Batman Begins

Home
Smell the Movies
Smell the TV

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	2005
Country of origin:	USA / UK
Director:	Christopher Nolan
Genre:	The Legacy Begins
Starring:	Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy
Rating:	5/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0372784/
Tagline:	No tagline
Favourite line:	"Death does not wait for you to be ready! Death is not considerate, or fair! And make no mistake: here, you face Death."

Christian Bale’s first outing as The Caped Crusader is a surprisingly low-key affair.

The plot:
A forlorn Bruce Wayne, still haunted by the loss of his parents at the hands of a mugger, utterly disenfranchised by the city he wants to love, but can’t, heads off into the wilds to learn the skills required to ‘survive’ in a world he considers hard, brutal, uncompromising.
Winding up in Bhutan – as you do – he encounters Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), a warrior of sorts, who agrees to train him.
Returning to Gotham, Wayne dons the infamous suit, and sets to sorting out the ne’er-do-wells, but the foe he is up against is stronger than he could ever have imagined.

As incredible as it may seem now, there was a time when Batman movies were something of a laughing stock.
Joel Schumacher had helmed two in the series, the rather poor ‘Forever’ and the truly execrable ‘and Robin’ and it seemed the series was dead in the water.
Then, up steps Christopher ‘Inception’, ‘Memento’ Nolan to, with the aid of his brother Jonathan, breath life into the leather fetish icon.
Gone are the over the top histrionics and unnecessarily high salaries and ego's of the megastars.
Gone too are the shallow and superfluous plot lines which simply serve to lead up to another set ,piece, culminating in Arnold SchwarzeGeezer declaring ‘Ice to see you’ or some other such drivel.
In their place are atmosphere, a genuine sense of brooding dread and, in the form of Christian Bale, the best Batman yet. Understated and disturbed, his performance here is captivating, and doesn’t veer into caricature as it does in The Dark Knight.
A rollicking good start to the trilogy, the next one is even better, kids.