Thursday, February 02, 2006

Review: Batman Begins.

Note: I wrote this a few months ago, but finally decided to post it.

It looks like I'm a bit out of touch with the movie scene, my standards are going down, or I'm just lucky. I keep seeing movies that I have heard little about and I really like.

Batman stars Christian Bale and a notable cast including Katie Holmes, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neilson, Gary Oldman, Tom Wilkinson, and Rutger Hauer. The film starts from the beginning of Batman's coming to be through his first victory. This includes his first encounter with bats, witnessing his parents murder, coming to terms with their death, and the creation of Batman.

Being an architect, I like films that venture into the future and show what could be possible. Granted Hollywood has a habit of always making it dark and wet, but it fits with the comic book feel. The added treat for me was that downtown Chicago was used as a backdrop for many of their cityscapes. They just did a bit of rearranging and added some skyscrapers. Curiously, they didn't omit any of the scaffolding covering the sidewalks for the chase scenes. It's cool to see that stuff on the big screen since many of my friends and myself worked on many of those buildings. And the scene where Batman is out on a ledge overlooking the city, he is looking directly across the river into the office where my wife used to work.

Aside from the scenery, it was an overall good comic action movie. I feel like I have seen Christian Bale before, but I can't figure out where even after consulting IMDB. His manner of speaking in this movie also reminded me of someone who I can't put my finger on. The gadgets and the car are really cool. The main point that made me like the film was discovering the story behind how Batman was created. I found it to be an above average film that would be good to see on a large TV due to the imagery.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Holy Mackrel indeed. I realize that is the title of the previous post, but it is very apropo of my reaction to the Batman Begins post. Last week I was at a conference on the East coast (US), and as an indulgence I watched Batman Begins, on the hotel pay-per-view.

I saw the movie on the big screen when it was first released and thoroughly enjoyed this film noir, apparently so because I paid $12 USD to watch it in the hotel. I generally don't like "comic book" movies, I thought the Spiderman movies were a mega-snore.


I think the Batman movie did a really good job creating a history for Batman, and I enjoyed watching / learning about the early years of the BatCave and all the costume and BatBelt gadgets--very, very cool. The storyline was a bit like StarWars in the Jedi-like training Batman goes through in Asia. But unlike StarWars (the 3 prequels), Batman Begins works,

The acting was superb. I thought it was cute at the end how the movie introduced the sequel.