Batman Begins

I watched the movie on the first day it played, yesterday. It got rave reviews from my friends who already watched the movie during midnight screening. I noticed that Christopher Nolan directed this movie. For those of you who haven't heard of this guy, he directed a masterpiece, mind-bending movie titled Memento, one of my personal fave.

I anticipated a movie that is deep in character development and filled with surprises typical of Mr. Nolan's movies. This movie is definitely have a lot more depth than that of the Joel Schumacher's version (Batman Forever, Batman & Robin) but not as gothic as the Tim Burton's version (Batman and Batman Returns). The movie started out pretty slowly, kind of what I expected to give a chance for Nolan to build up Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) character. It started with the scene where young Bruce fell down a well that filled with bat and freaked out..it became his greatest fear. Then he's suddenly gone to Himalaya to meet Ducard (Liam Neeson) who then became his mentor and taught him how to conquer his fears and trained him to be a ninja. It turned out that Ducard is a member of "evil" League of Shadows, in which then Bruce refused to join and then he managed to kill everyone there except Ducard who survived at his mercy.

The movie continued with the process how Bruce got his gadgets and how he built the Wayne's Manor. Nolan succeeded in characterizing Bruce Wayne as this vulnerable hero who's living a double life. It won't be until about an hour into the movie that Bruce wore his batsuit. We then introduced to several of his villains, Scarecrow/ Mr. Crane (Cillian Murphy, that guy from "28 days later") was pretty interesting. But the one that sticked up on me the most is Ducard, Ra's Al Ghul and the League of SHadows... it's so interesting to me how they have this vision about the corrupted city (Gotham equivalent to Jkt? :P) but have their own way to resolve the issue (fresh start!, my previous entry ? :P) which is pretty misguided ("We burned London to the ground") even though we knew it works.

The movie kind of tailed off to me in the action part, I was expecting a bit more action, I was probably expecting too much out of Nolan's movie. I also did not get enough surprise or anything grand at the end that I expect out of a 140-minutes movie. Overall, Nolan did a great job lifting the Batman series again, but this one to me did not have enough balance between drama and action so that it might be kind of boring for those of you who's looking for action. The character depth and acting overall is awesome except for Katie Holmes who fell behind the great cast. Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson, Bale, Caine, Morgan Freeman really gives this movie a great cast who gave this movie an edge in the acting side. I like this one a bit more than Tim Burton's version, but some of you may prefer the Tim Burton ones.

7.5/10