Date night!

[kickaha]

ginkgo treated me to a movie tonight as a surprise, and it was none other than Batman Begins. :) I'm a huge Batman nut, so I figured I'd just go see this on a matinee some day, but my sweetie sprang for it. :)

I liked it. A lot. In fact, I liked just about everything except:



1) Katie Holmes. The character wasn't necessary to any of the plot, and damned little of the character development in Bruce. *One scene*, but still... meh. A number of other actresses could have done more with the part.

2) Ducard == al Ghul?? WTF?? That really wasn't necessary. Two separate characters in the comics, should have kept them that way.

3) al Ghul is Persian. Neeson... not so much.

4) It's pronounced *RAISH* you twits, not 'razz'. Grr.

5) Crane was really entirely too pretty. Not a bad job from the actor, but the look was... well, just not what I ever would have expected.

6) A microwave beam that vaporizes water would also cause every living being to explode in a big red steam cloud. *shrug* Oh well.

Really though, other than the apparent* mangling of al Ghul, bad science (duh, it's a comic book movie), and Rachel Dawson's Creek... er, I mean Dawes... I really quite liked it. (* I say 'apparent' because Neeson had one line at the party about mystic or supernatural reasons for him to have survived, which Bruce just totally blew off. Given the Lazarus Pit of the comics, this isn't totally off base, but given everything else they mangled on him... oy.)

Things I really liked:

1) Bruce's psyche. Nailed that. Bale did a great job. This is the core of the mythos, not the toys, not the villains, but a very broken man trying to make something positive out of the pieces.

2) Retcon of Joe Chill being stalked by Bruce. *NICE* touch, much more realistic IMO. The after effects to push him over the edge dovetailed perfectly. (Yeah, yeah, the one place Rachel was needed... but yet not really. Oy.)

3) The tech. Lucius Fox as Wayne's Q? Gotta love it. (Yeah, I said the tech wasn't good as a focal point - doesn't mean I can't like it. :) )

4) The one-liners weren't that bad, surprisingly. Some were downright great. flinx, that quote you gave about 'what road is he on?' made me just wince when I read it on your journal... but in the movie it actually worked. Bottom line: nothing yanked me hard out of the experience. (A couple should have been edited out, but oh well.)

5) The pacing of the first half of the movie, flipping between his current training and the road that took him there was just wonderful. I think I enjoyed this more than anything in the Batman half of the movie with the possible exception of:

6) "Swear by ME!" The hair on my neck stood up, I swear to god. Er, Batman. Something. Beautiful.


All in all, I think they did a great job getting the franchise back on track to being something not laughable. Schumacher? Suck eggs.

Comments

Re: Fox and other things

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Lucius Fox is the CEO of Wayne Enterprises in both cartoons and comics. He doesn't know about Bruce's double life however, as in the movie.

They never said how al Ghul survived, although *I* thought when Bruce dropped him off that he was still alive, and not a corpse. It was Ken Watanabe that was crushed, not Neeson... which makes much of the exposition about 'you left me to die' senseless IMO.

Katie Holmes may be kind of cute, sort of, in a lopsided way, but she's not much of an actress.

Yeah, it seemed like this suit was a lot more flexible than previous ones. :) When he was crouching, he looked like an animal.