The Times They Are a Changin’

Bruce Wayne (Bale) witnesses his parents’ death by a tramp – and runs away from home at the age of 20 odd – goes around the world trying to fight crime in his own way, which involves getting thrown into prison and beating the shit out of anyone who comes his way.. bale is intense as he plays the brooding son who blames himself for what happened to his parents and also thinks of fighting crime as a personal vendetta.. his friend, essential love interest, blah blah, rachel dawes (played by katie holmes and who is one of the films weak links) is one of those eternal do gooders who trys enlisting wayne into her do goodness trip and fails a bit.. she looks cute, but thats abt as much as happens.. complete waste of time in mah opinion, a character which shd have been done away with.. but then the damsel in distress angle wouldnt have worked without it.. anyways, the film also does away with the standard one mega villian theme of the bat series and introduces a whole bunch of them (also in a way in keeping with the whole bat series philosophy) – except that none of the villians are the theme villians (a la mr freeze, riddler, joker, penguin, etc).. ras al ghul who heads the shadowy league of shadows – who claim to be the eternal do gooders ridding the world of evil (the london fire was their doing) is the main one – played by ken watanabe (the cameo) and liam neeson (the real one), then there is the psychopathic scarecrow (cillian murphy) whose eyes are quite chilling, the mob boss (tom wilkinson), the money mad bureaucrat who runs the wayne corporation (rutger hauer).. of course, on the side of the good you have our bat, the bat’s butler alfred (wonderfully played by michael caine), dr lucius fox, scientific wizard and q to the batman’s bond (morgan freeman), the lady love rachel dawes, the good cop lt gordon (gary oldman) and so on..

The film is nice in the sense that everything is tacky, like you would expect when the batman was starting out (and not in the adam smith cartoon series kind of way).. the batmobile is a bulky vehicle (a humvees wet dream is how ebert describes in), the bat mask breaks initially because of an error in the manufacturing tolerances, the bat cave is a real cave beneath the wayne mansion, the bat suit some jazzy material that lucius fox has made.. the batman once he gets his toys and his mask becomes the standard one that we know of.. bale fails a bit in trying to play the playboy wayne (in response to alfred’s question of what does bruce wayne do with his time).. however, the attempt to make the batman real, the one that is quite scary and the dark knight as opposed to the cheery superman.. in all the film makes him a superhero coming to terms to with his needs and he is the only superhero who does not get genetically modified for his super hero tricks – a bit of flashy technology yes, but no changing of the genetic makeup..

Anyways, the story as it runs once wayne becomes batman is that ras al ghul is planning to eliminate gotham city as it has become the bed of evil and in the league of shadows lingo it meant kaboom time.. they use a drug that the scarecrow has to bamboozle the minds of the gotham citizens and make them into loonies.. how the batman saves the day is the rest of the story..

overall a good movie, one of the good movies to have come out last year..