(no subject)

[joiedecombat]

I have seen Batman Begins, and lo, it was good.

It was very, very good - easily better than the original one with Keaton and Nicholson, because it is more believable. There's still that very Gotham impression of darkness and decay and ventures into the macabre that wouldn't work in a movie that was meant to be something that could happen in the real world... but believable. And I'm talking as much about the design of Gotham City as anything else, because Tim Burton's was an ugly gothic monstrosity, and Nolan's Gotham looks almost like a real city. New York on steroids, as has been said, with some shadings here and there into some usually fairly subtle retro, less obvious than but not unlike the sort of things they did in the animated series.

And then they go and show us where the hell all Batman's stuff came from - all the gadgets, but not just the gadgets. The Batcave and the car and the bracers and where he got the idea and figured out how to make it work. I was particularly impressed by the reasoning they gave behind him choosing the bat as a symbol. It's not something I would ever have thought of, but it works, and whether it came from any of the comics or from Nolan and his writers, I dug it.

And then there's the Massive Casting Love. ♥ Liam Neeson. ♥ Gary Oldman. ♥ Michael Caine, though I never did quite adjust to not hearing a more upper-crust accent. ♥ Morgan Freeman. Cilliam Murphy is a disturbingly pretty man, emphasis on "disturbingly" - he kept making my creepy-meter twitch. I had no real prior knowledge of Christian Bale, and while I won't say that he's my idea of the perfect Batman, I have nothing to complain about, either. He does a good job. My only complaint, and it's the predictable one, would be against Katie Holmes, who didn't annoy me as much as I feared she might, but did tend to smile on exactly the wrong lines. Her formative lecture in one of the flashbacks would have been more effective if she hadn't been making such a fond "but I love you anyway" face through the whole thing.

But on the whole, love. Love, love, love, and a giddy fangirl squee for the lead-in for the Joker at the end. I can't wait to see what they do with him.

Also, fear me, for I have caught annwyd's icon-making bug, and conquered ImageReady in the process.



Too much Rinoa-bashing makes baby ninja testy.

Comments

[fiddlersgreen.livejournal.com]

I think the bat symbology comes at least partly from some of the comics, specifically Frank Miller's work. (Possibly Batman: Year One...I know they lifted some stuff, but I haven't read it recently enough to say what.)

And yes, I thought it was excellent. I think what I aprpeciated most was that they actually made Batman properly *scary*. Shooting a lot of those scenes, especially some of his first Batman moments, like it was a horror film really worked.