BATMAN BEGINS AND THE TRILOGY BELT

There's been a lot of excitement and trepidation about The Dark Knight Rises. Rotten Tomatoes has suspended comments on reviews because fans have been threatening critics who dared to not like the film. It's a bit presumptuous of fans to critique a review of a film that isn't even out yet, but the urge is understandable. Christopher Nolan has, over the past few years, completely redefined the superhero genre with his Batman films, and as fans we want him to blow us away one more time with this final entry, but we have a secret fear that it might not succeed. Over the next few day's we're gonna talk about Nolan's batman films, but first lets talk about trilogies...

Making a great film is hard. Many films that start out good seem to run out of steam and then by the end just feel perfunctory. The problem of keeping consistent quality escalates ten fold when dealing with trilogies. Making one great film is hard enough, making three interlinking ones is next to impossible. Most often any sequels are a series of diminishing returns (Back to the Future). Other times the first sequel is even better than the original installment but then the disappointment of the final part seems to leave ultimate greatness just out of reach. Take the original Star Wars trilogy. The first one is quite good. It dazzled the world with a whirlwind of stylistic, genre bending influences that preempt Tarantino by a good decade. Then Empire Strikes Back went deeper into the world and told a more emotionally resonant story. But then Return of the Jedi came out. It’s a good film, and it finishes off a lot of the lingering questions left from previous entries, but it’s just not as good as Empire.

This same pattern has been seen again and again in film trilogies, notably in Sam Raimi’s Spider-man films and perhaps most infamously with the Godfather films. Now the Godfather films are not failures, they represent two wildly impressive achievements in cinema. But what if the trilogy didn’t fizzle out? What if all three volumes escalated in quality? A trilogy that did this, that started strong and topped itself with each entry would be a huge achievement in cinema. With so many trilogies out there and so many film-goers actively interested in the results, one might call it the world heavyweight championship of film. To the winner of this prize would go the trilogy belt.

Like this, but for movies.

Having come up with this theory, I looked around for clear winners.  Now this theory is more for fun than anything else, but there are some rules applied:

1. Escalation of Quality.  The series has to start strong and each successive volume must be measurably better than the last. This excludes Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films as they are of such a consistent quality that choosing one over the other becomes a matter of personal preference.
2. It Must be a Trilogy. There must only be three installments in the overall series with a definitive resolution. Sorry to Star Trek II-IV which tell a self contained story but are part of a larger series (they would also not pass rule 1 as Star Trek III is not as good as II or IV)
3. No “Loose” Trilogies. The installments can tell standalone stories but must be connected in some concrete way, preferably following the same characters or sets of characters. This sadly excludes Park Chan Wook’s excellent Vengeance Trilogy or Spielberg’s supposed Running Man trilogy. In short, if you have to be told that it’s a trilogy—it’s not.
4. Continuity of Creation. All three installments must be said to be the work of one man, or at the very least, the same team. This disqualifies the Bourne films which switched directors after the first film, though it’s on the bubble because the films can be said to be authored by screenwriter Tony Gilroy who invented his own world rather than use the contrived doorstops he was supposed to be adapting (it’s all a moot point as a fourth Bourne film is coming out soon without it’s main lead, taking it out of compliance with rules 2 and 3).

Applying these rules to the great trilogies I find one, and exactly one, trilogy that satisfactorily meets the requirements. Sergio Leoné’s Dollars trilogy.

Started in 1964, A Fistful of Dollars is an engrossing western re-appropriation of Akira Kurosawsa’s Yojimbo (itself a reappropriation of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest). Fistful is an excellent film that reinvigorated a dying genre but its sequel For A Few Dollars More tells a more complex, more ambitious, and more rewarding story. The final installment in the trilogy, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is a great, lightning bolt from the sky masterpiece that makes the first two look like field sketches for a great painting.

 It’s been nearly 50 years since that series concluded and no trilogy has managed to stick the landing and deliver on that promise of escalating quality. Of the incomplete trilogies out there right now, two can be firmly said to be in the running for the Trilogy Belt: Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy films and Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy which we will be discussing here in a sec. Both films had entertaining but, flawed first installment’s and dynamite first sequels. The possibility of Hellboy III being made at all is very much up in the air at the moment, leaving it up to Nolan. If Nolan, who’s action filmmaking facility took a huge leap forward with Inception, has managed to make the impending Dark Knight Rises better than it’s predecessor he would have won the belt for the first time in nearly 50 years. Over the next few days I’ll be reviewing Nolan’s Bat-films to track their overall quality and post a review of Dark Knight Rises early next week.

Which brings us to Batman Begins...

Until 2005, big-screen depictions of the Dark Knight have had a spotty track record. The ’66 Adam West film is gloriously silly, Burton’s wonderful, but Prince filled, 1989 version was good but seemed more concerned with German Expressionism and Citizen Kane references than being about Batman. Burton’s films had great style but light substance. The Shumacer era was light on anything to recommend. For all the supposed darkness these films had, they seemed to always be harkening back to the campy 60’s era of Batman which was fun (and accurate to the tone of the comics of THAT era) but had little to do with the Batman that Bob Kane created in the 30’s, or the one of the contemporary world. There where some attempts, Darren Aronofsky and Frank Millar (author of two of the most important Batman books of all time, also Sin City) notably worked on a film that would have depicted Bruce Wayne as the borderline Travis Bickle level sociopath he'd be if he existed in the real world. It was a ultimately too bold a venture for a studio that wanted a PG-13, but the idea of a more grounded Batman would eventually gain traction with a different indi-darling director.

Enter Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins which finds Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in a Chinese prison camp. Having left his 1% lifestyle to learn more about the criminal element he yearns to fight against. Call it “method crime fighting.” He’s rescued by a mysterious warrior named Ducard (Liam Neeson), a representive of an ancient order called The League of Shadows headed by the mysterious R’as al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). Under his tutelage Wayne learns all sorts of martial arts as well as the discipline he needs. But when Bruce refuses to kill a man the League has found guilty, he breaks away and Ducard becomes his enemy.

Upon returning to Gotham, Bruce reconnects with a childhood crush Rachel (Katie Holmes) and begins to create a separate persona under which to rescue crime-ridden city. He starts by gathering tools he’ll need from his parent’s company’s Applied Sciences division headed by Q – I mean Lucious Fox (Morgan Freeman). Fox provides him with a bullet proof survival suit, a cape made of memory-cloth for “base jumping” and an old prototype “bridging vehicle” called The Tumbler.  Bruce starts off fighting mob-bosses and quickly graduates to supervillian/shrink Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) and his mysterious employers who wish to destroy Gotham city.

It's a lot of plot for one film, but if Nolan is good at one thing, it's finding ways to stuff a lot of plot into a film and make it flow. This is an excellent Batman film. It's true, we've seen origin stories like this before, but never with this level of detail. Where as Spider-Man takes the costume for granted, Begins takes it all seriously. Watching Bruce slowly build the Bat-suit from of off the shelf parts and create his cover identity is honestly more interesting than the actual plot of the film. It's also nice to see that despite all his training, Bruce isn't very good at being Batman at first. He doesn't make every jump he takes and, quite frankly gets his ass handed to him by Scarecrow the first time they meet. We can tell he's on the right track but the film isn't called Batman Knows What He's Doing. It's that constant adjustment to his methods and costume that make the the first hour so good. So compelling are these sequences, that when the full plot finally kicks in, it doesn't measure up.

Now it's universaly agreed that Katie Holmes is the weakest link in the film. Romantic interests have never been the strong suit of Batman stories on the page or the screen. He’s always been something of an asexual character. He’s looking for justice, not love. Still Nolan gives us a love-interest, making her an ADA was a smart choice, casting baby-faced Katie Holmes isn’t. It’s not that she’s a bad actress (she's a blast in Thankyou For Smoking), she’s just horrendously miscast.

But the film has other problems too. Nolan had made only two feature length films prior to this and neither one of them featured the kind of action spectacle required of a film like this. Unfortunately, Nolan's action beats are confusingly put together. I’ve read arguments that the fight scenes in Batman Begins are designed to disorient the viewer, to be impressionistic of how it feels to be attacked by Batman. That’s a good justification, but they resemble the standard 2005 Hollywood style too much for me to completely buy that, and besides at some point I’m gonna want to clearly see Batman punch someone in the face. The action scenes are not bad by any means (the car chase where the Tumbler jumps from roof top to roof top is fun), but they just aren't up to the standard of the storytelling.

What’s interesting about this film is Batman and his incredibly skewed moral compass. Early in the film, long before be becomes Batman, Bruce tries to kill his parent’s murderer. He fails but learns his lesson. later he refuses to kill another murderer because he doesn’t want to be "an executioner." But here's the thing about Batman – He doesn’t kill people, except when he does. The fact of the matter is that Batman’s refusal to kill is a bit of a half-measure in a city as corrupt as Gotham, and in both films, circumstances eventually play out so that he is pushed into doing so. In that executioner scene, Bruce gets out of it by setting fire to the building he’s in. A fire that may very well have resulted in the death of the man he was trying to save as well as several dozen other people. One could argue that he realized that the League posed a threat to thousands, perhaps millions, of lives and that sacrificing a few would be in the interest of the greater good. But that’s the point. Batman is completely inconsistent in applying his moral code. Batman may understand this deep down, but doesn’t want to admit it and it’s intriguing to see how he spins it. (Spoiler Alert) During the film’s climax, he tells R’as al Ghul “I won’t kill you; but I don’t have to save you,” and then leaves him to die in a train crash that he caused. I don’t know what crime Batman would be charged with, but it’s at least manslaughter (End of Spoilers). The huge fascination of Nolan’s films is, despite all the literalism, seeing Batman make progressively more hypocritical choices while still claiming to be a symbol of incorruptibility. We’ll see even more of this in The Dark Knight, and it’s these moral quandaries that make the Batman character special, even more important that he doesn’t seem to mind his obvious hypocritical nature. His flexible nature has served him well so far in the series, but at what point will to start to become a problem?

Now this level realism doesn’t rule the picture. It’s still a Batman film, and a pulpy one at that. The League of Shadows as a terrorist organization was very topical and well done (they even have an ideology reminiscent of Al Qaeda), but it’s still a terrorist organization made up of ninjas using hallucinogenic’s to poison a city. It’s very pulpy in a very old fashion way that harkens back to the characters origins as a thinly veiled rip-off of The Shadow, right down to Batman praying on the fears of his victims. 

Batman Begins isn’t the best possible superhero movie, but it’s done as well the pre-existing, origin story formula can be done. The film’s action sequences may be lacking at times, but the film’s thoughtfulness and attempts to ground the source material in something remotely resembling the real world is admirable and exciting.

Grade: B+


Be sure to follow g-blatt's dreams on Facebook, and check out part's two and three of the series to see how Nolan's Bat-films fit into the Trilogy Belt theory:
Intro / Batman Begins
The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight Rises