I agree with you on this. The crime boss earlier in the movie was screaming his head off, and all she was doing was sitting there looking a little freaked out. Out of all the plot holes in the movie, this was the only one that truly bothered me.
I was just damned glad it was someone other than Batman with the nipples for a change.
Great movie.
There is a credit for a Barbara Gordon. although she’s just a little girl. The movie follows Miller/Mazzuchelli’s Batman Year One in quite a few ways.
Other touches from the comics I noticed…
*Szasz: You can actually see his trademark scars poking out from under his prison oranges (He notches a scar onto his body for each kill)
*Underground Railroad: I remember seeing this featured in the comics, as Batman had to solve a century-old mystery concerning one of his ancestors.
Wayne Corp Surplus: I’ve seem this in a comic story, too. Batman building his arsenal from “misplaced” WayneCorp prototypes.
*Ducard: This really threw me, because Ducard is a character from the comics. He’s a French manhunter/assassin and one of the men Bruce Wayne studied extensively under while wandering the world as a young man.
That didn’t bother me, since it’s actually pretty plausible. Just in terms of bad drug experiences, it’s remarkable how calming a reassuring voice reminding the person that they’ve been dosed can be. Armed with that, and knowing that the terrors she saw earlier weren’t real, why should she trust her senses about the ride? The driver seemed calm, after all. They couldn’t really be travelling at 150MPH down the wrong side of the highway any more than maggots could pour out of a screaming Scarecrow’s eye sockets. 
La la la.
Besides, she was slipping into catatonia, anyway.
narrowly avoids taking an easy shot at Katie Holmes’ acting
Perhaps because Spiderman was the first superhero movie I ever watched? Yes, you are right here, I did claim that Spiderman did establish the template. My bad. Maybe I shalln’t have used the word ‘established’, but more like ‘employed’. Must be more careful with my choice of word :smack:
Eats word
Well, I shelled out the $16 American to see it at the big theater yesterday, and I must say I’m really impressed. I too liked this better than the Tim Burton versions. The way I see it, this version of Gotham and the Batman shares the dark tone, but is more realistic than the Burton Gotham. The Gotham of Batman Begins could plausibly exist in the real world. Burton’s Gotham would be somewhat of a stretch. (Schumacher’s Gotham…no.)
One interesting and classy thing in relation to watching this movie in Japan: You may be aware that a couple of months ago, there was a horrific train accident near Osaka, in which a train derailed and crashed into a building. The producers and director wrote up a statement that was posted (in Japanese), stating that there was a scene in the movie that was reminiscent of this, and that said scene was written and shot long before the accident. Then they went ahead and apologized anyway, and expressed sympathy for the victims. Nice.
Breaking news: Katie Holmes not coming back for sequels:
Ouch.
Although I did hear Warners is working on a side deal for her nipples to cameo.
–Cliffy
I was in high school when Burton came out with his genre-redefining version of Batman. Superhero movies had become so uncool at that point, it seemed like there would never be another one again. Burton’s *Batman * changed all that in a fundamental way, and this version is reaping the benefits. I still will always like Nicholson as the best supervillian ever. Outside of that, I think Batman Begins beats Burton’s Batman on every level (alliteration unintentional, but not avoided.)
I agree with most of the general consensus here (Holmes was fun to look at but lousy in all other aspects, the technology was great, etc.) A couple of unique points:
- I read on IMDB that Ra’s al Ghul was the traditional name of the leader of the League of Assasins, way back during the crusades. Dunno if this is true, but it certainly makes the “League of Shadows” (or whatever it was) more interesting from a historical perspective. It also leads into my next point:
- A lot of folks in this thread are fixating on the whole “Batman as a Ninja” aspect. My take was that Ninja skills were simply one of the areas of study in Bruce Wayne’s training. It looked like he was also learning other styles of fighting/surviving. The Ninja fixation seems unwarranted to me. Maybe one of the fans of the comic can chime in here.
- I remember reading Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns back in the day. I quit reading comics shortly thereafter, but wished they would make a Batman movie that filled out that vision. It seems to me they finally did with this one.
- I liked that this movie was about Bruce Wayne and not Batman. Batman is simply an aspect of Bruce Wayne’s personality.
[movie producer]
Nah. Everyday a newer, harder set of nipples gets off the bus and wants to be a star!
[/movie producer]
I agree with this. In fact, before Wayne ever met the League of Shadows, he apparently had already picked up extensive martial arts training. When he and Ducard are sparing, just after Wayne’s climbed the mountain with the flower, you can see him assuming various martial arts forms. Ducard names them as he assumes them, then defeats them. (“Jujitsu!” Smack, punch, crash. “Tiger claw!” Whack, thud, crunch) The implication, to me, was that Ducard knew all the martial arts Bruce knew, and how to defeat them. Ducard’s training regime improved his pre-exsisting skills, and emphasized the importance of stealth and psychological warfare (ninjutsu), which Wayne has never incorporated before.
Also, don’t forget Bruce was able to take on all those guys in the prison with no help at all. That shows he already had fighting skills.
Katie Holmes not returning for a sequel works for a couple of reasons. Obviously, it’s a good thing because she was pretty weak – but she can also be unceremoniously dropped for fairly subtle character reasons.
I briefly mentioned the Jungian thing in my OP – I’ve been trying real hard not to babble about it too much — but… The way the script is written, Batman is presented pretty much as a Jungian set-piece – and the whole thing with Rachel is an anima projection dealy. Bruce is infatuated with her because he sees her as an idealization of a bunch of lofty ideals. (Merciful justice, righteousness, etc.) Part of his growth process is realizing that he’s projecting an image onto her that isn’t necessarily objective – it’s an externalization of internal qualities. Rachel’s not the real deal.
Batman Begins was mostly about Bruce’s “shadow work” – acknowledging and assimilating the buried parts of the personality that are feared and rejected. Jung said that this is pretty much a cakewalk, compared with confronting the anima. So far we’ve seen the first two stages of Bruce’s anima development. The momma bit and the idealized, aesthetic love bit.
If everything proceeds according to precedent, the sequel should have a hypersexualized, gonadal love interest.
“Awwwwwwwwwwriight. Giggidy, giggidy, gig-gi-dy!” [/Quagmire]
Just got back from the theater. Man, I enjoyed this movie.
First, some random off-topic thoughts:
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Shame about the title. Clearly Warner Bros. hopes to reboot the film franchise, and this movie establishes an origin for Batman entirely distinct from Tim Burton’s movie, so why not start completely fresh and just call it “Batman”? It’s been 16 years since Burton’s version, and it wasn’t that much longer between his film and the Adam West movie. For that matter, it was also about two decades between the West “Batman” and the Lewis Wilson “Batman” of 1943. 16 years seems like a reasonable elapsed time between film cycles, so why confuse the issue by tacking on a “-Begins” as though this were some sort of prequel to the Burton films (shudder) or the ones that followed (twitch)?
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Warner Bros. really needs to give whoever designed the movie posters for this movie a good beating. The two ads on display in my local theater lobby are remarkable for their aggressive blandness, betraying no hint whatsoever of the impressive visuals of the film itself, and were probably responsible (at least in part) for me waiting almost a week before buying a ticket. It’s quite a trick to make Batman look boring, but these guys succeeded in spades. For the record, the posters in question were “What did I just step in?”, and “Healthy Bat-relationship.”
(What the hell is supposed to be going on in that last poster? It’s like he’s the Frankenstein monster or something.)
Any hoo. On to the movie:
I generally have nothing but scorn for people who forgive gaping idiocies in movies with the excuse, “Oh, it’s just a movie! Don’t think too much about it, just sit back and enjoy it!” Darn it, I like to think about the movies I watch! Yet, strangely, this film worked for me despite being chock full of barely disguised goofiness. The plot seemed like a Pointillist image (or a four-color comic panel, for that matter), in that none of the individual elements can withstand close scrutiny yet they combine to form a complete and satisfying experience. I enjoyed the film much more when I stopped trying to work out the details.
This movie worked hard to answer questions about just why Batman does what he does, pointing out the line the character walks between justice and revenge and the limitations he sets for himself: elements that the earlier films tended to ignore or gloss over. Against that background, the question of whether a microwave weapon would fry its operator before vaporizing liquid water, or the plausibility of a corporate sub-basement full of forgotten military prototypes, is maybe not so important this time around.
I will admit, however, that the writers could have probably worked a little harder to come up with a slightly more believable doomsday weapon. Even if I accept the movie’s assertion that this microwave device can turn water to steam in pipes without affecting living organisms, the stated justification for the gadget makes absolutely no sense even in comic-book terms. What good is a device that can boil away an enemy’s water supply, if it has to be right next to the supply in order to do it? How did this thing even get off the drawing board?
For that matter, it’s probably best not to think about the hundreds of engineers and technicians who worked on the prototype Batmobile, and hence would recognize it immediately from all that news footage. “Hey, that looks just like the experimental vehicle I spent six years designing for WayneCorp…oh, but it’s painted black. Never mind.” At least he could have welded some bat wings or something onto it to disguise the outline…but these are trifles.
Overall, I think the generally realistic tone of the film probably helped more than hindered it. It was refreshing to see a Gotham City that, while slightly fantastical in some respects, could actually exist outside of a movie or theme park. Batman’s appearance is much more startling when every building isn’t a giant baroque funhouse/cathedral/haunted mansion. It was also nice to see the emphasis on Gotham as a haven for *corruption, * as well as street crime.
Hollywood finally seems to be noticing that movies about superheroes are more successful when the idea itself isn’t played for laughs. I think we have Sam Raimi to thank for driving that bit of wisdom home. It’s a pleasant surprise to finally see a movie featuring Batman that isn’t awash in ironic self-mockery.
Other thoughts:
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This movie had more intentional laughs than any other recent Batman movie I’ve seen.
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The character of Lucius Fox has been waiting years for Morgan Freeman to play him.
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Only Michael Caine could successfully portray the ultra-proper Alfred the Butler with a cheeky Cockney accent.
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Finally, a (quasi-)reasonable justification for why Gotham City is infested with the criminally insane!
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I was utterly and completely faked out by the whole Ken Watanabe switcheroo. What a great twist. I’m also endlessly grateful that I didn’t have to see Liam Neeson in a green slit-to-the-navel Elvis jumpsuit.
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Hey, that’s Rutger Hauer!
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Speaking of, I must have missed a few lines somewhere. Although the movie seemed to be implying that Rutger’s CEO character was unscrupulous and slimy, I really didn’t pick up a huge amount of evidence to support that. The guy kept the company afloat for nearly two decades, and as far as I could tell, his major crime was lobbying to take the company public some years after the last Wayne heir had been declared legally dead. Yes, he did peremptorily fire Lucius Fox because of the microwave gadget, but is that really so unreasonable either? Was some huge revelation made about the CEO’s criminal connections while I was out in the men’s room? (Curse you, giant-size Diet Coke!) Anyway, the guy probably had a huge severance package written into his contract. And since Bruce Wayne is such a nototorious wacko, what with disappearing for years and burning down his mansion and hiring the guy from the basement to run his company and all, being fired by him probably didn’t hurt Rutger’s job prospects in the slightest. He’s probably doing all right.
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Gary Oldman: I forgive you for Lost in Space.
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I spent a fair amount of the movie trying to figure out what Katie Holmes’ character was supposed to be doing. She just seemed so out of place, especially considering the care with which the other plot threads seemed to be fitted together. Part of that was probably my fault, since I kept expecting Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter from the comics to make an appearance, and couldn’t get it through my head that Katie was, indeed, supposed to be the big love interest for this movie. Possibly she was written in as a point of identification for the women who attended the movie to ogle Christian Bale, since she is the only woman in the entire film with more than seventeen seconds of screen time. Other than her, I can only remember Bruce Wayne’s mom–she had a line, right?–Rutger Hauer’s secretary, and the alcohol-fueled harridan who tried to introduce Ra’s to Bruce at the mansion. (Evidently, in Gotham society circles, it’s customary to invite people whom you don’t know to your own birthday party. Either that, or Ra’s and his posse managed to get themselves inside by acting as the booze hag’s male escorts.)
I prefer to think that Katie Holmes was simply there as a peace offering from Warner Bros. to Batman fans everywhere: *“Thank you so much for attending this new movie. Let’s put the past behind us, shall we? Please, accept our offering of these nipples. Notice how they’re attached to a woman this time, and not on Batman at all? We’re so dreadfully, dreadfully sorry.” *
It was probably orginally designed as a giant microwave before the Pentagon big wigs got their hands on it.
I’ve read a lot of thoughts on Katie’s badness and nipples. The latter, I, unfortunately, missed mostly (I remember the last scene). The former, I honestly can’t think of an actress that’s the right age who would not be out-shown by the likes of Freeman and Caine.
I just wanted to point out that I thought it was really cool that they included Qui-Gon in this movie, and revealed that Qui-Gon was actually a bad guy. I just realized that also means Bruce Wayne was receiving Sith training, not Ninja training. (That should make everyone happy.)
Think about it, it makes sense. If Qui-Gon/Ra’s al Ghul is a Sith, it explains why he later chose Annikan as a padwan. Qui-Gon knew that Annikan would turn to the dark side. Those crafty. crafty Sith!
Eventually, Batman will evolve his technology to the point where Fox creates him an actual, workable lightsaber. Okay, I’ll stop now.
How does an Irish actor end up playing characters with names like “Qui-Gon Jinn” and “Ra’s al Ghul”?? Go slam some Guiness and chomp some Lucky Charms, Ra’s al Ghul, ya bastard!
Scarlett Johansen.
I’m with you man. I saw the whole (awesome) movie and kept waiting for him to be evil. Iknew from the moment I saw him he was gonna get fired, but I couldn’t figure out why. He never did anything that your average CEO wouldn’t do. Maybe Bruce just didn’t like the cut of his jib, or whatever.