Movie Reviews

Some of the recent comic-book adaptations have turned out really well; the Spiderman and X-Men films come to mind as the most well-made of the adaptations. Sin City accomplished the feat of looking like a comic-book more than any other film I've seen. Ang Lee's Hulk attempted that too, and was fairly successful (unfortunately, Sin City wasn't very good, and Hulk was just 'okay').

Christopher Nolan's take on the Caped Crusader in Batman Begins offers a refreshingly different take on it all: he takes the ideas from the Batman comics and does his own thing with them by not trying to make a "comic book movie". He's created a taut, dark, dramatic, and smart action movie that just happens to have a comic-book character as its protagonist.

I think this has allowed Nolan to free the Batman/Bruce Wayne character from the confines of the comics and instead let the character inhabit Nolan's own world. There are no shots in Batman Begins where I thought to myself, "Oh, here's one of those scenes where he's trying to make it look like a comic-book panel". We know from Nolan's previous two films (Memento and Insomnia) that he's a quality filmmaker, and it's readily apparent that his dark and serious 'noir' stylings are a perfect match for what is supposed to be a dark and serious character (something Joel Schumaker had apparently forgotten).

Speaking of the character, the Batman in Batman Begins is the way I think that he should be depicted. He's a 'quiet hunter' of the bad guys, so to speak, and he swoops down on them one at a time, out of the shadows, and scares the crap out of all the other bad guys he hasn't gotten around to dispatching yet. He does not ride his Bat-cycle through a brick wall (leaving a rough outline of the Bat symbol in the wall he crashed through) announcing his presence to everyone around, and then proceed to take all of them out in a choreographed martial-arts brawl (also something that Joel Schumaker apparently forgot).

Nolan has scored a perfect three out of three with his film repertoire, and Batman Begins is definitely the best comic book movie I've ever seen -- possibly because it avoids the trappings of being a comic book movie.