Batman Begins restarts the franchise, and I loved it!

Batman Begins takes the Batman story back to its roots and shows how and why Bruce Wayne became Batman. Of all the previous films, this is easily the best and most mature of them. I did thoroughly enjoy Tim Burton’s vision of the original film, though he went over the top with the sequel. The last two Batman films progressively got worse, so bad that it has been almost ten years since Hollywood decided to gamble on the Batman name again. They hit one out of the park with this movie.

Because this film goes way back and establishes the Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) character, it isn’t until about halfway through the movie that he actually becomes Batman. For the less patient movie-goer, this may be a problem. In essence, Batman Begins is a prequel, though this film restarts the Batman franchise with a fresh new look and characters. The first half of the film shows the murder of Wayne’s billionaire parents, though this time not by the Joker, and he winds up in a remote temple. Here he meets a strange man (Liam Neeson) who puts Wayne through a sort of ninja training, then asks him to join their seemingly terrorist organization called The League of Shadows. When Wayne refuses, a huge fight breaks out and the temple gets blown up. Wayne then decides to return to Gotham and help clean up his hometown, but he’s got his work cut out for him.

Once Wayne gets back to Gotham, he finds a corrupt city run by crooked politicians, paid-off cops and judges, and only a handful of people not willing to give in to the bad things going on. Among them is an honest cop (Gary Oldman) and the assistant District Attorney (Katie Holmes). She is also a former childhood friend of Wayne’s and becomes the inevitable love interest. The main plot slowly unfolds to reveal that a demented psychiatrist (Cillian Murphy) is working along with a secret organization to pollute the city’s water supply and then drive people crazy by vaporizing the water. Yeah, I know the first Batman film also used the whole poison gas thing, but the overall storyline is different enough here to be forgiven.

I think the casting of Christian Bale as Batman/Bruce Wayne was an excellent choice. Some may consider him and unknown, but this guy has been in the business for years. He was so good in his debut role in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun that a special National Board of Review Juvenile Performance award was created just to give to him. If you want to see another great Bale action sci-fi film, check out Equilibrium.

In this film, Liam Neeson plays yet another mentor-type role, sort of like a twisted version of his Jedi character from Episode I. Veteran actors Michael Caine, as the butler Alfred, and Morgan Freeman also have excellent supporting roles and bring credibility to the movie. Gary Oldman didn’t have a lot of screen time with his role, but it was nice to see him play a good guy. Katie Holmes, who recently became engaged to Tom Cruise, did very well for her part. I thought everything about the casting was excellent and the balance of new and old faces really worked for the movie.

Director Christopher Nolan became one of those ‘directors to watch for’ when he made Memento and then followed it up with the excellent Insomnia. According to the IMDb, he had the entire cast and crew of this film watch Blade Runner in order to give them the idea of how he wanted this movie to look. He’s the kind of director who can pull excellent performances out his actors and he helped give the movie a great darkened look that wasn’t too unrealistic. Some of his fight scenes were shot a little too close-up, but for the most part the action was very well done. Nolan co-wrote this film with David S. Goyer, who is the man behind the Blade trilogy.

Batman Begins is excellent in every regard. It isn’t silly and doesn’t have a bunch of stupid pseudo-comic one-liners. It is a very mature and well-made movie that sets itself up for a sequel. I was a little put off by the idea of starting the whole Batman series over, but after seeing this film I am all for it. The question now is who will play the next Joker?