Just pretend all those other Bat-movies never happened.
Batman's image in popular culture has been dominated in the last 40 years by the ZAP! POW! Adam West incarnation from the 1960s television show. While that version of the character has its charms, it misses the mark when it comes to the essence of the original dark, archetypal figure. The real Batman, created by Bob Kane in 1939,
***image1***
is a brooding man, a living embodiment of fear and vengeance.
Batman Begins
director Christopher Nolan (
Memento
) and writer David S Goyer (
Blade
) clearly have done their homework.
This latest incarnation gets at the core of the character like never before, disregarding all previous film and television projects by going deep into Bruce Wayne's (Christian Bale) motivation for donning the cape and cowl. After his parents are murdered, Wayne grows up guilty and angry over their deaths, helpless to avenge them. As an adult he drifts around the world, ending up in a prison in the Far East and bumping into Ducard (Liam Neeson), a mysterious man offering to train him to fight crime in a dynamic lifted from the classic Kung Fu movie plot. When he returns to crime-riddled Gotham, Wayne enlists the help of his trusty butler Alfred (Michael Caine), weapons maker Lucius (Morgan Freeman) and the only honest cop in Gotham-Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman)-to wage his one-man war on crime, and his attempt to put the ghosts of his parents to rest.
Nolan takes the long way when explaining the "why" of the character, but once the motivations are thoroughly revealed, the "how" is explored quickly and the film begins to gain momentum at an unbelievable pace. Wayne taps into his family's vast fortune to arm himself and begins to tear down the city's underworld, lorded over by Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). But it wouldn't be Batman without supervillains as well-two nasty freaks, Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) and Ra's al Ghul, (Ken Watanabe) team up to bring the city to its knees. Of course, only Batman can stop them.
Nolan treats each frame with an overriding sense of creepiness, playing up the "creature of the night" aspect of Batman. After exposure to the Scarecrow's hallucinogenic gas-which, in
***image2***
classic comic book fashion, threatens the city's water supply-Batman appears as a red-eyed monster hovering over the streets of the city and preying on people below. It's a far cry from ZAP! POW!
Bale's Batman is more ferocious than we've seen before and moves with speed and agility absent from previous Bat-suits. As Bruce Wayne he perfectly embodies the pompous, womanizing playboy that serves as cover for his alter ego.
The supporting cast-always an essential part of the Bat-mythos-works well together, but Katie Holmes, as love interest Rachel Dawes, is the weak link. Holmes is given the worst of the dialogue and seems small amidst the vastness of the project as a whole.
Nolan and Goyer give plenty of knowing nods to fans of the comics but never bog the project down for pesky continuity with previous pictures. Batman is already a franchise, but if future film follow-ups are anything like this, Bat-fans will have something to look forward to for a long time.
