Wayne's World

What happens when you want to remake a film that was popular to begin with? Remakes have always been popular, especially, if you want to remake in the genre, and not retell the same story. Batman Begins is the latest retelling of Batman.

I saw Tim Burton's Batman in 1989. Burton wanted to make Batman darker, not like the campy Batman of the 60s played by Adam West, and sidekick, ever squeaky clean, Robin (played by Burt Ward). He's created such dark visions in films like Edward Scissonhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas. He, too, is doing a remake--he brings his vision to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with Johnny Depp playing the titular Wonka, doing his best, well, Michael Jackson.

I didn't care for Burton's Batman. For one, I wanted a darker Bruce Wayne. I know Michael Keaton can play creepy. He did a creepy job in Pacific Heights, a by-the-numbers thriller with Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine playing a couple that buys a place that they can't afford, and get a tenant from hell, played by Keaton. The plot doesn't make that much sense, except that it plays to suburban fears of strangers. In Burton's version, Keaton comes across as mild mannered, and not that much different from his Batman.

Burton's goal, to me, in Batman, was to achieve a certain look with Gotham. And of course, it was Nicholson doing Joker. I mean, that's supposed to be cool, right? "You can't handle the truth!" and he's doing Joker. Sorry, I didn't care for it.

And, most painful was Vicky Vale, played by Kim Basinger, an actor I just can't abide (to be fair, she was fine in Cellular). She plays the damsel in distress who Bruce is supposed to like, but why? I don't get it. I didn't buy their relationship. After the second Batman film, you could see that Burton just liked the bad guys better. Batman was boring. Penguin was who he cared about.

Fast forward 15 years or so, and Christopher Nolan can look back at what made Burton's Batman tank. As someone curious about Batman, you ask questions. Why does he want to be a "bat"? How does he deal with his parents death? What makes him an angry man? How does he learn to fight? And, as Nicholson himself intones, "Where does he get those fabulous toys?".

Nolan spends the better part of an hour giving us the history of Bruce Wayne, how he played with childhood sweetheart (if you could call it that) Rachel Dawes, who becomes the principled one. How he fears bats. How this indirectly causes the death of his parents. How he yearns to seek revenge, then to seek ways of doing justice. How he meets Henri Ducard who trains him to deal with fear, and to fight. How he leaves when he can't buy into the genocidal beliefs (Gotham-idal?) of the League of Shadows.

It's an interesting choice to cast Liam Neeson, effectively, playing Qui-gon Jin in this film, but the dark version we wished would have appeared in Episode 1. In fact, casting is very interesting. There's hardly an American. Christian Bale. English. Gary Oldman (doing his best Ned Flanders). English. Michael Caine. English (though he's playing English). Tom Wilkinson. English. Cilian Murphy (looking like a morph of Tom Welling and Johnny Depp). Irish. Liam Neeson. Irish, too. Rutger Hauer (yes!). Dutch. Ken Watanabe (ack, wasted). Japanese. Only Morgan Freeman and Katie Holmes are the two major characters that are American.

I don't mind the choice of casting. It goes to show that directors want actors, and if they can sound American, and they can act, all the better.

Nolan also knows we want to know how Wayne gets his toys. The answer, if it's much of an answer, is Lucius, who apparently has nothing better to do than to make war toys so expensive only, well, Bruce Wayne could afford it. Freeman gets to be humorous, even if this role wasn't a stretch.

Oh, did I mention I didn't care for Burton's Alfred, who seemed like he was going to die (and I think he may have). If Nicholson was the uber-actor that made Burton's Batman, then Michael Caine is the uber actor in Nolan's. It's not as juicy a role, but he becomes the anchor to Bruce's past, and has a little bite to him, presumably because Caine wasn't going to do his best Anthony Hopkins (think: Remains of the Day).

And, Katie Holmes. Perhaps a bit too saccharine, and too cute, but at least they didn't have her playing the ninny that Basinger played. In fact, much of the time, they aren't on screen together. Her Dawes isn't that interested in a Wayne that's lost his ideals (did he ever have it?). They don't play up the romance, and the film is better for it.

Ah, the action scenes. Most of the fights take place in shadows. You don't see fights as much as blurs. Nolan's Batman hides in shadows. He pops out. His enemies fear him. That cape is just too cool. And yet we know Wayne has one person he's not sure he can beat, which is Ducard, or is he really R'as Al Ghul? And that's the one demon he must confront. Nolan presents Batman's struggles as internal, whereas Burton's Batman...is he struggling? He's hiding behind the mask, and that's part of Burton's conceit.

So the ending seems like it was lifted out of the second Spiderman, with a runaway train. It still works as tension. There are so many things that I found hard to deal with in Burton's Batman that Nolan addresses. Who would have thought Nolan could tell such a visceral, linear story. He who gave us the backwards-telling Memento, and the jumbled, Following. When Darren Aronofsky backed out, was Nolan really able to give us a Batman that we wanted to watch? Apparently so.

We're not done with the plethora of superhero films. Out soon are Fantastic Four (doesn't look good), Superman (who knows?), Sky High (going to make Robert Rodriguez look good). Right now, Batman Begins is the best of the bunch. You know there's a sequel. That's no joke.