Classic Movie Review : Batman Begins (2005)

Warner Brothers (who own DC Comics) doesn’t exactly have a stellar track record for making great Batman movies. It’s not always their fault, but most of the time it is. For example, the choice of Zack Snyder to direct the turgid Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was (on surface) reasonable. Snyder’s a self-declared comic book nerd. He looooved the characters. But rebooting Batman on the tail end of Christopher Nolan’s glorious run was a mistake.

Zack Snyder is not good and shouldn’t be trusted around big budget films.

Nolan’s adaptations were the only instance of Batman movies that were great in-and-of-themselves and Warner Brothers decided not to learn anything from them and handed creative control to a less talented storyteller. To understand how Christopher Nolan saved Bruce Wayne from cinematic mediocrity, you have to first understand why he wanted to make Batman movies and many of these answers are in the first film of the trilogy: Batman Begins.

Batman Begins is half an origin story and half a classic Batman tale, where Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) battles Scarecrow (the always excellent Cillian Murphy), a martial arts weirdo named Ducard (Liam Neeson) and the League of Shadows. It’s basically a two hours long celebration of Bruce Wayne’s emotional complexity, which focuses on a very important (and oddly groundbreaking) idea that we’re going to discuss today: making Batman relatable.

Now let’s get one thing out of the way. Batman is human and flawed, but he is not a relatable character. A billionaire who wears a cape and fistfights the downtrodden in the street for foolish emotional pursuits that serve no one but him would trend on Twitter for all the wrong reasons. But Christopher Nolan thought a superhero without superpowers was the most relatable thing in the world, so he went for it and he… kind of makes it work against all odds?

Nolan’s strategy to humanize Batman is clever and multilayered. For the first hour, Bruce Wayne is Bruce Wayne and he does not exactly do Bruce Wayne things. After the murder of his parents, he does what every dumb kid looking for meaning does when they are too emotionally immature for adulthood: he travels the world and gets recruited into an Eastern martial arts cult. This is relatable because a shitload of us has done at least one of these things.

This establishes emotional vulnerability. Wayne is not just haunted by the murder of his parents, he’s also confused in regards to what he could fucking do with his life. He disappears from Gotham City for seven years, becomes a killing machine and yet does not gain an ounce of emotional maturity. This culminates in this hilarious scene where he clumsily tells his old paramour Rachel (Katie Holmes) he did not just really walked out of a pool with two bimbos.

The scene both reflects Bruce Wayne’s emotional clumsiness and introduces a basic existential crap that we all love about Batman: it’s what we do that defines us and all that. The other part of Christopher Nolan’s strategy to make Batman relatable lies in the end result of Batman Begins: it is not really a resounding success. Half of Gotham City is destroyed, Wayne Manor has burned down and he had to let a bad guy die in order to prevent greater chaos.

I don’t know about you, but I sure wrecked half of my life and purposefully overlooked my personal ethics a couple times in order to reach a goal I had set for myself. In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne does not cleanly succeeds at anything except maybe at making a hostile takeover of his father’s company. Batman might be a force of nature. An idea that makes people feel safe and criminals feel fearful, but behind that idea is a dude who constantly risks everything.

That is pretty fucking relatable.

If Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is such a resounding success, it’s partly because he dedicates an entire movie to making you care about an emotionally damaged billionaire with poor understanding of how crime works. He does it by making him more like us (or more like we’ve once been): immature, vulnerable and confused at to how the world works. Batman Begins is awesome because it makes Batman less like Batman and more like your cousin Kyle.

8.3/10