Summer Movie Round-Up Part 2: Batman Begins
Posted by 7th on September 26, 2005

Set the Wayback Machine to the summer of 1977. Star Wars, a film that was not believed in, for the most part, by the studio that bankrolled it, is released to tremendous success, smashing box office records around the world and keeping people lined around theaters for weeks.

Up until this time, the summer was a dead time for movies due to most people taking advantage of the outdoor activities one doesn't tend to do during winter time, like having sex on state park picnic tables.

Having a film come out in the summer and not only do well, but become the highest grossing film of all time (for a while, anyway) made Hollywood stand up and take notice. Prior to Star Wars, movies during the summer time tended to be low budget dramas and kiddie films. This new revelation that there was an audience, and a tremendously large one, during the summer time changed everything forever.

But it was a slow change. I don't really remember the "Summer Movie" rush really taking full effect until the summer of 1984, when we were hit with Gremlins, Ghostbusters, The Last Starfighter, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Romancing The Stone, and Beverly Hills Cop, among others. From then on out, every summer was clogged with big budget popcorn films.

Even then, going to see a movie was a very special event in my house. My dad had a thing about being in a dark, enclosed room surrounded by people he couldn't see. So we only went to movies when it was something that was considered a must-see, or on special occasions, like my birthday, or the last day before school started. This is why I can remember going to see so many movies of that era: Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, Superman, Superman II, hell, even Flash Gordon.

I remember them because they meant something. Or at least, they did back then.

This changed, at least for me, in the summer of 1989. This was one of the biggest summers ever: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, The Abyss, Ghostbusters II, Field of Dreams... and a little indie film called Batman.

I distinctly recall that they'd been throwing teaser trailers up for this film for months. I can remember reading articles about it starring Michael Keaton, a comedian, as Batman. What a ridiculous notion! Mr. Mom as the Dark Knight, indeed! Most critics predicted its doom on that fact alone, much less that it was directed by Tim Burton, known for quirky cult classics like Frankenweenie, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, and Beetlejuice.

After much debate, it was decided that we would venture out, as a family, to see this upstart film. This was the summer before I began my freshman year of high school, so I had a lot of friends that I could have gone to see it with, older friends who had licenses, but for some reason, I reserved this one as a flick to see with Mom and Dad. I'd gone to see every film released that summer, a first for me, because for the first time, I had a way to go see them without my parents taking me. Whether it was with my cousins, or my friend Will and his mom, or my neighbor Donnis, I caught all the big movies that summer, except for Batman.

When we got to the Hamilton Place Mall theater, we were in for quite a shock. It was opening night, and the entire theater lobby was packed. The mob (for there was no discernable line) stretched halfway back through the food court. We got in line somewhere around the Taco Bell, and waited.

And we waited.

And we waited some more.

About 90 minutes later, we had our tickets, and took our seats, cokes and popcorn in hand. The theater was packed with wall-to-wall humanity. We managed to find seats, but everyone who came in after us was sitting in the aisles (something that's now disallowed by the fire code, but apparently some nimrod in the ticket booth over sold the thing.)

What followed was, for me, the best comic book movie I'd ever seen. The action was heavy, the mood dark, the actors completely over the top, the FX were amazing (for its day) and the score was the kind that just got stuck in your head and refused to leave.

But what I remember most about it was listening to my dad laugh. He laughed more in that movie than I'd ever heard him laugh before, short of the time that we went to a character breakfast at Disney World (in the Empress Lilly, now known as Fulton's Crab House) and Pluto nearly tickled him into a heart attack.

He particularly lost it during the infamous "I'm glad you're dead!" scene, his laughter pouring out of him until he lost his breath, sitting there in the dark, red-faced and grinning.

The only time I can think of that he enjoyed a movie going experience more had nothing to do with the film itself.

We were visiting my aunt in Florida, and decided to take in a flick. We went to see Lethal Weapon 2. As we were sitting there, watching Mel and Danny prove they aren't too old for this shit, several young ghetto fabulous individuals poured into the theater late and surrounded us.

They immediately started yelling and cursing at the screen, throwing shit, basically making asses of themselves.

After about 15 minutes of it, I heard my dad mutter "I've had about enough of this," and I froze, thinking he was about to lay into the lot of them. Instead, he leaned over slightly in a mannerism I'd become all-too-familiar with, and sighed contentedly.

Shortly thereafter, an incredibly repugnant stench filled the theater. The guy sitting next to me said "Daaymn, man, was that you?!" to his buddy.

His friend muttered "Fuck no! I think it was that kid sitting next to you."

I looked over without blinking an eye and said "I didn't do shit."

My dad, to his credit, stayed quiet, a slight grin on his face.

The angry group stood up, muttering about how much white people stink, and moved down to the front of the theater. A few seconds later, the one who'd blamed it on me said "God-DAMN, it's down here too!"

They all got up and left, and my father burst out laughing, spraying coke onto the head of the old lady sitting in front of him. He laughed so hard, he had to get up and leave the theater.

When he finally came back, he sat down, looked at me, and winked.

He often recounted that story, as if it were some desparate act of gunplay he undertook to take down a crime ring, complete with dialogue and sound effects.

But I digress.

Batman was the last time I can remember seeing a movie with my Dad and really enjoying it. I'd overdone it, you see. By taking in every movie that came out, I'd robbed the event of its special quality. It was no longer an occasional event: it had become a weekly ritual. A year or two after I graduated high school, my dad stopped going to movies altogether (I think the last one he ever went to see was Congo, and he went to see it with Mom.) The fun had gone out of it for him too. But not because the occasion had grown blaise. He claimed he lost interest because being in a dark room just made him fall asleep and miss the movie. I think it was because I wasn't with him as much as I had been.

So this past summer, I found myself going to a new Batman film, one promising to reinvent the comic book film genre and give it serious credibility (as if it had never had credibility with me before. For Christ's sakes, one of my all time favorite movies is Super Fuzz.)

It's no secret that the sequels to Tim Burton's original Batman vision tarred its image in black, black sludge that stank of not-niceness, particularly the last two films, directed with a particularly gay flourish by infamous homosexual director
Joel Schumacher. The latter of the two, Batman and Robin, seemed to place the nail in the coffin on the franchise with it's way over the top antics that seemed to be taken more from the TV show of the 60's than from Frank Miler's graphic novel. Having Ahnold as Mr. Freeze didn't help matters either, and effectively killed his career as a big name action star. Come to think of it, I suppose you could say that was one positive effect the film had on the movie industry.

So here comes upstart director Chistopher Nolan, the mastermind behind films like Memento and Insomnia, serious crime dramas with gritty characters and interesting plot twists. The going story was that he planned to turn Batman into a serious, dark and foreboding drama, to give the character real depth, and bring the idea of the comic book film a new level of class. Did he succeed?

Read on.

Batman Begins is an apt, if not slightly annoying title, for the movie begins at the beginning of Bruce Wayne's tale. As muchas the original Batman was an origin film of sorts, this movie takes it back even further, not only showing us the death of Wayne's parents, but the way he dealt with it.

Wayne is tortured by their death, and the lawlessness of it. As opposed to Burton's vision, where the character of the Joker was remade into Jack Napier, a career gangster who killed Wayne's parents in his youth, this killer is a simple bum, who accidentally shoots Mr. Wayne while trying to rob them for drug money.

Considerable screen time is given here to the kind of man bruce's father was, much more than in any of the previous films. It really gives his senseless death resonance. We care more about Bruce's loss, because his father seems like such a good person, someone we'd be proud to know.

We also see the event that would later shape Bruce's choice of image, the infamous fall into the iunderground cavern beneath Wayne Manor that eventually becomes the Bat Cave. We didn't see this event in Burton's film. In fact, it wasn't even referenced at all until the third film in thet franchise, Batman Forever with Val Kilmer. Here, we see the real terror in the child's eyes as he's surrounded by bats. We see his haunted nightmares many nights afterwards. His gripping fear of these winged denizens of the night is brought into stark detail, and given the importance it should have always had.

So it finally comes to pass that the bum responsible for the Wayne's death is arrested and put on trial. Bruce is a young man now, in college, but still adrift inside as a person, a shell of a man. He tries to assassinate his parents' killer, but in the end, he doesn't have it in him. So he flees to Asia, where he runs into a sort of crime-fighting ninja cult run by a man named Ras Al Ghul, played in this film by Ken Watanabe (who scarcely has any lines and is criminally under used here, especially after his Oscar-worthy performance in The Last Samurai.) His right hand man is played by Liam Neeson, who finds Bruce, brings him into the fold, and teaches him to be the ultimate weapon for good... then shares his plans to completely destroy Gotham City and everyone in it. (We later learn that Neeson is the real Ras Al Ghul, and that Watanabe's performance is even less needed, as he was merely the figurehead behind which Neeson plotted his schemes.)

Watching Bruce's face is akin to the reaction you might have after going out on a perfect blind date, and topping off the evening by going home to her apartment, reaching under her skirt, and grabbing ahold of a giant dick.

Bruce reacts like many of us would to that situation. He burns the damn building down and kills everyone inside, except for Neeson, whom he dumps off on the next street corner (again, it all fits perfectly with the "went on a date with a dude" theorem, doesn't it.) He then flees back to Gotham, determined to destroy evil from the inside out, rather than taking Neeson's approach.

He begins to formulate plans. He moves back into Wayne Manor and re-unites with Alfred, the family butler. He takes back control of his father's company, (from a very under-used Rutger Hauer) and consults with their research and development guru Lucious Fox (a very under-used Morgan Freeman) and aquires lots of new toys for his nighttime endeavors.

Eventually, we see the evolution of Batman through his trial-and-error from night to night, until finally, he has the persona, and the methodology, perfected.

Then the weird guy from 28 Days Later sprays him in the face with psycho juice, and everything turns to shit.

Soon he uncovers a plot wherein Al Ghul's organization is paying the Scarecrow to funnel a neuro toxin into Gotham City's water supply, which they then plan to spray all over the city by slamming the Gotham monorail (which Bruce's father planned and built) into the hub of Gotham City's water distribution center, which just happens to lie in a tower that the train just happens to drive straight through... with a machine developed by Lucius Fox onboard that atomizes all water in a given area into BREATHABLE VAPOR. Yeah.

As you can imagine, Bruce saves the day, and sort of gets the girl, and Detective Gordon (remember, origin film... he hasn't made it to commisioner yet) hands him a nice little clue towards his next case: a joker card that's been left at the scenes of several suspected mob killings. Hmmmmm...

Overall, this film does a better job of telling the story of Bruce Wayne than any film before it. Once that story's done and Wayne actually becomes Batman, however, the film ceases to be a super hero film and turns into something more akin to a Robert De Niro crime flick. Oh, there's plenty of Bats zipping around with his grappling doo hicky, punching bad guys, saying things like "I'M.... BATMAN!!!!" but it's all very toned down compared to the original film. This is a different Batman, a Batman who's been trained in the arts of Ninjitsu. Rather then get into a kung-fu fist fight in a back alley, he'll just wait in the shadows Rambo style and break a guy's neck before he knows what's going on.

There are numerous scenes where badnicks are walking around narrow passageways, eyes full of terror, trying to see what it is that keeps killing them one at a time in horror movie fashion. A lot of the time, all you see of Batman is a flash of cape, or a pair of hands that reach out of the black and drag a hoodlum into the shadows. It's almost spooky, in fact. In these scenes, it feels more like Aliens than it does anything else, with Batman playing the role of the Xenomorph.

The film is not perfect, however. I do have a few minor problems with it. First of all, this film was supposed to really be the first one to focus on Batman's detective skills. Now, maybe this was toned down to express Batman's wetness behind the bat ears, so to speak, but he essentially bumbles his way around Gotham finding clues here and there, until Lucius Fox figures it all out for him.

I know the suit is supposed to be a prototype, but it doesn't look quite right. His arm guards, for example, are of a lighter color than his cape, so it makes them stand out like black leather cuffs on a really strange business shirt.

Wayne's jawline also seems to be a tad too wide for the hole that's cut for him, making him look pudgy inside the suit.

Other than that, and a lack of any real "HOLY SHIT!" moments, the film is about the most intriguing, thought-provoking Super-Hero film ever made, certainly more cerebral than the unbridled fanboy love of the fantastic Spider-man films, or the hidden "it's alright to be gay" metaphors of the X-Men flicks.

Actingwise, Tom Cruise's new piece of ass is the only weak link. I was never convinced, at any point in the film, that Catie Holmes was either a lawyer OR in love with Bruce Wayne. She's just dead film space as far as I'm concerned, and really wish people would stop hiring her because of the crazy scientologist she's fucking.

Seriously, outside of the chance to see her naked, is there any other reason to ever want to watch her in a film you can think of? She's the Mary Anne to Jessica Alba's Ginger, for Christ's sake.

The saddest part of it all, really, is how much pure talent is wasted here. I had my doubts as to how well Alfred was going to come across with Michael Caine taking on the role. After all, the prior Alfred from the original series was just so damned perfect, and over the last decade, Caine has made a bit of an anti-name for himself taking any gig that has a paycheck. But this time, it fits. He takes the role and shines with it, to the point that I can't really think of anyone who could have possibly done better. He steals every scene he's in, and I can only hope that if this film becomes a series, he's given more play time in the sequels to come.

Same with Morgan Freeman. He fills the "Q" role to Bruce Wayne's James Bond here, expounding on the use and origins of each Bat Gadget, explaining all those "wonderful toys" we've seen over the years, how they work, and why they were made.

As I stated earlier, it is he, not Wayne, who figures everything out, which shouldn't have been, but it works, nonetheless. His final victory over the corporate muckity mucks who tried to bury him in the company basement (from a career standpoint) is one of the most satisfying scenes in the film, and like Alfred, I hope he's given a juicier bone to chew on with the next in the series.

Rutger Hauer was also given the short end of the stick, playing the man who runs Wayne Enterprises after Bruce vanishes. He plays the shrewd corporate villain well, but is barely on screen before he's gone. It's a shame really. It seems he hasn't gotten a good break since his turn as Lothos in the original Buffy movie. Swanson, Perry, Ruebens, now Hauer. The only actor to come out of that film relatively unscathed is Donald Sutherland, and considering the run he's had over the past 15 years, that ain't saying much.

So overall, this was a good, down and dirty action film, Batman by way of Dirty Harry. You won't experience any real white knuckle moments or big laughs like Burton's original film, but that's not neccessarily a bad thing. After watching Ahnold traipse around in faux-chrome telling everyone to "CHILL!" it was time for a change.

And what was with the non-existant soundtrack? There was no memorable theme to it at all, which I'm sad to say is an ongoing trend with the last several comic films. With Superman and Batman, and hell, even the first Turtle movie, you knew before the credits even rolled what film you were watching. To this day, I can hum every bar from the Superman soundtrack. Same with Danny Elfman's original Batman score. It's part of what MADE those films.

Today, watch Spider-Man. Watch Daredevil (well, no, DON'T watch Daredevil.) Watch both the X-Men films, or Hulk, or Fantastic Four. Can you hum any of the soundtracks from those films?

Didn't think so. Shit, even bombs like 1994's The Shadow (one of my unabashed guilty pleasures) had a coherent theme. And last year's Incredibles proves that a memorable soundtrack is still feasible in current super hero movies. (Try it. Try to hum one bar of the Spider-Man soundtrack, then try to hum Incredibles. See the difference?)

I was thrilled to read recently that the composer on the new Superman film had been instructed by director Bryan Singer (the same guy who directed the first two X-Men films) to include as much of the original soundtrack as he could without it coming across as a parody, because he couldn't imagine a Superman film without that music. John Williams called it 30 years ago, and nothing could possibly surpass it for that character.

To this day, I can watch Burton's Batman, and at the end, as he stands on a ledge looking to the sky, as the bells of Gotham cathedral rings in the background, and that Bat signal bursts to life as Elfman's soundtrack reaches its crescendo, a tingle of geek love shoots up my spine.

There are no moments like that in this film. It's not that kind of film. It's a superhero film made to not feel like a superhero film. In some ways, I love that. In others, I don't, as it seems to have taken some of the "larger-than-life" ness out of the character.

It's an amazing motion picture. I'm just still not convinced that it's a great Batman picture.

And my Dad would have hated it. I can hear him now. "The whole damn movie takes place in the dark."