Batman Begins

Batman Begins is the best live-action Batman movie ever made. Even better than the Tim Burton original, which I loved when it first came out.

For the first time, Gotham City feels like a real, living, breathing place inhabited by actual people. It's neither Burton's gothic wonderland nor is it Schumacher's neon paradise, this Gotham City has soaring skylines but it also has rotting slums. It has character.

Everyone who saw Christian Bale in Equilibrium and thought "Wow, this guy would make the perfect Batman" and then gasped in amazement when he actually got cast in the role can now smile smugly. Yes, you were all right. Christian Bale makes an awesome Batman. Even better, he makes an awesome Bruce Wayne. This is a movie about Bruce Wayne creating his Batman persona and I can think of no other actor who could pull it off as well as Bale did here.

I won't go into the details of what makes the movie so good- you've all probably read it elsewhere or watched the movie yourselves. So we all know, or at least, have a rough idea, of how good this movie is. What I'm going to talk about is what I didn't really like about the movie.

*Here Be Spoilers.*Don't read on, those who haven't seen the film.

See, when I walked out of the movie theatre after watching the movie, there were two thoughts in my head. One was, "Oh my god, I can't believe how cool they made Batman!" The second was, "And yet, why am I slightly... disappointed...?"

Well I've had almost a month to think it over and I've come to realise exactly what it was that disappointed me so much.

It wasn't Katie Holms as Bruce Wayne's would-be love interest. Sure that whole plot thread is kind of tacky, but I can live with it.

It wasn't really the lack of good action sequences, either.

I thought the training sequences were serviceable, though they COULD have hired a stunt director from Hong Kong to jazz them up. Batman's first attack on Falcone's gang, shot like a horror-movie, with Batman flitting in and out of shadows to take out men indiviually, was really cool and original. The chase scenes with the Batmobile were kind of boring though. Well, not so much boring as unnecessary. One gets the feeling there are chase scenes because a Hollywood summer blockbuster MUST have chase scenes.

Batman's fight scenes... are just plain lousy. Choppily edited to the point where you have no idea what's going on until finally Batman's standing in front of a pile of groaning hench-men. That's a bit unimpressive in this day and age. Don't tell me it's because Batman's suit doesn't give Christian Bale freedom of movement, either. Hello, this is the age of CGI! CGI let Keanu Reeves fight off a hundred men while dressed up in a full-length gown in the Matrix Reloaded. Why couldn't Warner Brothers hire their Matrix CGI team to create a CGI Batman and make some really impressive fight scenes?

I mean, he doesn't need to be inhumanly strong or fly or anything like that, but he shouldn't be completely inflexible and ungainly either. The movie drives the point home that Batman strikes from the shadows and uses stealth and illusion to defeat his opponents. OK, but that doesn't mean he can't be fluid and graceful. In the comic books, he's supposed to be the world's greatest martial artist. Can't we have a movie that shows off that side of him just for once?

But that's really a minor niggle compared to my real beef with the movie. See, the real problem with this movie is Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2.

Huh? What?

Stick with me here. You see, Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 both featured great villains. Sure, the Green Goblin's costume kind of sucked, but as a villain he was superb. His development as a villain was a great counterpoint to Spider-Man's development as a hero. His story is inextricable from Spider-Man's. It was all linked thematically and fit in beautifully.

Then came Spider-Man 2, which raised the bar so high that it doesn't look like anyone else'll overleap it for quite some time. Doctor Octopus is probably the greatest comic-book villain put to film. And once again, he's completely relevant to Peter Parker's story in the movie. He's not just some villain tossed into the script so that Spider-Man has someone to fight. Not at all. Before he becomes a villain, he's Doctor Otto Octavius, brilliant scientist and loving husband. The kind of man that Peter Parker wants to be, but can't, because he has to be Spider-Man. Then a tragedy occurs, his wife dies, he goes insane and becomes the villainous Doctor Octopus. In Doctor Octopus, we have a villain who's fully-fleshed out, with a backstory and motivations and even a character arc that goes full circle and ends with his redemption.

Well I think you can see where I'm going with this. Yes, the villains in Batman Begins suck. They really suck. Well, the mob boss Falcone is suitably sinister and impressive in an early flashback sequence but the filmmakers let Batman take him out in his very first outing as Batman. I think that was a really bad decision on their part- not only does it make Batman seem a little too powerful at this early stage in his career, but it also completely destroys any possibility of using Falcone as a credible villain. A mob boss doesn't need a backstory, unlike Spider-Man's villains. He's a mob boss. Everyone gets mob bosses. All he needed to do was physically embody the crime and corruption of Gotham, a symbol of all that's gone wrong with the city since the death of Bruce Wayne's parents. A truly amazing movie could've been made focusing on Batman's efforts to slowly and methodically take down this man.

Instead somebody made the bone-headed decision of turning the last third of the movie into a standard Hollywood action movie- complete with supposedly cunning and powerful villains who do incredibly stupid things.

I'm talking specifically about Ra's Al Ghul here. He initially cuts an impressive figure when he returns to Gotham. The revelation of his true identity is well-played out. But his masterplan to destroy Gotham is beyond ridiculous. I mean, its the kind of thing that the Scarecrow, who's in this movie but is oddly enough reduced to a bit part, might come up with. And he has nothing but the rather vague and fuzzy motivation of "Gotham City's full of crime and corruption. It sucks. So we need to destroy it." Riiiiight. So why not just nuke the whole place? Sheesh.

Given Ra's Al Ghul's history in the comic books as the only villain who can actually match wits with Batman, the Professor Moriarty to Batman's Sherlock Holmes, treating him this way in the movie is just disrespectful, really.

Well that's all I have to say about that. The movie's good, but falls short of greatness. And with the talented team that Warner Brothers assembled to make this movie, that's a bit unacceptable.

Well, despite my reservations about the movie, I have to say I really enjoyed watching the movie and I have high hopes for the next one. The bit at the end setting up the Joker as the villain for the next movie is positively spinge-tingling. Hopefully in the next one they sort out what was wrong with this movie , improve what was right and deliver the kind of masterpiece Batman deserves.

My final verdict: 8 out of 10.