Why Batman Begins is still the best Batman film
Apparently it was 15 years ago today that I had one of the most religious experiences I’ve ever had watching a comic book movie in a theater.
It seriously doesn’t feel like it has been that long.
Alas, it was June 15, 2005 that Batman Begins AKA The Greatest Batman Solo Film Of All-Time was released in theaters…...and I went into it slightly skeptical.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting to hate it at all. I knew on some level based on everything we had seen about it to that point that I was going to enjoy the experience, but I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it as much as I did.
I had logical reasons for being skittish about it. At the time, we weren’t even a decade removed from “The Ice Man Cometh” and Bat credit cards that festooned the feature film known as Batman and Robin, a movie I didn’t see in theaters but was gifted on VHS when I was younger. I did actually enjoy it initially, and then I got older and started realizing that the best interpretation of Batman I had ever seen on screen was Batman the Animated Series, and the closest thing we had to that in live action wasn’t anything with Joel Schumacher at the helm.
No, you had to go back to Tim Burton’s films for anything like that, and even they were more gothic and weird compared to Batman TAS, a signature of Burton’s style, which I thoroughly enjoy in many ways, it’s just still different than the world that Paul Dini and Bruce Timm gave us every Saturday morning on FOX, and no one had been able to replicate something close to that in live action just yet.
Enter Christopher Nolan, who at the time I knew very well from Memento AND Insomnia. Yes, I had seen both of those movies before he tackled the world of the Caped Crusader. Memento was one of those crazy word of mouth movies that people said we HAD to watch, and I did, got a headache from how badly the storytelling device twisted my brain(if you’ve never seen it, give it a watch and you’ll see what I mean), and loved its ingenuity as a film. That put Nolan on my radar and I was an instant fan, so when it was announced that he would be directing the next Batman film, I was assured that it would be nothing like the toy commercials the previous two entries had been.
Then I saw leaked photos of the Tumbler and got mad. Really mad. “It’s a damn tank,” I said. I was convinced in one shot that Warner Bros. had learned nothing from the Schumacher disasters and were still intent on selling toys with these expensive Batman films. Ugh.
It wasn’t until that first teaser came out and we got a glimpse of the costume that my concerns started to ease off. Even the casting of Christian Bale didn’t faze me because at the time I hadn’t seen American Psycho, so the cognitive dissonance that many of my friends had, picturing a creepy, narcissistic serial killer in the cape and cowl, was completely lost on me. In fact, the only movie I had seen Bale in then was the 2000 continuation of Shaft directed by John Singleton, in which he plays a disgustingly pretentious racist on trial for the murder of a black man.
Fortunately for me, I watched Equilibrium around the same time and that clued me into the idea that Bale was a good action actor and also very versatile, so I was willing to give him a fair shake as Bruce Wayne.
The biggest thing I remember from the first viewing is that I grinned like a little kid twice during it, and both times were during interrogation scenes. When he has Flass hanging upside down questioning him about the drugs(Swear to me!) and later when he gasses Crane with the fear toxin and appears to him as a demonic bat creature(Taste of your own medicine, doctor?). I couldn’t have been more ecstatic with those scenes, because they were straight out of TAS for me.
There’s a two-part episode of the series called Feat of Clay, which is a retelling of the origin of Clayface, and in both parts there are two scenes where Batman interrogates Roland Daggett’s thugs. The first time he hangs one of them from a robotic arm on the Batwing, flies him over the river and actually terrifies the criminal bad enough that he passes out. The second time he corners one that is a germaphobe and continuously slams his fist into the wall to shake a jar of “Crimson Fever” ever so closer to landing on the thug’s head, causing him to cower in terror.
That level of intimidation was something we just hadn’t seen yet in live action, until Batman Begins. Yes there were definitely moments in Batman 89’ and even a bit in Batman Returns, but not to this level. Begins was a film where we saw Bruce Wayne build the Batman ideology as a dramatic example to shake Gotham out of apathy. As he put it, an incorruptible, everlasting symbol that was terrifying.
Half the brilliance of the film is that first hour, where we see the origin of Bruce Wayne’s journey to become Batman through his voice, from the moment his parents were murdered, to his tortured realization of the corruption that led to their death, to his travels to find the League of Shadows and train, and finally to his return home to be the symbol the city needed to rebuild itself. We had never been shown in live action why AND how he became Batman, and for the first time Begins showed us that process step by step, piece by piece. We see him doing the detective work on the city, we see him seek out the cave and with Alfred’s assistance, build the batsuit with materials from his company’s own R&D department.
When I saw The Tumbler then, my opinion on it did a complete 180. By the time the big chase scene to rescue Rachel was over, I wanted one for myself. Still wouldn’t mind it. It IS a tank, but it made all the sense in the world for him to have it and it was badass. A more than worthy Batmobile.
Somewhat controversially, I’ve said that I consider Batman Begins to be the best of The Dark Knight Trilogy, and I still hold that opinion today, not only because I think it’s the best Batman origin movie, but because I think it is the best constructed film in the entire series. The pacing is excellent throughout along with the writing, as the movie tells a true A to B story about the origin of Batman, and it makes him plausible to exist in our world. This isn’t a fantastical environment with freeze guns, brain-draining TV devices and doctors reincarnated by lab toxins in the ground. This is literally how Batman COULD look and operate in real life, at the behest of a billionaire playboy looking to make a difference in the shadow of his parents legacy. Yes, the fear toxin and the microwave emitter stuff is comic book science, but Gotham City feels like a real American cityscape, and my favorite shot of the film by far is after he strings up Falcone for the cops, he’s standing over the city like a gargoyle, watching over it, silently but definitively announcing his presence as its new protector…...with an immaculate score from Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard supporting it.
When I left that movie theater 15 years ago, I was elated, because my favorite superhero of all time had returned from an iffy at best period on film with an absolutely badass, powerful, visceral and striking representation that was beyond anything I could have expected from it going in. When new Batman movies are made, THIS is the one that I compare them to as any kind of personal standard to be held for them, because it is the best true Batman solo film in my opinion, with the best structure, strongest tone and writing, and incredible balance between the comic book realm and our own world to be one of the best origin stories of our time.