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Batman Begins explores the roots of the Batman legend and the Dark Knight’s emergence as a strength for good in Gotham. In the wake of his parents’ murder, disillusioned industrial heir Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) travels the world seeking the means to fight injustice and turn fear versus those who prey on the fearful. He returns to Gotham and unveils his alter-ego: Batman, a masked crusader who uses his strength, intellect and an array of high tech deceptions to fight the sinister forces that threaten the city.
Batman Begins discards the former four films in the series and recasts the Caped Crusader as a fearsome avenging angel. That’s good news, because the series, which had gotten off to a rousing get started under Tim Burton, had gradually dissolved into self-parody by 1997′s Batman & Robin. As the title implies, Batman Begins tells the story anew, when Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) flees Western civilization following the murder of his parents. He is taken in by a mysterious instructor named Ducard (Liam Neeson in another advisor role) and spurred and encouraged to become a ninja in the League of Shadows, but he rather returns to his native Gotham City resolved to end the mob rule that is strangling it. But are there forces even more sinister at hand?
Cowritten by the team of David S. Goyer (a veteran comic book writer) and conductor Christopher Nolan (Memento), Batman Begins is a welcome return to the grim and gritty version of the Dark Knight, owing a great debt to the graphic novels that preceded it. It doesn’t have the razzle dazzle, or the mass appeal, of Spider-Man 2 (though the Batmobile is cool), and retelling the origin means it starts slowly, like most “first” superhero movies. But it’s surely the best Bat-film since Burton’s original, and one of the best superhero movies of it is time. Bale cuts a good figure as Batman, intense and dangerous but with numerous of the lightheartedness Michael Keaton brought to the character. Michael Caine provides much of the film’s humor as the family butler, Alfred, and as the love interest, Katie Holmes (Dawson’s Creek) is astoundingly believable in her initial adult role. Also featuring Gary Oldman as the young police officer Jim Gordon, Morgan Freeman as a Q-like gadgets expert, and Cillian Murphy as the vile Jonathan Crane. –David Horiuchi
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From The New YorkerAnd ends with a whimper. Christopher Nolan, working with a screenplay that he wrote with David S. Goyer, has attempted a literal-minded myth of creation. The orphaned young Bruce Wayne (a gloomy Christian Bale) undergoes an initiation in a lot of nameless Asian snow-capped mountains, where he’s trained by a morally equivocal adjunct (Liam Neeson) to a shadowy ninja vigilante leader (Ken Watanabe). Neeson, wearing a pointy little beard, keeps knocking Bale down as he says such things to him as “To conquer fear you will have to become fear.” The screenplay sounds as if it were written after a course in self-realization taken on Santa Monica Boulevard, and the direction is both pompous and cheesy, with absurd plot developments and a large total of whirling motion shot so close that we can’t in truth see anything. Gotham is no longer a malignant paradise of evil; it’s just dark. With Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine wasted in poorly written roles as Batman’s allies.-David Denby -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker
Bats On The Run Sciencentral Animal Oddities Photo
Bats On The Run Sciencentral Animal Oddities Pic
Bats On The Run Sciencentral Animal Oddities Picture
Bats On The Run Sciencentral Animal Oddities Photo
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383 of 432 persons found the following review helpful.
 Batman flies high in splendid BEGINS
By Hazen B Markoe
Since his original dramatic aspect in Detective Comics in 1939, Batman has grown to become a pop-culture icon. From movie serials in the 40′s, to a classic campy TV show in the 60′s, to a solid animated series in the 90′s, fans have thrilled to the super heroics of this distinguishable character. However, as a film franchise, he has brought results that were more or less less than impressive creatively. While the Tim Burton directed films, BATMAN and BATMAN RETURNS were stylish and dark, they likewise suffered from plot holes you could drive a Batmobile through. Then Joel Schumacher introduced a Day-Glo sensibility to the Dark Knight in BATMAN FOREVER, before drowning the reputation in foolish costumes (a Bat suit with nipples???), pun-filled foes, and whiney sidekicks in the lousy BATMAN & ROBIN. By then, Batman as cinematic property had become a laughingstock. Fortunately, indie film conductor Christopher Nolan reinvigorates the franchise in glorious form in BATMAN BEGINS, a reboot of the Batman legend that, for the introductory time, puts the focus squarely on our hero and not on the over-the-top villains of past films. Nolan likewise bases the film in a strong semblance of reality that allows the audience to not only receive the possibleness of the winged vigilante, but hug it as well.
135 of 149 persons found the following review helpful.
 Batman is back! **Updated review to BluRay edition**
By R.Suarez
After years of not having a Batman film and for the most part due to the franchise hitting bottom thanks to Joel Schumacher’s disastrous “Batman forever” and “Batman and Robin”, Christopher Nolan present us his version of the reputation with an impressive all star cast anda story brilliantly written by David S. Goyer.
506 of 588 persons found the following review helpful.
Flesh and Machinery
By MICHAEL ACUNA
Christopher Nolan and his co-screenwriter, David Goyer have chosen to postpone the crossover of Bruce Wayne (a soulful Christian Bale) into Batman until half way through the new “Batman Begins.”
And this is a primary and indispensable step that Nolan puts off until Bruce walks the world in search of his own personal nirvana… in a sort of Christ-like traveling to grasp himself and his place in the world after his parents are barbarically murdered. It is also from this quest that he acquires the cognition and attainments necessary for him to become a warrior, ready and capable to combat the ills and rid his town Gotham of all evil-doers.
Nolan’s “Batman Begins” is a more macho, masculine film than were the former movies, which is not to take anything away from Tim Burton’s elegiac, gothic and visionary takes on this story. But Burton’s world is/was/ and will always be the world of the dreamer: his Batman is more sinned versus than sinning. His Batman needs love and understanding while Nolan’s wants and needs justice and revenge more than anything else: even the sultry Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes proves to be of little interest to Batman save a chaste kiss at the end of the movie. It’s interesting to note that in the former Batman films we had huge finelooking bombshells like Kim Bassinger and Nicole Kidman as the so-called love interests while here, in Nolan’s vision we have a more scrubbed clean, working class (Rachel is an assistant D.A.) heroine: a woman who is as mesmerized in righting wrongs as is Batman and not plainly an individual meant as an adornment to the suave debonair Batman of Val Kilmer, George Clooney or Michael Keaton. It’s an essential and telling shift from woman as a plush toy to one who is, not only gorgeous but also smart and committed to a cause other than self-promotion and self-satisfaction.
Christian Bale’s Batman is real..i.e. a genuine, fleshed-out, beautifully written movie character: he is conflicted, he makes mistakes, he trusts the faulty humans at times and he recompense for his mistakes. It is a remarkable casting coup to have Bale in this role peculiarly since of late he has been playing a spate of radicals…i.e. in “The Machinist,” in which he transforms himself into a skeleton…literally. As Bruce Wayne/Batman, Bale dons the mask, assumes the persona, not out of a lust for power but out of a fervid faith that good will always triumph over evil: various times in this film he is brought to task for his trust in the basic goodness of people and one of his consultants ( Liam Neeson as Ducard) even goes so far as to ridicule Bruce as sentimental and weak for it. Though Ducard is his advisor and sensei, this kinship proves to be fraught with ambiguity as the movie progresses to the climax.
What is a Batman film without it is villains? But this film is devoid of the cartoon craziness of the Riddler or the Joker. Here we have Cillian Murphy (so good in “28 Days Later”) as a scary-as-hell The Scarecrow, alias psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Crane, who spews his psychedelic paranoia and psychosis on an unsuspecting Gotham. His “stuff” is more thrilling and exceptionally bad or displeasing than anything that the aforementioned villains could ever muster.
“Batman Begins” is not only a physically finelooking film, it is likewise an in an emotional manner and ideologically perplexed one. It wears it is heart on it is sleeve, yes…but it likewise has the brains and a profoundly strong back and pumped up physicality to back it up.
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