Batman Begins

I swear, I must be the only person on Earth who doesn’t like this movie. I’ve watched it like three times now, trying to figure out what the appeal is, and I still don’t get it. Supposedly it’s because it’s “dark” and “grim” and “gets inside Batman’s mind”, but to me it just came across as boring and full of inane predictable dumbed-down “psychological overtones”.

The story of how Batman got his start certainly has potential. It’s interesting. The idea has me interested. But what I imagine would have happened, and apparently some of the old comics back me up on this, is that he slowly sort of pieced together both his skills and persona going various places in the world, studying technology, learning fighting skills, etc. That would work well in a comic format, but it’s too fragmented for a typical 2-hour Hollywood movie, so they wrapped everything up into a convenient package by having all of Batman’s equipment pre-made for him by Wayne Enterprises. Oh, and he was trained by a secret cult of ninjas in the Himalayas.

Yeah, a fucking ninja cult in the Himalayas. That’s really the one huge point of the movie that I just can’t past. The movie is Trying Very Hard To Be Taken Seriously, and then it busts out a secret ninja cult headed up by Ken Watanabe and Liam Neeson. What the hell, dude, how am I supposed to take your movie seriously with ninja vigilante cult in it? White ninjas = instant fail, always. You should know that, guys, come on now.

The other major problem with it is that for what is supposed to be a “psychodrama” it actually falls back on a lot of predictable action sequences to carry it through. Unfortunately, the director is of this modern MTV school of shooting action sequences by shaking the camera around a lot so you can’t see what the hell is going on.

Every time I’ve watched this I’ve had trouble paying attention and staying awake. There’s too much of this adolescent Hollywood-style attempt at “deep” philosophical conversations, which just drone on. And something is up with the sound, at least on the DVD version, everyone speaks in a very low tone to begin with and then the sound is dim so that you have to crank it up or it’s just a soup of breathiness and mumbling.

Links :

* Batman Begins HD DVD Review