Gothamo Delenda Est !

[chani]

So Yes I saw Batman Begins yesterday, and when Liam Neeson said "Gotham must be destroyed" at the beginning of the film, I couldn't help thinking of Cato The Elder and his famous ablative absolute, Carthago Delenda Est. I was probably the only one in the theatre to think of a roman senator then. I'm that weird!

No explicit spoilers but...you shouldn't read if you're planning to see it.

1) The reservations first

Well it was a bit too long, or maybe it's just it was late and I was very tired after a sleepless night and a day of deliberations in the bac' jury, but it felt too long.

I wasn't impressed much by the first part in the mountains, aka Bruce's initiation into The ligue of Shadows. Looked like Liam Neeson didn't realize he was no longer playing a Jedi in Star Wars ( BTW I don't recall the name of his character in Star Wars Episode 1 and I forgot the name of his character in Batman too!) and the outside scenes gave me that feeling of déjà-vu on screen...in Highlander maybe.

I figured out who the villain was as soon as the doctor revealed he was not working for Falcone but for someone who was coming. I know it wasn't the most essential stuff in that movie but still, it was just so easy to guess given to the ablative absolute...and it's annoying when you have to wait like an hour until the scene of the big revelation occurs (the birthday party scene) while they even gave a huge clue 20 minutes before with the doctor's mask. To be fair I expected a bad ending then, very déjà-vu, but they avoided the melodrama...

I was sorry for Bruce's mother because it's all about the father...He didn't seem to think of his mom at all. I know the father/son dialectic is big on the movie but still.

Speaking of women and last but not least: Kathie Holmes sucked. I mean her character is so unconvincing. She's supposed to be an assistant attorney and she looks like a 18 years old! I think she is the weakest part of the film.

2) Good stuff:

Christian Bale whom I saw in The Machinist a few months ago is a great Bruce Wayne. He can be the average man, without any charisma, and the next minute he's charming and attractive, and even a bit frightening. It isn't t that he has an expressive face (although he does) but that he's really lookshifting (is that a word?) as if there were two or three in him which is exactly what his character is supposed to be: vulnerable Bruce, Bruce Wayne Prince of the City, Batman the creature.

He wants to think that The Prince-Play Boy and the Batman are only masks but they are all him. This makes me think of Lorenzaccio, a Musset's play. In Musset's story, Lorenzo di Medici wanted to save his city from corruption and crimes, and chose to wear a mask in order to be a hero (in his case he impersonated what he hated and wore a mask of debauchery and vice to get closer to his target, his cousin Alexander, duke of Florence) but in the end the mask had become his face and he knew he couldn't take it off nor go back to the pure Lorenzo he once was.

I liked that the movie was about the making of the Batman, what he got and what he lost through that making. The film raised good questions about justice vs revenge, human vs monster, salvation vs destruction, heroic action vs passiveness...Bruce himself is filled with those contradictions and a good place to watch such dialectics going on.

Of course the lesson about fear being the main enemy wasn't very subtle, they kinda used an anvil there, but the plot of using the citizens' own fears to destroy the city was well done. The androgynous doctor was really creepy btw. He was less scary when he wore his mask actually! There was something quite Victorian in that modern Gotham then, especially that neighbourhood with the asylum, that called to my mind Gothic Novels.

The connection between Batman style and the Ninja was pretty neat.

It's always a pleasure to see Rutger Hauer (but boy he has aged!), and it's funny that his character was named Mr Earl since Bruce was the little Prince!

Great idea to cast Gary Oldman as a good guy for once. Gary is a very talented actor but he has been so typecasted in bad boy roles lately. They managed to erase his usal sexiness behind an ugly moustache and ugly glasses.

I also enjoyed Morgan Freeman as Bruce's own Mr Q.

But my favourite is Michael Caine playing Alfred the butler. I loved his interactions with Bruce. Christian and Michael have great chemistry on screen.

Thus the father/son relationship comes in several times: Dad/Bruce, Liam Neeson/Bruce, Alfred/Bruce...But I think it's Alfred/Bruce that comes out the most. It's good because Batman would be nothing without his butler.

 

At the end of the day, not a bad movie.

Comments

[jerusha]

I liked the movie quite a bit myself, and would definitely agree with both your reservations and the things you liked. Katie Holmes bugged me, especially at the end of the movie. Who kisses a guy just before they break up with them? To me, it was like the writers decided that they had to have the characters kiss just because. And I wasn't that impressed with her anyway.

[so-sharlemaine.livejournal.com]

I love Christian Bale. Just so totally love and admire him. Not to mention want to shag him silly. So I had extreme reservations about him doing Batman. I haven't seen a Batman movie since the first one back in the eighties, and I'll probably wait for this one to hit Direct TV before I see it. But if you say it's not bad, then I might consider it if I'm with a group of RL friends, who never want to see what I want to see.

I didn't realize this movie had so many people I respect in it; Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and I so totally love Morgan Freeman. He's one of my top five favorite actors. His talent is just so amazing to me.

Maybe I should go check this one out. Morgan is sort of my neighbor, you know. He and his wife have a farm near my home, and he really lives there when he's not filming.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Hey that's cool! Morgan Freeman is good as all the supportive cast. I wasn't into Batman movies either, but when I saw there were Bale, Oldman, Hauer and Caine, I thought I couldn't miss it.

Speaking of actors I like...

I wish I could say that John Malkovich is sort of my neighbour too since he often lives in Paris when he is in the South of France, but I never met him! *sigh*

[so-sharlemaine.livejournal.com]

I sat next to John Malkovich in a bar in Beverly Hills one time when I lived in California! Of course he had his back to me the whole time and was talking to someone else, but it was still cool ;-)

That was a nice little bar too. It was called the Colonial, but it was very French provencial in decor. Excellent wine list as I remember.