When Tim Burton announced his pick for the lead
role in Batman (1989), he was met with consternation
and utter chagrin. It's no wonder. People wondered how a skinny,
pug-faced weasel like Micheal Keaton could possibly pull off the
part of the coolest superhero of comic lore. This guy was Beetlejuice.
This guy was Mr. Mom. Aside from skewering villains on his mucronate
eyebrows, Keaton couldn't possibly be expected to fight a war
on crime.
But
he did, upstaged as he was by Jack Nicholson's Joker, and silly
as he looked in that fake muscle suit. Most directors would ask
their lead actor to bulk up or go on a protein-egg diet when training
to be an action-hero, but not Tim Burton! Tim Burton is unorthodox!
Tim Burton defies convention! Tim Burton is weird! And what social
statement could be more acute than a flab-happy loser wearing
sharply-defined rubber muscles. "Man!" audiences exclaimed,
"that suit is ripped!"
Following in Keaton's footsteps came Batman Kilmer
and Batman Clooney, who strictly adhered to the skinny Batman
tradition. But by this point, Burton was no longer at the wheel.
The dubious Joel Schumacher had taken over, and boy-oh-boy, did
he love butts! At least Burton had the decency not to feature
shots of Keaton's derriere. We know the Batsuit has rubber butt
muscles built in; we don't need it proven to us. But Schumacher
had other ideas, and the third and fourth Batman installments
were to be desultory celebrations of the male body. Or, rather,
they were to be desultory celebrations of a rubber mold of a male
body.
Now, don't think that my only grievances with
the existing Batfilms are of a superficial, masculinity-oriented
nature. I have plenty of complaints. It's just that I need to
establish how much better-suited the next Batman will be than
the previous three frauds: Keaton, the comic; Clooney, the winsome;
and Kilmer, the lips. All of these actors are respectable in their
own right, but none are Batman. Batman should be a Pscyho. Batman
should be consummately dark and austere. Batman should have starred
in Newsies.
Christian
Bale to the rescue! Bale doesn't need rubber butt muscles! Bale
doesn't need a glow-in-the-dark, fin-flagged, sissy-mobile! Bale
kills people with chainsaws and eats their brains! Bale slays
dragons and probably eats some of their brains too! Bale dances
and sings his own songs! And yes, he was in Newsies!
The steely-faced Bale will undoubtedly breathe
new life into the tired figure of the Dark Knight, but can he
alone revive the cinematic legend of Batman? Probably
not, and, thankfully, he is not alone. Helming this new era of
Batman is director Chris Nolan, the man responsible for The
Following and the masterful Memento. He is also
responsible for the turgid English-language remake of the Norwegian
film Insomnia. I guess all the subtlety was used up in
Norway, because Nolan didn't seem to find any for his version
of Insomnia. If you want to see a well-crafted thriller,
skip the bloated American starfest and see the superior Norwegian
film.
Enough
digression. I'm willing to forgive Nolan the Insomnia
misstep; he has a clean record, and, honestly, it was more the
fault of the screenwriter than it was the direction. Nolan has
an undeniable sense of style and an apparent talent for handling
his actors, and I think he'll give the Batman Begins
script the treatment it deserves. Speaking of the script, I read
it, and this article was supposed to be a review of it. So here
we go.
Batman Begins tells the story of how
Bruce Wayne, the afflicted young heir to Wayne millions, becomes
Batman, the afflicted middle-aged champion of Gotham City. Bruce
is plagued by memories of his parents' murders, and he has decided
that the best way to cope with his grief is to spend his millions
of dollars traveling around the world in an attempt to discover
himself or something. Who wouldn't, right?
The film opens with Bruce contained in a Chinese
prison, where he is brutalized by guards and from which he has
no hope of escape. Enter Ducard, a mysterious Jedi knight of ambiguous
European descent, who rescues Bruce and takes him to the even
more mysterious crime lord Ra's Al Ghul. These two shelter the
impressionable Bruce and train him as one of their own, but then
the awful truth is revealed: They're bad guys!
Luckily, they trained Bruce too well, and he
defeats them and escapes to Gotham City, where he uses his training
to become the Batman and end the city's reign of crime. This is,
of course, enthralling.
The
screenplay, penned by David Goyer, provides an intriguing introduction
to the Dark Knight's crusade, and the degree to which Bruce Wayne's
character is developed exceeds the level in all four previous
films combined. Goyer surprises with a good story and appealing,
if not realistic, characters. More on the Batman script in a moment,
but for now I think it's time for a tangent...
David Goyer is the man who crafted the Blade
trilogy, another comic book adaptation. If you haven't seen Blade,
and you like action movies, and you're in kindergarten, see it;
you won't be disappointed, and you'll understand all the words.
However, for those of us with discerning tastes, or even those
of us who have read a book, Blade typifies the zenith
of bad movies. Blade is about vampires, and in case that's
not grounds enough to dismiss it as garbage, consider this: Every
character in the movie is a vampire or on his or her way to becoming
a vampire. I'm serious. No, really, I'm serious. This is the kind
of material Goyer traditionally writes.
There
is one aspect of his writing to which I will credit Goyer: He
knows his audience. Anyone who pays to see Blade, Goyer
reasons, must be the kind of benumbed simpleton who slips into
a frothing, semi-comatose state every few minutes and awakens
clueless as to where he is and how he got there. Goyer accommodates
them. He has his characters repeat the word "vampire"
endlessly, as if to scream, "Hey, idiots! You're in a vampire
movie!"
If this sounds like cherry pie to you, then go
rent this movie immediately; it's every bit as good as my description.
And for those of you wondering why I would see such a movie, I'll
now point out that I didn't. My roommate was watching it, and
I happened to catch a few minutes while I was packing his lunch
and tying his shoes for him.
Maybe I’m being overly critical here. To
his credit, Goyer does manage to write a mean action sequence.
And the Batplot is a good one. The only real downfall to his writing
is dialogue. The characters, Bruce Wayne especially, frequently
lapse into ponderous, humdrum rhetoric. The script is full of
stuff like this:
BRUCE
WAYNE
I traveled the earth to find the man within the shadows, but instead
I found the shadows within the man.
DUCARD
You must cast off the man, but retain the shadows, for a shadowless
man is simply a man, but a manless shadow is something else entirely.
BRUCE
WAYNE
I shall become the shadowless shadow, the manless man.
DUCARD
We should go see Darkman. It rules.
Darkman indeed rules, but aside from
that, the dialogue is brimming with inflated language, striving
for importance and falling ultimately flat. Whenever the script
calls for a solemn moment, ostentation sets in, and whoever is
speaking turns into a sermonizing moron.
Remember the first day of class in, oh, say,
third grade or so? You had to compose an essay about your summer
vacation, and it had to be 400 words, right? Of course, as you
realize now, and probably realized then, no third grader can write
400 descriptive words about anything, so you did everything you
could to stretch those humble little sentences of yours into rambling
literary peacocks. Well, that’s how David Goyer has chosen
to write his Batscript. He’s going for the old third grader
approach, undeniably a tempting method. I can just see Goyer sitting
there at his computer with a thesaurus in his lap, much as I am
doing now, squealing over every aureate word he finds, much as
I just did when I wrote “aureate.” How lugubrious.
This is the first draft, however (of Batman
Begins, not of my review), and I have read that Chris Nolan
gets final say on the shooting script. It’s likely he'll
change some of the grandiloquent turd lines. I trust Nolan and
his directorial prowess, even if he did botch Insomnia,
for which I will never forgive him, as I said before.
So we’ve probably got a good movie coming
our way. Start anticipating it as soon as you can. Batman
Begins looks to be solid entertainment. This movie is promising
a lot (such as the renewal of the Batman film franchise), and
I’ll be surprised if it disappoints. Speaking of disappointments,
there is one I suffered while reading, and it concerns a minor
twist toward the end. But that’s what we call a spoiler,
and I won't reveal it unless you beg me. It would absolutely ruin
the ending, and thus, your life, as it did mine.
Good script overall, though, with an enormous,
mostly talented, cast and plenty of Batflourishes here and there.
Christian Bale gets to use some neat-o gadgetry, courtesy of Morgan
Freeman, whose character is readjusting to city life after just
being released from Shawshank prison. Tom Wilkinson plays against
type as a bad guy. Darkman’s in it, and that’s always
a plus. Michael Caine… I don’t really have anything
to say about Michael Caine. And Rutger Hauer plays a renegade
Replicant who wants to wrestle control of Wayne Enterprises. And
that brings me to one final point of discussion (always trust
Rutger Hauer’s inclusion to segue).
Nolan says he wants to make this movie like Blade
Runner, whatever that means. Is he trying to impress us by
referencing what everyone knows is a good film? Ed Wood wanted
to make his movies like Citizen Kane, but people knew
better than to admire his productions because of that. But then,
Christopher Nolan is no Ed Wood, and Ridley Scott isn’t
quite Orson Wells, although he came awful close with that movie
about the broads who drive their car off a cliff. Anyway, the
point is, Blade Runner rules; see it. And you should
probably see Batman Begins when it comes out, too.
-Harris
