Nolan demonstrated enough talent by the mid-2000s that Warner Bros. gave him the keys to the kingdom. You could say only keys to certain doors, as although he worked on the screenplay he had to do it WITH Blade writer David S. Goyer. This was the only time Nolan had worked on a screenplay where he didn’t get to write alone or with his brother. Still, it was a step up from not getting to write at all on Insomnia. More importantly, they were rebooting the Batman franchise and put Nolan in the director’s chair!
Let’s understand what a big deal this was. Although Batman and Batman Returns were huge smashes, the series had been left for dead by the fourth installment. The Superman film series had followed a similar trajectory a decade earlier. The Spider-Man series was presently incredibly popular, and the X-Men series fairly so, but this was before the launch of the MCU so a comic book movie still didn’t mean you could just print money. If Batman was going to be taken seriously again by filmgoers, who hadn’t yet forgotten the lame Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, the new movie had to blow them out of the water.
It did! In spite of all the otherworldly (pun not intended) success of the MCU, there are only three live-action movies starring a solo superhero in the whole IMDB Top 250 – the movies in this Batman trilogy!
Of course trilogies can be cancelled if the first installment flops but this sure didn’t. It did great and deservedly so!
In the previous series, Tim Burton had been handcuffed into making a boring Jack Nicholson showcase the first time and had fun letting his quirky imagination loose the second time before unfortunately getting replaced by Joel Schumacher for the remaining films. Now, Batman Begins introduced Hollywood to the concept of a “reboot”, and Christopher Nolan clearly viewed the Batman character with awe and treated him accordingly.
Christian Bale (who put on an incredible amount of muscle mass in just six months right after almost literally starving himself to death for The Machinist)
At least after this he got to go on an ice cream and pizza diet!
plays a Bruce Wayne left feeling rootless in life after his parents’ murder. As the heir to their billions, he has spent his whole adult life in the Far East, learning martial arts because…why not?
He eventually does come back to Gotham City, where his childhood friend Rachel Dawes is a prosecuting attorney and disgusted by his indifference to their hometown’s crime infestation. In his absence Bruce still gets to live in his childhood home, along with the butler Alfred who wound up raising him. However, he was pushed out of any real power at Wayne Enterprises by the current executive in charge. Yet he does notice company inventor Lucius Fox has made some nifty hi-tech devices. He uses those, and the fighting skills he learned in Asia at the hands of Raʼs al Ghul, to become a vigilante crime fighter. Police Lieutenant Gordon has mixed feelings about this, but Batman has come along just in time, as a mobster and a psychiatrist are working on a criminal plot that would forever change life as we know it.
All of the significant male actors in the movie are excellent – Bale, Michael Caine, Rutger Hauer, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Ken Watanabe, Gary Oldman, Tom Wilkinson, Cillian Murphy – but the female is not. I was part of the generation calling Katie Holmes a teen crush, but here she proved that she couldn’t act and it’s unsurprising that her career died as we aged out of the youth demographic.
What different adult paths for the Dawson’s cast. One became a four-time Oscar nominee, one at least starred on another long-running drama series, one’s done guest appearances here and there…and one is best known for the marriage into Tom Cruise’s cult!
Still, that’s the only weakness of Batman Begins. Script, performances, score, cinematography, sets, effects, choreography – top notch! Of course so was Nolan’s direction tying it together.
Bottom Line: Thumbs up!
Up Next: Small scale success!
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