| Batman
Begins Comes to DVD
I have to admit, when I first saw Batman Begins, I
wasn’t as impressed as everyone around me seemed
to be. I liked it and thought it was well-made, but
it just wasn’t Batman to me, growing up as I had
with Tim Burton’s first two film’s and Danny
Elfman’s dark and beautiful soundtrack (I won’t
even acknowledge Joel Schumachers’ following two
crap-fests, and anyone who wants to argue that can kiss
my grits).
But as I picked up the Special Edition version (one
of three left) and sat down to watch the film since
first viewing it, I realized something: This is the
best Batman movie yet, and I was too busy measuring
it against Tim Burton’s films to realize this.
Whereas those focused primarily on the villains, who
Burton seemed to have an affinity for due to their outcast
status, this film focuses on the most complex and disturbed
creature of the Batman universe, Batman himself.
Honing in on a curious loophole that the original DC
comics never fully addressed, the seven years that elapse
when Bruce Wayne first leaves Gotham and returns as
The Dark Knight, Begins stars a pitch-perfect Christian
Bale as Batman and a cast that reads like the attendance
list at the Oscars. Liam Neeson is Ducard, Wayne’s
wily mentor, Michael Caine is Alfred, the Wayne family’s
stalwart butler, Morgan Freeman is Lucius Fox, the man
who supplies Bruce with “all those wonderful toys,”
and Tom Cruises’ newly zombified fiancee Katie
Holmes is Rachel Dawes, Bruce Wayne’s childhood
love interest.
The movie begins with Bruce in a prison somewhere in
Tibet, picking fights with inmates in his mission to
understand and combat the criminal mind that lead to
the death of his parents. He is rescued from the camp
by Henri Ducard, a member of the mysterious League of
Shadows, a group of justice-mad vigilante ninjas run
by a man named Ra’s Al Ghul. When Bruce is done
with his stealth training, he is asked to confront his
fears, bats, while being flanked by a wall of faceless
warriors. He passes the test, but is asked to kill a
criminal to seal his training. He refuses, burning down
the training facility and rescuing his mentor Ducard
before returning to Gotham.
And it’s here that he begins mulling over the
idea of cleaning up Gotham and the crime-ridden streets
that allowed something as horrifying as his parents’
death to happen. He becomes a symbol, something “elemental
and terrifying,” something that does “great
and terrible things.” In short, he becomes that
character we all grew up with.
Director Christopher Nolan takes a wholly realistic
stance on the Batman story, and where one would believe
that this would typically suck the life out of a comic
book movie, they would be right. But Begins in no way
seems like a comic book movie. What the movie presents
us with we accept, so much so that we forget the big
name actors in the film as they melt seamlessly into
their parts. There is no caricature, there is only a
story about a young man cut so deeply by a single event
in his past that he feels he has no other choice than
to don a mask and prevent the same from happening to
other good people.
The special features on the DVD are at once really cool
and a little annoying. The entire disk is presented
as a comic, written by Begins screenwriter David S.
Goyer, in which the viewer has to sift through different
panels to get to all the features. The problem is, there
is no option to see a list of the features beforehand,
and you have to wade through to the end of the comic
before you can get to one. This is a little time-consuming
and inconvenient, but it’s not distracting enough
to keep you from watching features that include eight
miniature documentaries on the film. There are also
numerous easter eggs, which are hidden features, though
they sometimes reference back to the same menu. The
documentary on what comics the filmmakers based the
majority of the movie on is particularly interesting.
The feature on the Batmobile, called “the Tumbler”
in the film, is definitely the best, detailing how the
crew built an entire new car from scratch for the film!
It took me a while to realize that the Batman comics,
when they were at their best with Frank Miller or Jeph
Loeb at the helm, were essentially about this very same,
archetypical and mythical story presented in the film.
Credit must be given to Christopher Nolan for understanding
that Batman isn’t only spectacle, but is a myth
as a man, passed down throughout seventy years of comics
in all incarnations while keeping the same basic and
human principle, compassion. Plus, the suit is awesome.
Four and Half stars
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