BURN GORMAN IN BATMAN MOVIE
Everyone seemed to be knocked out by how “dark” the movie is, but surely that word should imply not just violence and a general overlay of unpleasantness (e.g., the unidentified man Joker has, apparently randomly, tied to a pyre of wads of cash before setting it aflame), but a consistent vision, and The Dark Knight has no such thing. The movie pits Batman against The Joker (Heath Ledger, in his final performance), who’s dedicated himself to undermining the plans of Gotham’s new D.A., Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), to banish the city’s ruling mobsters. There isn’t a moment of genuine beauty or wit or feeling in the entire two and a half hours the only scene I enjoyed was a brief interlude in which Wayne’s business partner, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), laughs a would-be blackmailer out of his office.
But it’s an even worse movie than its predecessor: more ponderous, less imaginative, with a more monotonous array of car smash-ups and explosions.
So Bruce has to defeat them – temporarily, at least – and stage an escape before he can return to battle the more homegrown evil in his own hometown.ĭespite its sadism and unvaried tone, however, Batman Begins was an enormous hit, and its sequel, The Dark Knight (2008), which Nolan wrote with his brother Jonathan, was a bigger one. (The real corruption – or at least stupidity of a monumental order – must have been at Warner Brothers, where this plot premise made it past the pitch stage.) But first there’s a long sequence at a Tibetan monastery, which seems to belong in some other movie altogether, where Wayne is trained in martial arts by mystics (the westerner among them is Ra’s Al Ghul, played by Liam Neeson, whose goatee is more expressive than his performance) who turn out to be the League of Shadows, fanatics with a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah God complex, dedicated to wiping out cities overrun with evil, like Gotham. So when, years later, returning to a Gotham City overrun with gangsters and all manner of corruption, he chooses to disguise himself as a bat, it’s his way of conquering those childhood fears and doing penance for the fact that his inability to handle them led his parents to their deaths. They encountered the mugger on a deserted street outside the opera house if Bruce had only been able to control his phobia, his parents might be alive today. As a boy, Bruce was so terrified of bats as a result of falling down a well on his dad’s estate that, when his parents took him to see the operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat), the prop bats on stage distressed him and he asked to be taken home early.
Nolan brought art-house credentials ( Memento, a wildly overrated puzzle picture that didn’t make basic plot sense) and a grim relentlessness that I would have said was precisely the wrong kind of approach for a comic-book adventure. And the concept was misconceived. Bruce (Christian Bale), like the character Michael Keaton played in the Burton pictures, has never been able to move past the pointless deaths of his parents, before his eyes, at the hands of a mugger, but it isn’t grief that motivates this Bruce it’s guilt. Then Christopher Nolan took over the franchise in 2005 with Batman Begins, which he also co-wrote with Davis G.
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