{"id":131,"date":"2005-08-02T09:46:56","date_gmt":"2005-08-02T15:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.codedread.com\/?p=131"},"modified":"2005-08-02T09:46:56","modified_gmt":"2005-08-02T15:46:56","slug":"batman-franchise-reboot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/08\/02\/batman-franchise-reboot\/","title":{"rendered":"Batman Franchise Reboot"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw \"Batman Begins<\/a>\" this weekend. I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed the first Batman<\/a> with Michael Keaton (1989). This movie focuses more on story than we've seen in the past and Christian Bale makes a good Bruce Wayne. I particularly liked the scenes where Bruce Wayne has to pretend he is a carefree, reckless playboy in high society - makes me think how great it would be if Paris Hilton was really moonlighting as a crime-fighting superheroine trained in the martial arts and with an IQ of 200. <\/p>\n

<\/object><\/div>\n

About the only thing I truly disliked was the gratuitous car chase scenes (shot in downtown Chicago, looks like). It's just obvious that someone thought \"oh, we have to have a huge expensive car scene so that we can show off Batman's new car<\/a>\". To be honest, I've always been interested in the darker, edgier, heroic, tragic aspects of the Batman story. I rarely get geeked about all his high-tech gadgets.<\/p>\n

After having a couple days to mull it over in my mind, I was surprised that I didn't mind having three or four different villainous characters in this movie. However I think characters like the crime boss Carmine Falcone<\/a> or Dr. Jonathan Crane<\/a> could have taken center stage here, they were strong enough characters as portrayed. Maybe I didn't mind because none of the villains were cheesy, over-the-top costumed villains like Jim Carrey's Riddler<\/a> or Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze<\/a> in the latter Joel Schumaker debacles, and the villains were integrated in ways that were surprisingly natural. To steal a word from Roger Ebert's review: the characters lack \"gloss\", and that's a good thing.<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/div>\n

I do think it's a shame that they were not able to adapt Frank Miller's excellent 4-part series \"Batman: Year One\" into a movie. That story plays like a movie should with drama, intrigue, heroics, romance and tragedy. However, it is interesting that \"Batman Begins\" has a few traces unique to Year One's story: Carmine Falcone, Jim Gordon's partner \"Flass\", Batman summoning his \"backup\" when trapped in a building, and the final scene (very much lifted out of the comic book). I wonder if someone just took the working script of Batman: Year One and said: \"we need more villains, we need a love interest for Batman and we need to focus WAY more on Batman\/Bruce Wayne instead of Jim Gordon\". Overall, I'm pleased with the way \"Begins\" turned out, but I think a faithful adaptation of \"Year One\" would have also surprised people (including those critics<\/a> who were already surprised).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw “Batman Begins” this weekend. I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed the first Batman with Michael Keaton (1989). This movie focuses more on story than we’ve seen in the past and Christian Bale makes a good Bruce Wayne. I particularly liked the scenes where Bruce Wayne has to pretend he is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,19,3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-batman","category-comic-books","category-entertainment","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}