Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins”

We went to see the lat­est Bat­man Film last night. I can hon­est­ly say, that if there were any Bat­man films made before this one, I have com­plete­ly for­got­ten them. This is the way Bat­man was meant to be on the big screen.

Okay, so I did like Tim Bur­ton’s “Bat­man” and “Bat­man Returns.” They were both sol­id, if solidy Tim Bur­ton, films. Lean­ing heav­i­ly on the com­ic book aspect, they made for great movies. The visu­als in a Tim Bur­ton film rarely dis­s­ap­point, even if the plots lack some. These also brought in a nice pshy­co­sis ele­ment that gave some depth to the film’s char­ac­ters. Michael Keaton under­played his char­ac­ter while the vil­lians were over the top. The fol­low­ing films in the series, sad­ly, were com­plete train-wrecks.

The lat­est in the fran­chise, how­ev­er, makes me wish we could have just start­ed with it. Christo­pher Nolan and David Goy­er did the same thing right that has ben­e­fit­ed the lat­est Spi­der­man films: give a won­der­ful­ly human back sto­ry (which both Spi­der­man and Bat­man have in place) and let the char­ac­ters unfold the sto­ry. Too often, com­ic book based movies take the atti­tude of how quick­ly can we get the guy in the mask and keep him there and how many cool look­ing vehi­cles and vil­lians can we have on screen at all times. Rest assured, there are great gad­gets and a ter­rif­ic vil­lian in “Bat­man Begins.” There’s also real­ly great char­ac­ters. I found myself not real­ly car­ing if Bruce Wayne was wear­ing the cos­tume or not. There was only one char­ac­ter and I want­ed to hear what he had to say or see what he had planned next. The gratu­ti­tus shot of Bat­man pos­ing as a gar­goyle looked great, but did­n’t hold my inter­est near­ly as long as see­ing Bruce Wayne dis­cov­er­ing how he could acheive more than being a mere mortal.

As far as the direc­tion of the film, I was expect­ing a lot from Nolan, hav­ing enjoyed Memen­to so much. I was­n’t dis­s­ap­point­ed. He drew on a hor­ror film ele­ment. The scene with Bat­man attack­ing a gang of thugs unload­ing a ship­ment of drugs from a car­go con­tain­er could have been tak­en write from Rid­ley Scot­t’s “Alien.” Wayne (Chris­t­ian Bale) learns that fear is his great­est weapon, and you see it on screen more than any bat­mo­bile or bat-a-rang. What’ s more, I found myself want­i­ng only more of the horror/suspense ele­ment and car­ing less about the sci-fi aspect. Of course, all this stalk­er-in-the-shad­ows hor­ror is a great set­ting to find Bat­man’s first more-than-a-mere-man vil­lian, the Scare­crow. Some of the best ele­ments are again mak­ing a crime sto­ry into a super­nat­ur­al hor­ror film. A bril­liant use of film genre where it might not be suspected.

Pre­quels often have a real­ly great “Oh, that’s how!” fac­tor, and what’s great about “Bat­man Begins” is that we all know where we’re head­ed, so we all get those. The writ­ers threw in some sub­tle ones for the devout (like the bat belt), and the obvi­ous ones for the rest of us. No one needs to be intro­duced to James Gor­don (Gary Old­man), pos­si­bly Gotham’s last clean cop.

One of my favorite comics of all time was Frank Miller’s “Dark Knight.” While this isn’t that sto­ry line (in fact, it is quite the oppo­site, being the begin­ning of the sto­ry arc), it is a ter­rif­ic sto­ry. It also cap­tures the stark atmos­phere and grit of that graph­ic nov­el. Bat­man is just a man, but one who uses peo­ples fears, some the­atrics, gad­gets, and a lit­tle stealth train­ing to fight crime. The bal­ance between vig­i­lan­tism and jus­tice is approached. There are no fan­tas­tic mutants here. Just imper­fect men who must decid­ed what means they use to attain pow­er and how they will use it. Christo­pher Nolan was giv­en the pow­er to co-write and direct a film in the Bat­man fran­chise, and he used that pow­er for good, not evil (or glow-in-the-dark motor­cy­cle thugs).