Film Review: Batman Begins (1995)
Christopher Nolan became the hegemon of twenty-first-century Hollywood by locating the one sweet spot the industry had convinced itself could not exist — the point where the arthouse auteur and the Spielberg-style blockbuster-churning machine occupy the same body — and Batman Begins is the film that established the pattern. Everything that followed, from the IMAX grandiosity of Dunkirk to the three-hour talkathon that is Oppenheimer, from the A-list casts recruited to lend gravity to nonsense to the solemn pseudo-philosophy deployed as prestige packaging, was rehearsed here first. The trick was not new in kind; Hitchcock and Kubrick had both worked the seam. What was new was the scale of the bet and the willingness of a major studio to underwrite it, and the fact that a man who had made Memento — a puzzle-box noir with a gimmick so arch it could have sunk a lesser picture — was handed the keys to a moribund franchise worth billions in merchandising.
The dead franchise and the spectacular gamble
By 2005 the Batman property was radioactive. Batman & Robin (1997) had not merely underperformed; it had made the character faintly ridiculous, a rubber-nippled toy commercial with Schwarzenegger punning his way through a glacier. Warner Bros. spent the intervening years watching X-Men and Spider-Man hoover up box office with exactly the template the Batman films had already exhausted: origin, villain, set piece, sequel hook. Copying it would have been the safe move and the fatal one. Batman could not compete with Marvel's newcomers on novelty, so he had to compete on seriousness — and seriousness, in 2005, meant auteurs.
The gamble was less reckless than it looks. The studio's shortlist had already included Darren Aronofsky, whose Batman: Year One project with Frank Miller had been gestating and collapsing for years; the appetite for an art-house Batman predated Nolan. He was cheap, he had Insomnia to prove he could handle a star and a location budget without sulking, and the downside was capped: the franchise was already dead, so failure cost a reboot and a write-down. The upside, if the thing worked, was a prestige property that could be sold to adults as well as to the toy aisle. It worked spectacularly, and the industry has been trying to reverse-engineer the conditions ever since.
The picture itself
David S. Goyer's script dispenses with the marquee villain entirely. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is orphaned by a mugger, flees Gotham, rots in a Bhutanese prison and is recruited by Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson) into the League of Shadows, a paramilitary NGO with a sideline in municipal genocide. He returns to a Gotham rendered as Chicago with the serial numbers filed off — a crime-infested, elevated-train-ribbed cesspit whose wealthy families and corrupt institutions are indistinguishable — and, with the help of Alfred (Michael Caine), Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) and a great deal of Wayne Enterprises R&D, becomes a bat. The League follows him home to enact its purification. Cillian Murphy's Crane/Scarecrow supplies hallucinogens; the climax is a monorail chase and a microwave emitter that boils the city's water supply.
What it does to its predecessors
The 1989–97 series ran on a single organising principle: the villain as spectacle. Nicholson's Joker was the film, and Keaton was a supporting player in his own picture. Burton gave Gotham German-expressionist opera, gorgeous and utterly hermetic; Schumacher swapped it for neon camp and let the toy line dictate the costume budget. Nolan inverts the hierarchy. The villain is a means; the man is the subject. Where Burton's Batman was a fully formed weirdo from frame one, Nolan gives us the fall, the training, the fear, the fabrication of a symbol — and asks, without much rigour, whether a billionaire in a mask can be anything other than a symptom.
The realism, so loudly advertised, is largely a matter of surfaces: military-grade hardware, plausible-sounding explanations, an absence of grinning grotesques. It is a production-design decision dressed as a philosophy. The League of Shadows is a terrorist cell with a watertight alibi; Fox is a defence contractor with a conscience; Wayne's mass-surveillance apparatus in the third act makes the Bush administration's look like a playground game. The allegory is not buried deep — Nolan's subsequent defenders and detractors have spent two decades arguing about whether the politics are sincere or merely atmospheric, and the honest answer is that they are atmospheric, which is precisely why they read as sincere.
Where it fails
The romance between Wayne and Rachel Dawes is a dead zone. Katie Holmes is handed a function rather than a character — the conscience who says "your father would be ashamed" — and the film grinds to a halt whenever she is required to generate feeling. Nolan has never been a director of erotic or even romantic charge, and here the deficit is naked. The action, meanwhile, is chopped to confetti: the fight choreography in the docks and the narrows is close-quarters blur, edited so breathlessly that geography is a rumour. And the PG-13 straitjacket pinches hardest in the last half-hour, where a film about terror and panic should be allowed a few drops of blood.
What survives is the craft around the edges: Caine turning Alfred into something genuinely wounded rather than merely wry, Oldman playing the one honest cop in a city of rats with barely-contained exhaustion, Wally Pfister's photography, the Zimmer/Howard score, and Bale's committed, unglamorous unpleasantness in the suit.
Verdict
Batman Begins is the most successful reboot in modern Hollywood, and also the template for everything now wrong with the blockbuster: the origin-story padding, the self-importance, the assumption that a grave tone constitutes depth. It is a good film that taught the industry a bad lesson. It also, on its own terms, mostly works — which is more than can be said for its immediate sequels' reputations.
RATING: 8/10
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