All I know is we don’t see Ra’s dead body so that leaves it wide open for him returning in some capacity.
I don’t recall seeing the figure jumping from the train the first time I saw “Batman Begins”, but afterwards I saw it mentioned on threads here on the SDMB. The second time I saw the movie was in an IMAX theater and I was keeping an eye out for it and did see it.
My point being, it was visible on the big screen but perhaps it’s more difficult to see on DVD or on a YouTube clip.
Its a comic book movie. In the comic book world, you can see his dead body, watch it ground up by a chipper shredder, have no doubt by any character that he is deader than a doornail, have the main writer at a comic book convention say “we killed him off but good - there isn’t any way anyone is bringing him back” and he can show up a year later because aliens transplanted his conciousness into a computer, his son vat grew a clone, and by extremely unlikely circumstances, the clone managed to have his conciousness reintroduced in an industrial accident. And if that doesn’t work, you just have a Crisis of the Infinite Earths and press the reset button.
Actually, what’s mildly irritating is that Batman would know. A crash doesn’t magically vaporize a body; there’d be more than enough to recognize Ra’s, and he might well be intact. Thus, Batman would soon know ehether or not his mentor survived simply by checking to see whether his body had been found. (I’m assuming that Ra’s has no magic “pretend to be dead” tricks in his back pocket.
I see the item in question - what I don’t see is anywhere in that area of the train for Ras to have made the jump.
I was very much under the impression he died. I am sure that whether or not he actually died depends on whether the producers want to bring him back or not. Given the bevy of supervillains still to be used in the reinvigorated Batman franchise, I would say the odds are, he will stay dead.
Nope. In fact, the survival rate is actually pretty good:
Batman: Joker - dies.
Batman Returns: Penguin - dies. Catwoman - survives.
Batman Forever: Two-Face - dies (well, plunged into a river). Riddler - survives.
Batman and Robin: Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, Bane - all survive.
Whether or not one counts Bane, since his performance was at best incidental, more villians survive than die.
At the very least, they don’t return in the next movie.
My WAG is because they discover that 419 scams and sundry other acts of spammery pay much better than constume-based crime sprees, with much lower overhead.
I too at least saw something leap from the train that couldn’t possibly be an ordinary piece of debris. In the iTunes version, the scene is at precisely 2:03:58. You can see something dark jump from the back side of the first half of the train. The gap between the first car and the second. What’s funny is how I never read any threads about him surviving. I didn’t think that he survived until I remembered how in the comics he comes “back to life”. So I took a closer look, and saw that split second scene. It may not be him, but directors are known to throw in bonus stuff that you wouldn’t notice unless you take a very close look. If he did survive, chances are he will be returning in “Batman 3: the dark knight rises”. And for those who say batman would check for the body and know if he was dead, that’s not legit. Didn’t you see the train exploding when it crashed into the parking lot? Even if Batman did check and didn’t find the body, he would have believed Ra’s completely obliterated by the explosion. A body couldn’t survive that… unless he jumped off before it blew up. We’ll just have to wait and see.
[Looks at the dates in the posts…]
Well, I guess Ra’s Al Ghul could return as zombie. 
I’m pretty sure he’s dead.
I’m just wondering if Harvey Two-Face will show up in Dark Victory, I mean, The Dark Knight Rises.
If it were a more conventional comic book movie, I wouldn’t bet against him. But the recent Batman movies seem to be aiming for a less fantastical mileu, so no Lazarus pits or the like.
Besides, any run of Batman movies isn’t going to go longer than a half-dozen flicks, tops, before it peters out and eventually gets rebooted. Batman’s got plenty of villains to last that long, using new villains for each movie.
He’s dead already!
Um, unless the screenwriter needs him not to be.
The thing is, even in the movie he pretty much escaped death once before. Sure it was with some more mundane means than in the comics, but that’s enough not to count him out.
Exactly - it’s more a Christopher Nolan movie than it is a Batman movie (and the second one even more so). I don’t really see Nolan descending to these kinds of lazy shortcuts.
So, it will be filmed backwards and upside down, then reversed and flipped just because?
He’s at least mostly dead.
(What? You knew someone was going to say it!)
Trapper: He got better!