Batman Begins.
June 20th, 2005 | by john |(This personal review is free of spoiler.)
The last two weeks have been crazy. It’s like two regular semester (Fall, Spring) hell weeks hitting you one after another (since Summer’s kind of squished, it makes sense but never expected it). Thankfully, I’ve had free time this weekend after catching up with all the school spectacles. With that free time, some friends and I decided to watch Batman Begins.
With not many good things to say about the last two Batman movies: Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin… I was skeptical on the entertainment value of the new one. I have to mention that there were some hype about this movie as several media outlets such as Arizona Central. It reported that Batman Begins could help revive the downward trend of Hollywood films in 2005. I read/skimmed through some of these articles a week or two ago and thought… “Well, maybe if Hollywood could release some good original movies instead of just remaking old ones or making books into movies… they wouldn’t be in such a slump!” But this is really beside the point.
Anywho, Christian Bale… I’ve only seen him previously in Equilibrium which had a bit too much action for all the most random reasons. It was definitely not one of those movies where actors and actresses can flourish in terms of… well, ‘acting’ since the characters didn’t really need to portray anything other than a hard outer shell. Bale sort of had a similar role as Batman and Bruce Wayne… but instead of being member of the upper-echelon “Grammatons” of a Utopian society, he was a 6th-Generation upper-class member of a corrupt city who decides to take the law into his own hands.
Gotham was better potrayed as a “New York City” type environment instead of the Gotham that was presented in the last two Batman flicks as a futuristic-dark-City environment you’d imagined for all hero comics. The environment looked real enough in terms of a City that really needed a good scrubbing – but who wants a hero in a sparkly clean city?
I also preferred the characters as being human with a dark-side instead of the human who was good until an accident happened to them. You also see the development of Batman as both the hero and the man (Bruce Wayne) which meant you also see the development of Batman’s ‘technology’ which is always cool to see. You also see the ‘villain’ as human with a dark-side so you don’t really know who the villain is until the second half of the film. As opposed to Two-face, Mr. Freeze, Joker, and the Penguin who all seem to have some kind of uneventful thing happened to them to turn them into weird-looking villains.
I was never into comic books so I honestly couldn’t tell you how much of this movie ties in with the original comics so I suppose hardcore Batman comic people would have opinions that shift one way or the other with that aspect of the film. But I liked how this film wasn’t a straight-forward “See villain hatch plan to take over Gotham, see Batman and XXXX stop them through confrontation.” Instead, it had multiple levels which you don’t see until the very end.
Out of everyone whose been Batman, Bale out-’Bat’ all of them. He portrayed the dark-side in Batman like you’ve never seen before as the story attempts to use fear against fear. Although it wasn’t spectacular as the media hyped this up to be, I still liked it. If anything, if you’ve seen the last two Batman flicks (or all of them minus crazy ‘we need something to do’ movie Catwoman came out to be) then you should like this film if anything for the sake of completing the Batman film quintriolgy.
