Watch The Hilarious Honest Trailer Of Batman Begins
See the superhero origin story so good it only took have a script to perfect it – Batman Begins!
Batman Begins is a 2005 superhero action thriller film based on the fictional DC Comics character Batman, co-written and directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer, Ken Watanabe, and Morgan Freeman. The film reboots the Batman film series, telling the origin story of the title character (Bale), from his alter ego Bruce Wayne’s initial fear of bats, the death of his parents, his journey to become Batman, and his fight to stop Ra’s al Ghul (Neeson) and the Scarecrow (Murphy) from plunging Gotham City into chaos. Comic book storylines such as The Man Who Falls, Batman: Year One, and Batman: The Long Halloween served as inspiration.
After a series of unsuccessful projects to resurrect Batman on screen following the critical failure and box office disappointment of Batman & Robin (1997), Nolan and David S. Goyer began to work on the film in early 2003 and aimed for a darker and more realistic tone, with humanity and realism being the basis of the film. The goal was to get the audience to care for both Batman and Bruce Wayne. The film, which was primarily shot in Iceland and Chicago, relied on traditional stunts and miniatures, while computer-generated imagery was used minimally.
Batman Begins opened on June 15, 2005, in the United States and Canada in 3,858 theaters. It grossed over $48 million in its opening weekend in North America, eventually grossing over $374 million worldwide. The film received positive reviews and is considered by many to be one of the best superhero films of the 2000s. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography and three BAFTA awards. It is followed by The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) in a continual story-arc, which has later been referred to as The Dark Knight Trilogy.
Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 85% based on 267 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The site’s critical consensus reads, “Brooding and dark, but also exciting and smart, Batman Begins is a film that understands the essence of one of the definitive superheroes.”[53] At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating reviews, the film received an average score of 70 out of 100, based on 41 critics, which indicates “generally favorable reviews”.[54] On CinemaScore, audiences gave the film an average grade of “A” on an A+ to F scale.[55]
James Berardinelli applauded Nolan and Goyer’s work in creating more understanding into “who [Batman] is and what motivates him”, something Berardinelli felt Tim Burton’s film had lacked; at the same time, Berardinelli felt the romantic aspect between Bale and Holmes did not work because the actors lacked the chemistry Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder (Superman), or Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst (Spider-Man) shared in their respective roles.[56] According to Total Film, Nolan manages to create such strong characters and story that the third-act action sequences cannot compare to “the frisson of two people talking”, and Katie Holmes and Christian Bale’s romantic subplot has a spark “refreshingly free of Peter Parker/Mary Jane-style whining”.[57]
Los Angeles Times‘ Kenneth Turan, who felt the film began slowly, stated that the “story, psychology and reality, not special effects”, assisted the darkness behind Batman’s arsenal; he noted that Neeson and Holmes, unlike Bale’s ability to “feel his role in his bones”, do not appear to fit their respective characters in “being both comic-book archetypes and real people”.[58] The New Yorker‘s David Denby did not share Berardinelli and Turan’s opinion. He was unimpressed with the film, when comparing it to the two Tim Burton films, and that Christian Bale’s presence was hindered by the “dull earnestness of the screenplay”, the final climax was “cheesy and unexciting”, and that Nolan had resorted to imitating the “fakery” used by other filmmakers when filming action sequences.[59]
Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune believed Nolan and Goyer managed to “comfortably mix the tormented drama and revenge motifs with light hearted gags and comic book allusions,” and that Nolan takes the series out of the “slam-bang Hollywood jokefests” the franchise had drifted into.[60] Comic book scribe and editor Dennis O’Neil stated that he “felt the filmmakers really understood the character they were translating”, citing this film as the best of the live-action Batman films.[61] In contrast, J.R. Jones, from the Chicago Reader, criticized the script, and Nolan and David Goyer for not living up to the “hype about exploring Batman’s damaged psyche“.[62] Roger Ebert, who gave mixed reviews to the previous films, and claimed in his review for Batman Returns that he did not believe noir worked in superhero films, wrote this was “the Batman movie I’ve been waiting for; more correctly, this is the movie I did not realize I was waiting for”. Giving it four out of four stars, he commended the realistic portrayals of the Batman arsenal – the Batsuit, Batcave, Tumbler, and the Batsignal – as well as the focus on “the story and character” with less stress on “high-tech action”.[63]
Like Berardinelli, USA Today‘s Mike Clark thought Bale performed the role of Batman as well as he did Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, but that the relationship between Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes was “frustratingly underdeveloped”.[64] Kyle Smith thought Bale exhibited “both the menace and the wit he showed in his brilliant turn in American Psycho“, and that the film works so well because of the realism, stating, “Batman starts stripping away each layer of Gotham crime only to discover a sicker and more monstrous evil beneath, his rancid city simultaneously invokes early ’90s New York, when criminals frolicked to the tune of five murders a day; Serpico New York, when cops were for sale; and today, when psychos seek to kill us all at once rather than one by one.”[65] In contrast, Salon.com‘s Stephanie Zacharek felt Nolan did not deliver the emotional depth expected of “one of the most soulful and tortured superheroes of all”; she thought Bale, unlike Michael Keaton whom she compared him to, failed to connect with the audience underneath the mask, but that Gary Oldman succeeded in “emotional complexity” where the rest of the movie failed.[66]
Film director Tim Burton—who had directed the 1989 Batman film—felt Nolan “captured the real spirit that these kind of movies are supposed to have nowadays. When I did Batman twenty years ago, in 1988 or something, it was a different time in comic book movies. You couldn’t go into that dark side of comics yet. The last couple of years that has become acceptable and Nolan certainly got more to the root of what the Batman comics are about.”
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