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The Nolan Bat Guy movies (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, & The Dark Knight Rises) screened across the weekend starting Fri night. Watching all three a decade(ish) after release & removed from the cultural impact of them, my thoughts on the films have evolved. I'm now a huge fan.
Batman Begins is the least ambitious of them. It's bold in that it hewed to the comics more directly than was the style with comic movies until then - borrowing elements from Frank Millers Batman Year One & imagery from Dark Knight Returns. But it was mostly just an origin tale.
My one complaint with the film is that it really could have used scenes with Batman doing Batman stuff. We see some mob takedowns, but it's light on his day to day crime fighting. There's no room for it in the later films, which made it feel like a lost opportunity here.
The big surprise in the film: Katie Holmes is actually pretty good in it. Watching it 15+ years later, divorced from the ghost Dawson Creek & the noise of marrying that Tom Cruise fellow, she held her own and felt like a lifelong friend (which Gyllenhaal simply doesn't in #2).
The Dark Knight was always my favourite of the three and the only one that I felt held up to repeat viewings. It's a big departure from Begins - stylistically it strips out the grime of Gotham and instead revels in the blues and greys of fluorescent lighting.
Its also very Nolan in that it leans heavily into structure and blatant exploration of theme. There's nothing subtle here. And I love it. It's interesting that TDK and Burton's Batman sequel Batman Returns both explicitly explore duality. Here because Two Face is the villain.
Also interesting is how the entire film is made up of connected vignettes. It doesn't feel at all like a 3-5 act story. It just keeps giving us moments until Batman is forced to become the hero Gotham needs, but doesn't yet deserve.
It's funny that the line about the hero Gotham needs/deserves became the iconic dialogue of the three films. The overall theme of all three films is established in Begins w/ Thomas Wayne telling Bruce that "we fall so that we can learn to pick ourselves up." It's a great line.
Bruce is regularly seen literally falling before remaking himself. He passes his training as he purposefully falls out of the train defeating Ra's. He falls with Harvey Before being reborn as a villain. In Rises he cannot fall any further, so climbs.
The end of The Dark Knight does something that I only remember seeing done at the excellent end of Robocop where the dialogue leads into the name of the movie coming up as a title card on screen. God I love that.
With The Dark Knight Rises working to pay off the themes and character arc established in the first film, it is more a continuation of Batman Begins than The Dark Knight. I used to see that as a negative, but the film plays like gangbusters when watched as a trilogy and not solo.
The death of Heath Ledger is really felt in TDKR. The original plan was for the character of The Joker to return. Instead we have Bane who is great, but not quite as menacing as needed. It did launch a million bad impersonations. Many by me.
Let the games begin!
Let the games begin!
Meanwhile the reveal of Talia is merely functional because the film needed a villain. It's a shame her alter ego Miranda Tate hadn't been introduced in a previous film to make the reveal more resonant.
Through 2017/18 I hosted a podcast about the Batman 1966 tv show for SBS VICELAND called BATMANLAND. It means I've spent A LOT of time closely watching the show. So I always got a kick out of the references sprinkled through the Nolan films.
The mask worn by The Joker and his goons in the bank heist at the start of The Dark Knight references the first reveal of Caesar Romero as The Joker.
You can see the mask worn here by Heath Ledger.
But my favourite reference is Nolan structuring the entirety of The Dark Knight Rises to end the same way as the 1967 Batman feature film. Batman has to get rid of a bomb.
Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb.
Joseph Gordon Levitt is great fun in this. The trilogy has been about Batman's ability to inspire. So it's fitting to see it end with someone picking up the mantle. But we don't get a good sense of what sort of hero he'll be. It feels more hollow than it should be.
Katie Holmes plays so much better in Batman Begins in 2020 than she did back in 2005. In 2020 Anna Hathaway still kinda sucks as Selina Klye/Catwoman.
The ambiguity of the end of TDKR with Bruce at the European Cafe nodding at Alfred. It didn't seem anywhere near as ambiguous. Bruce Wayne definitely lived. Tony Soprano was definitely whacked.
I had a great time watching Nolan's Batman all weekend.
