January 28, 2007
Batman Begins
Well, heck. They finally made a good Batman movie. Colour me surpised. I mean, the Tim Burton ones looked cool, but I never gave a damn about any of them.
I had avoided Batman Begins after being told it was based on Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One. Which, while good, wasn’t something that inspired me to go see a movie of it.
Turns out it wasn’t, and this was all to the good.
The reason BB succeeds, I think, is that it takes a fundamentally ludicrous concept and says “Right, somehow we need to justify this ridiculous shit and make it make sense, heck, almost believable.” Escaping from the campy cartoon nonsense that characterizes Batman (and most comic adaptations; really, different mediums should be used differently for storytelling, even with the same concepts at core) is what made BB interesting – that and creating a new villain.
And they pull it off. A good script helped immensely by a really good cast in understated roles. By the time Bale has become Batman, we can almost believe it. (It has come to my attention only recently that Christian Bale is actually an actor as opposed to the usual dancing slab of meat that passes for a Hollywood male lead.)
(Huh. A quick bounce around IMDB reveals writer/director Christopher Nolan did Memento (haven’t seen, but realise it’s meant to be good), The Prestige (very clever but inessential – again Bale is good) and is filming The Dark Knight, presumably a sequel.)
It will be interesting to see if the sequel can sustain the inventiveness, or if it will be dragged down by the franchise’s self referential cliches.
Filed by billy at 3:14 pm under culture
6 Comments
I aslo enjoyed BB greatly and thought it was well done with the suspension of disbelief (though it gets tough at times). Basically they’ve hit the right character points with it, and retained what made batman both cool and scary.
Momento is a great film which I highly recommend – even just for it’s approach to story telling. I haven’t seen the Prestige as yet, neither have I seen The Machinest, though have heard good things about it too…
I didn’t realise he’d done voice work for Howls Moving Castle, but I did realise he was the kid from Empire of the Sun (another great film!).
IMHO both Nolan and Bale show remarkable promise in their respective fields.
When I went to see it the opening sequences made me chunder. Almost. I thought it was so lame, the fucking hackneyed Orientalist schtick and all that… I thought it was going to be worse than the last couple of Batman movies, at least because hopefully NO ONE could take those seriously… But then it slowly turned and I thought it got better and better, starting with how awesome the interplay between Alfred and Bruce is on the private jet home.
It had one scene that sincerely shocked me too, really decent fright, which I was most certainly not expecting. And I thought all the riffing on fear throughout was generally awesome.
I even voluntarily watched it again, which I don’t do with many movies.
The only other Bale flick I’ve seen is The Machinist. Scott, I’d say it’s one of those … good, but … movies. It’s really unambitious and uninventive (I think it’s billed as something like “a cross between Fight Club & Memento!” and it’s sort of played that way), but I got the impression the film maker probably thought it was both. It’s done well though.
Man, and how about Gary Oldman as understated, not-frothing-at-the-mouth-ever guy??
Oh yeah, politically the whole thing was pretty disgusting, maybe that’s as far as the Frank Miller connection goes?
Yeah, Gary Oldman as not-Gary-Oldman was pretty amazing.
One of the clever things they did was make Batman seem moderate in comparison to Raoul Gayul (or whatever?)
Ra’s Al Ghul (or maybe Ghoul?). Actually, he’s been around since the late 60s or early 70s, and was invented as part of a strategy to reposition Batman away from the campy cartoon nonsense of the TV show. Maybe they brought him in for this one for that reason.
And a side-note: if you think BB is politically disgusting, try reading the political subtext of Sin City…
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw “The Machinist” billed as “Fight Club meets Memento!”
I mean, fuck, talk about giving away the ENTIRE DAMN TWIST of the film before you’ve even pressed play on the remote control.
Anyway, on the subject of Batman Begins… it was okay. It wasn’t a bad film, but I don’t think I’ll watch it again.
OTOH, I’ve adored every other Christopher Nolan film I’ve seen. “Memento” and “Insomnia” both took somewhat traditional plot lines but through skillful and disciplined non-linear narratives, superb casting and a strict focus on the perceptions of one character made them very interesting films to watch, re-watch and enjoy. Certainly, two of my favourite films of recent years.