directed by Christopher Nolan
screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
story by David S. Goyer
based on characters created by Bob Kane
141 min.
Ugh. I try to be careful about which “big” movies I spend money and time on, but this one had been so well reviewed! And yet.
I don’t feel like faking a coordinated line of argument here. In summary: the movie’s flaw was that it was made out of junk. So I’m just going to mention some of the junk.
Thought is for those who think. This phrase occurred to me while being annoyed by tons of irritating “dark” pseudo-thought. A typical “serious” superhero-comic trick is to employ concepts like “honor” and “justice” and “the self” as though they are sacred, overwhelming, and difficult – and thus worthy of totally cool visuals! – but not to have any consistent attitude toward these things, and in fact to freely change their definitions from scene to scene so as to allow a continuous stream of these effects.
To give away the first part of the movie, as a demonstration of its total lack of interest in having a point: Bruce Wayne learns a bunch of ninja-type wisdom from a bunch of ninja-types who encourage him to use fear as power, by first conquering his own fears. Then the ninja-types turn out to be crazies who want to destroy Gotham City in the name of cleansing human culture. The turning point is when the ninja-types ask Bruce to show his dedication by killing an imprisoned murderer. Bruce says no, that he will fight for justice but will not be an executioner. Then, because he has realized that these ninja-types are bad guys, he BURNS DOWN THE BUILDING KILLING EVERYONE (presumably including the murderer). Then he goes on to become Batman, following the philosophy of the crazy bad ninja-types. They later show up with a plan based on using fear as power which Batman must stop because it is evil.
Making a confusion stew out of “philosophy” is easy. Then just hang black billowing drapes all over it and give everyone stony expressions. Brilliant!
The fight scenes looked like murky confusing crap to me. This seems to be a trend in movies today. Maybe it just reflects that I am getting out of touch with the acceptable speed of editing, but I think in this case it was due to crap.
Number of times that someone cleverly repeats someone else’s line from earlier in the movie back at them in a different context: I think eight.
I’m getting tired of this “making of a legend” stuff, like “ooh, so that’s how he found the bat cave! ooh, so that’s how he found the batmobile!” That’s all well and good for something jokey like Young Sherlock Holmes, which lives well outside the actual reputation-making canon of Sherlock Holmes himself, but I feel like a Batman movie would do better to spend its time demonstrating why Batman is a character worthy of legend and not just some comic book schlock. That’s snotty of me – it was, after all, called Batman Begins, and his reputation is pretty darn well-established. But fleshing out a sketchy character shouldn’t mean fleshing out the history of his costume. It was cute in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, because it was put where it belongs, as a throwaway at the very beginning. It was a cute in Spider-Man, but mostly because it had a punchline. I don’t need to see that stuff anymore. “Origin story” shouldn’t have to mean the nerdy game of finding justifications for the absurd details.
I HATE mindless movie “jokes” wherein someone comments earthily on how remarkable the premises of the movie are. E.g. the Batmobile appears and CGI drives over a bunch of police cars, and then the guy watching says “I have got to get me one of those!” Oy. This movie had that joke relentlessly.
Also, in general, if you have a movie that’s all about a kid who rides on a flying artichoke, it is lazy and irritating to include a bewildered policeman talking into his radio saying “Well, it looks a kid…but he’s RIDING ON A FLYING ARTICHOKE!” This movie had the bewildered policemen in it, frequently.
Both of these quasi-jokes try to get mileage out of the audience feeling like, “yeah, we’re all on Batman’s team but you’re not, silly rabbit, so we feel pretty darn good about ourselves when you envy him, or are astounded by him.” Total bottom of the barrel tactics, appealing to our desire to feel superior to outsiders. Yes, that’s really how I see it.
The second part of the movie revolves around a plot to activate a powerful microwave emitter that vaporizes all water in the vicinity. It turns out only to affect water in pipes; people are unharmed by it. I’m not one to complain about scientific errors in stupid movies, but even as comic book pseudo-science, this is no good, because the idea that a microwave oven can be deadly is something people ENJOY knowing. Urban legends about exploding cats and everyday paranoia about standing too close to the microwave oven are commonplace. You should build your pseudo-science in keeping with stuff like that, not against it!
Michael Caine just sells his “well, sir, I’m Michael Caine” act to any movie that has use for it, doesn’t he. Ditto Morgan Freeman. When their two characters had a brief exchange, it felt for a moment like we might have entered some movie-neutral zone from which we could enter ANY OTHER MOVIE. Katie Holmes smirks whenever she needs to look thoughtful and I’ll bet she does that in real life too; it’s not a bad trick for reality, though it’s weak for movies. Christian Bale has the right quality for this role, which is to say he barely registers as a personality, only as a set of traits. Tom Wilkinson is very reliable at making something out of his time onscreen and I always enjoy watching him. Gary Oldman might as well have been a non-name actor. The Scarecrow guy was doing some cheesy stuff throughout, but given the nature of his role it was actually pretty well handled. Liam Neeson delivered his lines very much as he did in The Phantom Menace, so I was imagining that he didn’t think much of the movie, but maybe I was just projecting. I’m not sure he’s as good and serious an actor as you might be led to believe by his demeanor.
Many scenes called to mind the movie that Adaptation becomes in its last act – a reasonably well-made version of a soulless, hacky script, an assemblage of complete phoniness. This was a Donald movie.
The music, oddly, was a collaboration between Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard and managed to be utterly trashy in the extreme. Hans Zimmer’s beloved pounding drums set the tone for pretty much every scene. I think James Newton Howard sometimes has a nice touch but it wasn’t in evidence here at all.
Why does the water not affect people when they breath it in the form of shower vapor?
As far as fake science goes, I find that an acceptable aspect of the nonsense. In the film, we see people being sprayed with the poison gas, and it’s always an intense burst in the face of cloudy, steamy stuff. Intuitively, it makes sense that one is not, in ordinary life, confronted with that kind of thing – that it would take some sort of unprecedented event to convert ordinary water into something so aggressive as the poison gas we see. To be bothered by the example of shower vapor, you’d have to intentionally bring a rational and evaluative attitude to the science of the plot, which is obviously inappropriate. All I’m saying is that if you bring the concept of a “microwave weapon” into play, you ought to acknowledge the threat that implies, and this movie doesn’t. All they had to do was put in an exchange like: “Microwave, eh? So this thing’s gonna turn the city into a giant oven?” “No, this device was specifically designed to safely vaporize large bodies of water – it couldn’t cook a hot dog. That’s why it’s so strange that it was stolen – what could they possibly be planning?” That would have satisfied me.
Why did no one IN ALL OF GOTHAM AND ENVIRONS remember that there was this giant cave under the house when half the mansion supports were built down into it? It should have been local lore for years. Did they kill all the workers way back then so they wouldn’t tell?
How could he have fallen into a well that had a HUGE HOLE in the bottom that led to the bat cave? How could it ever have been a well, holding water in it? Water usually flows DOWN into a well.
So that troupe of Neeson-followers have been destroying modern-day Sodom’s for hundreds (thousands?) of years? And no one anywhere in the world ever suspected that something funny was up? (Yeah, where are the conspiracy theorists when you need them?)
Lots and lots of sword play with….. one….. scratch.
You don’t build a tank with pneumatic tires. Even really really good ones.
He lived, oh, 5 minutes outside Gotham, yet he had, oh, a square mile of beautiful green pastureland all around his mansion, with no city or suburbs in sight.
When you fall 10 stories, you get BROKEN and DIE. You don’t get a few purple marks on your arms.
A group of vigilantes, on top of a mountain in China, care about GOTHAM, USA? (He sees you when you’re sleeping…..) Do they have meetings to decide which city has crossed the threshold? What are the quantitative criteria?
OK. This is too easy