner Gordon for half the comic.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@32/krad: Yep, because that first Batman story was basically plagiarized from a Shadow prose novella, and Bruce was just Lamont Cranston. But I don’t think that aspect of his character was really played up as much as the idea of Clark Kent as a cowardly, Don Diego-esque milquetoast. After all, Clark’s main interactions were with Lois Lane, who had to be kept in the dark about his secret, while Bruce’s main interactions in the comics after his first year were with Dick Grayson (The Sensational Character Find of 1940!). So once Robin came along, Bruce became less of a dissolute playboy and more of a pipe-puffing father figure.
(And by the way, Bruce was just “wealthy” in the early comics; he wasn’t explicitly called a millionaire until 1943.)
I think the idea of Bruce as a philanthropist started in the mid-’60s when they killed off Alfred, and Bruce founded the charitable Alfred Foundation in tribute. When the TV series came along, the comics resurrected Alfred, and the charitable foundation became the Wayne Foundation. The TV show embraced that concept and leaned into the idea of Bruce as a philanthropist. They paid occasional lip service to the playboy idea, but never did much with it.
I don’t dispute Fox is mostly a simple Q to Batman’s Bond in this movie. Though let’s not forget the ending with the wonderful “Didn’t you get the memo?” payback Fox has with Earle. So, we do see him prove his worth to the company and rise to the position of leading it, a career trajectory Q has never received.
Best Nolan Batman “MY MENTOR is really a bad guy! Works WAY better than “I dress like a bat to beat people but oh my god I can’t deal with crazy”
I know that some others have probably already said this by now, but I think that “Begins” got a lot of positive reaction not only because it was the best of an admittedly weak slate of superhero movies that came out that year, but also because it’s heads and tails better than the previous Batman movies. With the possible exception of the 1989 “Batman”, a lot of fans were saying, “Finally, we got a *good* Batman movie!”
And, yes, once “The Dark Knight” came out, I recall detecting a noticeable shift from “great” to “good/okay/not bad” in regards to how people were describing “Begins” (because they are then, inevitably, comparing it to “Dark Knight” instead of what had come before).
I remember looking forward to this movie because I just love Ra’s al Ghul (admittedly because I love David Warner’s voice acting from the animated series). After the first half hour, I thought to myself, “But Liam Neeson looks much more like Ra’s al Ghul than Ken Watanabe. What a strange decision they made there.” And then I was embarrassed by the end.
I think this is hands down one of the best “origin of the superhero” movies, and also gives Dark Knight a run for its money as the best Batman movie. Christian Bale owns the role of Batman more than any of the live action guys save maybe Adam West.
That said, the monorails and microwaves destructo-weapon sequence at the end strains credibility a whole lot. Especially given the less fantastical approach taken earlier on (and later on in TDK, for that matter). Why not just spray the gas out of an airplane?
I do like Liam Neeson’s Ra’s, but I did feel like he needed a little more screen time to percolate.
@38/Twels: I think Bale was a good Bruce Wayne but a mediocre Batman, especially because of that insanely bad Bat-growl he did. But then, the premise of these films is that Batman is just a performance Bruce puts on, a symbol he uses to inspire the people and is eager to give up as soon as it’s no longer needed. Heck, the second and third films don’t even credit Bale as “Bruce Wayne/Batman” in the end titles, just “Bruce Wayne.”
Finally a “Batman Begins” review I can agree with!
Conroy definitely wins Best Batman Ever, but I think I’d give Best Live Action Bats to Keaton. Kilmer made a decent Batman but a pretty bland Bruce Wayne. Clooney I could buy as the Philanthropist/Playboy Bruce, but he never really felt like a good enough Action Star to be Batman. Bale feels flat in both roles (Personally, I think he shows more emotion in Equilibrium than he ever did as Batman.) Keaton was the only one who did a passable job of making Bruce a believable human being, and Batman a terrifying force of Good.
LazerWulf: Since 1991, every time I read a Batman comic book, it’s Conroy’s voice I hear. No performance has eclipsed it yet.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@41/LazerWulf: I never found Michael Keaton remotely credible as Bruce or Batman. He was totally miscast. (Although he was terrific as the Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming.) Kilmer left little impression. I think George Clooney could’ve been ideal in the role if he’d had a better script to work with. He certainly looked the part better than anyone else. (Although I’m biased since his father was my favorite TV newscaster in my childhood and a friend of my father’s.)
I think the Ra’s reveal mostly works because, for non comics readers, they don’t have the slightest idea how does Canon!Ra’s look (and let’s be honest, most of the mainstream movies audience either didn’t watch B:TAS or had forgotten about things like Ra’s appearance there by the time this movie came out), and for comics readers, we know Henri Ducard is a completely different character, making us think Liam was really him.
I’m saving something for Dark Knight Rises, why I think it’s actually the worst Batman movie of them all even if it’s a muuuuuuch better movie than Forever or & Robin. Suffice to say for now, while it’s a decent Bruce Wayne movie, I think Rises is a completely awful take on Batman as a character archetype, that wants to have it both ways with whether Batman is a possible and beneficial thing or not and fails at making both points, but I’ll hopefully expand on it when we get there.
I don’t recall ever hearing that Rachel had been a last-minute substitute for Dent. What I do remember hearing – I think in an interview with Goyer – was that Warner Brothers’ one stipulation to the filmmakers was that they include a love interest, because it had been such a popular element of Spider-Man. And sure enough, it feels really shoehorned in: Batman’s origin just doesn’t ring authentic to me when there’s a girlfriend involved (the main reason I’ve never liked Phantasm, which emphasizes the idea even more).
I have also read, more recently, that the character of the D.A. in this movie was originally supposed to be Dent himself, but it was decided to reserve such an important character for a sequel rather than killing him off right away. Of course, one of the unintended consequences of making them two different people is that Rachel becomes someone who just can’t stop having affairs with her bosses. Not a great look.
As for Fox, I’m less concerned about the magical Negro aspect of the character than with his overall role in minimizing Bruce’s agency. Before this movie, Batman had basically been his own Q, building the things he needed himself. Here, he’s just sort of a rich guy with some martial arts training who uses his connections to score himself cool weapons and get himself out of jams. That approach reaches its nadir when Fox has to explain to Bruce how he counteracted the effects of the fear toxin, and Bruce asks if he’s supposed to understand any of that. At the press screening I attended, a friend and fellow critic replied, “Yes, you’re supposed to understand it. You’re a scientist!” But not in this movie, which in the name of realism reduces Batman’s industriousness and resourcefulness considerably. (A related thought: As soon as the Tumbler is shown on TV, why don’t any of the numerous Wayne Enterprises employees who must have been involved with that project recognize it right away and realize Batman must have some connection to the firm?)
Other observations:
It took a friend’s girlfriend to point out how absurd it is that, after Bruce makes his big stand against killing the League’s hostage, he then doesn’t attempt to rescue the guy from the explosion he himself causes. Instead, he devotes all of his energy to rescuing Ducard – obviously because the story needs that character to remain alive. But within the narrative, it comes across as just two white guys lookin’ out for each other. Even though one of them just tried to convince the other one to murder a third, non-white guy that neither one of them now seems concerned with saving.
I don’t think it’s really strongly implied that the League had a direct hand in the murder of Bruce’s parents – just that they deliberately created the desperate conditions that would breed that sort of crime. That’s one thing I really like about the film: It keeps the Waynes’ deaths fairly random, as they should be. And I love how we’re left to decide for ourselves if Chill is really repentant. Because if he is, what does that mean for the Batman mythos – and for revenge fantasies like it in general? Bruce’s reaction is perfect: He just gets up and leaves the courtroom, because acknowledging that this criminal might be genuinely sorry threatens to pull the rug out from under the entire agenda he has set for himself.
Overall, my feeling is that the movie certainly has its flaws (like, doesn’t that ninja-training shit seem to go on forever?), but it’s basically a strong and mature piece of work. And I doubt much will happen in the next few years to threaten its position in my personal hierarchy as the third-best Batman movie (just behind the first Burton flick, which itself is just behind – well, we’ll talk about that next week).
@45/Stephen Schneider: “Before this movie, Batman had basically been his own Q, building the things he needed himself.”
I don’t think that had ever been clearly or consistently established. Different versions had handled it differently. The previous movies had implied that Batman relied heavily on Alfred. The Adam West Batman was a duly deputized officer of the law and seemed to have a whole infrastructure supporting his activities — the people who maintained the Batcopter at the airport, the Bat-Turn Parachute Retrieval Service or whatever it was called, etc. Some comics stories had explained his resources in various ways, e.g. he hired workers and had them brought in blindfolded and working on different parts of the projects so they never knew what they were doing. The ’80s and ’90s comics bizarrely and unfortunately gave him a mute hunchback mechanic who built and maintained the Batmobile. I mentioned the B:TAS episode that provided a different explanation for the Batmobile, that Batman had saved the life of a great mechanic once and he built and repaired the Batmobile to return the favor.
@46/Chris:
Random stories in various media may have shown him getting help with equipment, but Begins was the first time in my then-40 years of fandom that I remember a major tale significantly reducing Bruce’s own role in his development as it had been shown in the original, two-page origin of Batman. Remember that panel of him becoming “a master scientist”? Out the window, apparently because Nolan and co. thought it wouldn’t be realistic to have him develop so many skills of his own. And I think that’s a loss. Part of what makes the character inspirational is all the things he has taught himself to become better. In Begins, he’s more like a rich guy who does lots of push-ups and otherwise relies on everybody else around him to prop him up.
Maybe it’s just personal preference, but I always want to think of the character as the guy who built the 1950 Batmobile by himself, in one night, and while he had a broken leg.
@47/Stephen: I think the Nolan movies did show that Bruce and Alfred did a lot of their own work to modify and “Bat-ify” the baseline equipment they got from Lucius, since Lucius nominally didn’t know Bruce was Batman, and had to go on pretending he didn’t know even once he figured it out. And I think Bruce came up with a lot of the designs himself, and The Dark Knight showed him doing his own forensics work. So he did have the knowhow to do a lot of it himself. But as Bale’s successor said in Justice League, Bruce’s superpower is that he’s rich. So it stands to reason he’d have other smart people he could recruit to help him.
Besides, sure, back in the ’50s when Batman was just a guy in a denim bodysuit driving a souped-up hot rod and throwing smoke bombs and mini-boomerangs, it was plausible that one guy and his youthful ward and aging butler could build all the gear themselves. But when we get to the age when he has high-tech Kevlar body armor and microcircuitry in his cowl and HUDs in his eye slits and a memory-fabric cape and so forth, we’re getting past the point where it’s plausible that one or two guys could do it all themselves.
@48/Chris:
Well, see, that’s my point: I don’t think anything about Batman is or ever has been “plausible,” and the more you try to make it so, the more trouble you get into. And the less fun it all becomes. I just think what makes him delightful as a character is the completely improbable repertoire of things he has mastered. It’s an inspiration to the reader to learn new things and be well-rounded as a person, in emulation of this ideal none of us can ever hope to equal.
But yeah, I thought The Dark Knight was much better at showing Bruce in command of his own ship and just delegating some responsibilities. Again, more on that next week.
I’m not sure Bale gets enough credit here. While it was always easy to lampoon Bale’s Batvoice, Bale handles being a guy with a double life better than anyone I’ve seen to date. The bit during the party when he realizes Ra’s is there and up to something, and we see him acting as he slips from slightly bored snotty host to concerned crimefighter to drunken jerk is actually slyly done–we’re supposed to see Bruce acting and so Bale plays up Bruce’s roleplaying in a nicely-done way. I think every other actor I’ve seen tackling the dual role has come off (not necessarily badly) as Batman in and out of costume, sometimes just killing time until he can suit up again and punch somebody. Bale’s version is a guy with multiple personalities he shifts in and out of, and I think it works.
One other thing while I’m here: while I tend to agree that Nolan’s fight scenes in the trilogy are an awful spatial mess, I do think that does work to the first film’s advantage during the scene at the freight yard, where the gangsters guarding the incoming drug shipment find themselves picked off one by one by a thing in the shadows, a thing that when it finally appears is a whirling black blur that destroys the remaining mobsters. It’s The Batman as a horror movie monster that preys on criminals, which captures the entire reason the nutter dresses like a giant bat in the first place.
@49/Stephen: I will never accept the argument that having fantasy elements in a story is an excuse to abandon all standards of competent, plausible writing and just do sheer nonsense. On the contrary, writing fantasy carries with it the obligation to try harder for plausibility as compensation for the implausible elements. If you can take a scenario that seems unlikely and concoct an explanation for it that actually feels credible to the reader or viewer, that’s a real feat of creativity.
After all, people like to talk about suspension of disbelief, but what often gets ignored is that the full phrase is “the willing suspension of disbelief.” It’s not something audiences are required to do, it’s something they choose to do — or not do. So creators aren’t entitled to the audience’s suspension of disbelief — we have to earn it. We have to sell our implausible scenarios to them in a way that makes them want to believe they’re plausible, or at least pretend to believe long enough to enjoy the story. And I think Batman Begins did an excellent job at that, justifying how Batman works in a way that made it feel like it actually was plausible, like there was a good reason for all the seeming absurdities.
Batman has generally been one of the less implausible superheroes out there, because he doesn’t have powers and neither do most of his recurring enemies. In the early days, the ’40s and ’50s and so on, there wasn’t any real difference in the level of plausibility of Batman’s stories versus Superman’s; they both fought mad scientists and monsters and aliens and fairy-tale creatures brought to life about as often, and they both fought street-level gangsters and murderers and con artists and enemy spies about as often. But round about the ’80s and ’90s, when I was first getting into Batman comics (after decades of knowing him only from TV), the general approach at DC was that Batman was the most grounded and naturalistic character in the DC Universe. When he was in a Justice League comic or the like, he could get into fighting aliens or monsters or whatever, but in his own books, he was a detective battling mostly non-superpowered crime and corruption and cruelty in a gritty, believable world, following the precedent Frank Miller set in Batman: Year One. The Nolan films were very much in the vein of the Batman comics from that era, about 10-20 years before the movies. (Much like the Adam West show from the later ’60s was very much in the vein of the Batman comics of the mid-’40s to the mid-’50s, and Batman: The Animated Series in the mid-’90s was in the vein of the comics from the mid-’70s to mid-’80s.)
@@@@@ 51/Chris:
I think you’re confusing a few concepts here, or at least misreading my statements. No one’s talking about full-scale fantasy (in which the basic laws of creation as we know them no longer apply). I’m talking about the questionable application of the term “plausible” to superhero fiction in general. I can think of few superhero stories, no matter how human and fragile the protagonist, that qualify as plausible in a genuine sense. (Maybe that vignette near the start of the first Kick-Ass movie, in which the guy jumps off a building and dies instantly.) In fact, one of my biggest criticisms of Batman Begins is that, by focusing so unflinchingly on the nuts and bolts of how he does what he does, the movie makes the entire affair seem LESS believable despite the intended realism. There are just so many opportunities for us to stop and think, “Yeah, that could never happen.” I greatly prefer the approach taken in the 1966 series and the Tim Burton films, in which Batman is just presented as a fact of nature and it’s up to us whether or not we want to go with it. Talk about willing suspension of disbelief.
@52/Stephen: My point is, it’s invalid to say “This one aspect of a story is implausible, and that is a license for the story to make no sense whatsoever.” That’s wrong. There are degrees of implausibility. Yes, there are stories that go all-out with the craziness, and those can be a lot of fun (says the guy who just finished binge-reading three consecutive TPBs of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl), but there are also stories that feature one implausible element and strive to keep everything around it as believable as possible, or to present the implausibility in a way that makes it seem believable.
And the latter approach is how a lot of Batman fiction has done it. After the craziness of the Silver Age and the campy comedy of the Adam West series, Batman comics reacted against the perception of the character as absurd by adopting a more grounded, serious, adult tone, ultimately leading to Frank Miller’s two seminal Batman works in the mid-’80s which were the templates for the next couple of decades where Batman was treated as the most naturalistic, gritty, and street-level character in the DC stable — until Grant Morrison came along and showed how all the zany stuff from the Silver Age could be embraced in a way that still worked for today’s more sophisticated audiences. But the Nolan films came before that, and were following the precedent of the post-Miller, post-Crisis era of Batman comics.
The problem with any argument that contains the phrase “superhero fiction in general” is that superhero fiction is not one thing. It’s an amalgam of every conceivable genre and storytelling style. We’re talking about a universe that includes a guy from another planet who can fly and be invulnerable when he gets a suntan; an Amazon princess who was molded from clay and given life by literal Greek gods; a space cop with a magic wishing ring; a swamp man who’s made of plants and has elemental powers; a guy who’s two different guys in one body and who has nuclear transmuting powers and whose head is on fire for some reason; and one or two characters who actually know they’re in a comic book and did that well before Deadpool got famous for it. Next to all those guys, Batman is totally plausible.
I don’t mind Bale’s Bat growl here. It’s mostly kept to a rough whisper, and the big growl moments, like when he’s questioning the crooked cop, make sense as being an intimidating performance. It’s the next movie that takes it too far, making Batman sound like the Marlboro Man. How many packs you smoking a day, Bats?
@@@@@ 53/Chris:
Yeah, plenty of superheroes have more fantastical elements to their makeup than Batman. But I’d say that makes Bats “closer to plausible,” not plausible in and of himself. Anybody who finishes a Batman comic or comes out of a Batman movie thinking “Thor is off the wall, but that could really happen” needs his head examined, to put it politely.
Now, speaking of Grant Morrison, I always thought it was interesting that Christopher Nolan attached himself to the Batman franchise when Frank Miller was still the dominant storytelling paradigm. Because Morrison’s work strikes me as much more in line with the twisty, nonlinear approach Nolan has taken in several of his features. It would have been interesting to see Nolan’s take on something like The Return of Bruce Wayne, with all its inherent metaphysics. (And I’m still sad that Nolan never offered us his take on the Riddler, because imagine the prolonged, multilevel conundrum a story like that could have been.)
@55/Stephen: Lay off the straw men, please. It’s never about believing that something could really happen. The phrase is “suspension of disbelief,” which means it’s temporary, for the duration of the story. It’s about selling something well enough that the audience is willing to buy into the illusion rather than being pulled out of the story by the implausibilities. It’s like a magic trick. The audience knows the lady hasn’t really been cut in half, but the goal is to create a convincing illusion that she has.
The point is that it’s a matter of degree. Yes, there are implausibilities in a Batman story, but much less so than in a Superman or Green Lantern or Plastic Man story. You’re complaining about Nolan doing Batman in a grounded, naturalistic way as if that had never been done before, but as I’ve already told you, it was pretty much the way that Batman was regularly approached in the comics from about 1986 onward. That was part of the Batman brand in the post-Crisis era, that his stories were the most gritty and urban and down-to-earth, that he was dealing with corrupt cops and politicians and organized crime and deranged serial killers rather than the metahumans and aliens and supernatural forces that other superheroes dealt with. The implausibilities in his stories were more on the level of whether it was practical to fight crime as a costumed vigilante and whether anyone would actually choose to live in Gotham if it was such a hellhole, rather than on the level of violating the laws of physics and biology or entailing literal gods and demons.
“(And I’m still sad that Nolan never offered us his take on the Riddler, because imagine the prolonged, multilevel conundrum a story like that could have been.)”
Now there we agree. I often imagined a Nolanized version of Edward Nygma as a cool, calculating mastermind of organized crime manipulating events from behind the scenes. I also thought you could’ve done a naturalistic version of the Penguin as a crime lord known for his elegant attire and aspirations to high society. But I fear the prior movies’ fanciful takes on those two characters colored how they were perceived. I think Nolan didn’t find them believable enough, which suggests he knew them mainly from their movie versions.
@@@@@ 56/Chris:
“Lay off the straw men, please”
No idea what that means or where it’s coming from. But I guess Scarecrow could be considered a straw man. ;)
“… but as I’ve already told you…”
Okay, now I get it. See you next week.
I have also read, more recently, that the character of the D.A. in this movie was originally supposed to be Dent himself, but it was decided to reserve such an important character for a sequel rather than killing him off right away. Of course, one of the unintended consequences of making them two different people is that Rachel becomes someone who just can’t stop having affairs with her bosses. Not a great look.
Bruce isn’t her boss.
All this talk about Rachel being a replacement Harvey Dent makes me wonder if there wasn’t a missed opportunity to do some mix & match and have Bruce’s love interest in the film be “Harley Dent.” It definitely would’ve had possibilities for an end scene in which “Harley” joins Gordon and Batman on the rooftop and takes a moment to admire the Joker’s calling card.
I do find that this film’s treatment of Rachel is actually better than the next one’s, And generally find Katie Holmes’ portrayal to be superior to Maggie Gyllenhall’s.
Keith, you just inspired me to finally sit down and actually watch the Monty Python films. That Lancelot scene had me laughing in ways I didn’t believe was humanly possible. That alone makes this superhero rewatch worth it (and I’ll never watch that train fight scene the same way again).
I’ll give Batman Begins due credit. It’s the first Batman film that warrants more than one viewing. None of the previous films have that kind of rewatchability. It’s definitely far from a perfect film, and I would certainly never call it a great one (that would be left for its sequel). In all, it’s a well written and consistently made blockbuster film. One that sometimes tries a little too hard to be serious, while sometimes overlooking the inherent comic-bookiness that comes with the territory.
I’m not a fan of Bale as either Batman or Bruce, but the world is so well established that you’re able to follow through with Nolan’s take on the Hero’s Journey all the way to the end. Oldman is superb as Gordon and Caine nails this weary and fatherly take on Alfred.
When this opened in 2005, I had a hard time picturing Liam Neeson as a bad guy or even an angry fatherly mentor. Besides Schindler’s List, he was still Qui-Gon Jinn to me (yes, I adore the character and that film). Letting go of the wise and kind Jedi Master was tough for me. In a way, playing Ra’s al-Ghul was a predecessor for what has since become Neeson’s elderly action hero persona as seen in recent films.
I think this mostly works because it respects the characters and Nolan and Goyer successfully develop their arcs, telling a coherent origin story, nailing the crime-fighting aspect of Batman and also setting up an even better sequel. Visually, it isn’t as good. Dark Knight would not only portray better action, but also better visual design in general, especially in therms of cinematography. This one rarely stands out visually.
Lastly, I blame Batman for inspiring a lone poor golden-haired kid from the Narrows to become a vigilante. The end result? Six years later, we get a homicidal maniac who likes to cut off people’s heads.
One of my favorite aspects of this film, honestly, is that the martial arts in it are very much real martial arts that you would use in a real setting. Having been a student of martial arts for over a decade now, I can’t help but groan at times watching movie martial arts, super athletic energy-wasting stunts that would likely fail abysmally in a real-life situation.
The martial arts in this film are much more realistically portrayed. Quick, efficient movements that don’t waste energy, getting the most bang for the buck in order to realistically take on six opponents at once. No silly flying spin kicks or whatnot. Heck, I don’t think you actually see him kick an opponent (though I could be wrong on that count). Kicks are risky. They take you off balance, and if you miss, you risk someone either catching it (like Bruce did to Ducard), counterattacking with you off balance, or falling to the ground. It makes it much more believable that he was taught jiu-jutsu (not judo), which would focus more on quick efficient strikes, grabs, and the like.
Heck, in the one scene in which Crane and his men are preparing to torch the apartment, with the guy taking a leak, he just smashes his head into the mirror. Quick. Efficient.
This film is still my favorite depiction of martial arts in movies that aren’t specifically released with martial arts as the premise (which tend to get it right more often than not).
I’ve never seen Mask of the Phantasm (although kind of makes me want to see it) – but I did occasionally catch an episode of the Animated series on TV and one of the episodes I distinctly remember had the Scarecrow and I really liked it. So i was excited when I heard this would have the Scarecrow in it – and I was not disappointed. I agree with you that Cillian Murphy was excellent (and it’s really difficult for me to imagine him as Batman). Granted, how much of that was due to the fact that I find something about his face to be exquisite – like, I can see that he’s not stereotypically attractive, but something about the his face was very striking and just seemed to fit his character perfectly.
This is one of my favorite Batman movies – while I’m not a fan of grimdark as a rule, I think for Batman it does seem to fit a bit more. I can’t say I’m any kind of expert when it comes to the comics or other shows, but Batman does lend himself to a kind of gritty, noir aesthetic, at least from what general pop culture osmosis I picked up on. Like others have said, I enjoyed the psychological aspects of his origin story and how he comes to use symbols/fear and also understanding of the criminal mind (while refusing to take the role of executioner). And actually loved both Falcone and Lucius Fox.
@60 – ha. When watching this, there were a few points in the beginning where I thought, “hm, that is a very un-Jedi like thing to say” and so I was a bit suspicious of him for completely out-of-movie reasons.
@58 – There’s an implication that Rachel was dating (or at least had dated) the DA in this one too.
So when I first saw the trailers for this, I didn’t know what to think. I was somewhat excited by the prospect of a new Batman movie that seemed to be leaving the legacy of B&R in the dust. I thought the scenes showing his training abroad looked really cool. I had no idea who Lucius Fox was, so I was puzzled by this “CIA guy” as I perceived him from the trailer to be the source of Batman’s gadgets…similar to what a previous commenter noted, I was ingrained with the idea that Bruce and Alfred had pretty much done it themselves. Also, I was NOT on board with the idea of the batmobile being a tank. So while I was still super intrigued, I wasn’t terribly sure about it.
I saw it with my family and loved it. I was extremely receptive to the style presented by Nolan. I liked the explanation for the bat gear, both the stuff Fox (who turned out to be a cool character) had, and what Bruce and Al put together themselves (down to having to order 10,000 spare mask parts). I thought the direction they took with him using his own fear on the criminals was well developed and played, and even played into the larger plot with the fear toxin and Scarecrow, who was an awesome addition to the movie. One of my favorite scenes is when he first pulls out the mask and uses the toxin on Falcone.
I was also a fan of Falcone and how he was played…the club scene where he’s opposite Bruce in the flashback is another one of my favorites.
And I think the story pretty much works–coming back full circle with Ra’s showing up and reconnecting the main plot to the beginning of the movie is one of the things that is satisfying to a movie audience. Critique as you will from the standpoint of what makes a “good” or “realistic” story from a written standpoint, I think this is one of the mechanics that is proven to work within the film medium. Likewise, the commupance for Earle through the reveal that Bruce bought back a majority shareholding through different trusts and such is something that is very satisfying for movie audiences. It’s a minor side plot that gets resolved right after the main plot is, and I read some analysis somewhere that when all the various arcs and components of the movie’s plot get resolved within a short time span of one another, this is appealing to audiences.
Sure, there are some holes–why does the microwave not boil the water in people’s bodies, why doesn’t everyone go crazy while boiling their cooking water, didn’t that criminal get killed when he burns the house down anyway, and where the FUDGE does Scarecrow get a HORSE?–but I find I’m very forgiving when I enjoy a movie. Take Days of Future Past (Singer) for example. There are so many logic holes and problems there, but I unashamedly love that film. Same here, I enjoy the movie, so as CLB explained, I’m wilfully suspending any disbelief I might have.
One minor note–I do not believe that the cutting style here can be referred to as jump cuts. I don’t know if there’s a particular term…maybe just fast cuts? I believe “jump cuts” specifically refers to the style where the background of a shot stays fixed, but the objects in the scene suddenly “jump” forward in time without all the movement being shown. You see jump cuts in Requiem for a Dream where someone is exiting a building and they suddenly appear many feet along their path at quick intervals, or when the mother is eating a grape fruit but it doesn’t show her eating–it is just uneaten then cuts to being eaten without the background changing. Likewise the coffee cup suddenly empties.
Honestly, Mask of the Phantasm has got to be a prime example of something that was once underrated becoming overrated.
Batman Begins is just as good of not better
@58/ajay:
I wasn’t talking about Bruce. She’s having an affair with her boss the D.A. in Batman Begins. You know, the one who gets shot at the docks.
I’ve always said Mask of the Phantasm is the best Batman movie. It’s also a great movie, period. This is my second favorite Batman flick, but that’s just because the live action is such a poor lot (I guess Adam West’s Batman fills the next-best slot). This is certainly the best of the decidedly weak Nolan trilogy, considerably better than Rises, and obviously a lot better than the god-awful middle film which will not be named.
66 I honestly don’t even think Phantasm is the best animated Batman movie (Under the Red Hood is better)
I feel Mask of the Phantasm really just coasts by on the fact that it’s Batman the Animated Series as a movie.
So this may go against the grain, but personally I prefer this film to The Dark Knight. I acknowledge TDK as a superior piece of filmmaking, but as a form of entertainment I prefer the first entry of the trilogy. It feels more like a comic book than its counterpart, willing to throw in some of the more absurd elements that come with the source material. Plus there’s an emphasis on the psychology of the hero in this film that’s fascinating to watch, even if the dialogue can feel a bit too clinical at times. I also think that Katie Holmes gave a better performance than Maggie Gyllenhall did in the next movie. The roll of Rachel Dawes does feel a little forced, especially considering that the character was an original creation of the film, but Holmes at least tried to give the character a personality. But something that really helps the movie is its atmosphere. Much like the atmosphere of the Tim Burton films enhanced them, there’s an element of uncanniness to the realism in this film that separates it just enough from our world to be unnerving. That’s a good thing in my opinion because Gotham City should be unnerving. There should be a sense that there’s something wrong with this place. Otherwise, why would it need Batman to begin with? I think this film struck the balance between the realistic and the absurd quite well, and it’s a shame that the sequel moved away from it.
I, too, am interested in the aronofosky script: a homeless wayne trained by car mechanic Alfred and taking on Gotham’s wealthy, Robin Hood style? Sign me up
bonus points for adding the penguin *wenk*