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Batty Bore
 Like
the Elizabethan age, ours may be best
remembered for its entertainment industry. True, we haven’t
produced a King Lear.  We have different ideas of adult entertainment, and
of entertainment in general.
Instead of dramatizing stories
from Plutarch and Ovid, Hollywood now draws inspiration from comic books I
never read, television series I never watched, and old movies I never saw. It
serves up Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Godzilla, Dick
Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Bret Maverick, and, lately, The
Honeymooners, Bewitched, and The Dukes of
Hazzard. The budgets are colossal, the special effects stupendous,
and the sequels inevitable.
In all these efforts Hollywood
skimps on only one thing: scripts. Original, memorable stories, literate
dialogue, and interesting characters would violate the marketing maxims
these movies are guided by. Not that there isn’t plenty of acting,
directing, and technical talent around; but there seem to be no imaginative
producers to coordinate them. Though film is a visual medium, producers now
forget that it’s also auditory. Even a good action film depends on
words, scripts, and therefore writers.
Which brings me to Batman
Begins. For two weekends in a row it has outgrossed all other
movies, and in my small way I’m partly to blame for that. I actually
paid to see it.
Solemn reviewers have said that
this movie is the best, and deepest, of the Batman films. It’s what we
now call a “prequel”: it fills in the time before the earlier
Batman movies, showing how Bruce Wayne came to be Batman, in case
anyone is curious.
![[Breaker quote for Batty Bore: That's entertainment?]](2005breakers/050628.gif) You
may recall the first Superman film handling such biographical
data in the first few minutes, showing the hero’s infancy on the
planet Krypton, where his concerned parents, one of them being Marlon
Brando in a silly wig, get him out of harm’s way by sending him to
Earth, where he is raised by an American couple, before growing up to defend
the American way with his superhuman powers.
Well, Batman is a human and an
Earthling. He has no superhuman powers and doesn’t use guns; his
scruples forbid him to kill even the cardboard villains he faces. After seeing
his parents murdered by a street thug, young Bruce somehow winds up
somewhere in the Orient, where he studies Oriental wisdom and martial arts
under the tutelage of an Oriental master played by Liam Neeson, an Irishman.
One of the key precepts he learns is that you must “become what you
fear,” and since Bruce is afraid of bats, he eventually decides to
become a bat.
All this is explained in rapid
dialogue and dizzying flashbacks, and I’m sure it will all become clearer
to me when I watch it a few times on DVD, backing up frequently. A lot of
depth psychology is involved. Bruce has suffered considerable traumas and
stuff. He also does time in a prison, for what offense I never did figure out,
but he uses his martial arts there to beat up some of the more ornery
inmates.
Batman Begins
being an action movie, the action never stops, and yet it seems to take
several hours before we get to Bruce’s crucial metamorphosis into
Batman. In his maturity he returns to his native Gotham City, a cesspool of
crime and corruption, where by day he is a billionaire playboy whose
headline-making nocturnal identity is unsuspected, except by his faithful
British valet, played by Michael Caine. There are many villains, martial arts
fights, fires, explosions, and a pretty girl, played by Katie Holmes, Tom
Cruise’s main squeeze in real life. Also a big train wreck. King
Lear is easier to follow.
Oops! In all the excitement I forgot
to explain how Bruce came to be a billionaire. His late father was a doctor
who founded a big corporation, and during Bruce’s long sojourn in the
Orient, when he was thought to be deceased, unscrupulous members of the
board managed to gain legal control of the company, but he, Bruce, gets it
back. Morgan Freeman also figures in the fast-moving plot — it moves
so fast that it’s hard to tell whether it has a single extremely
intricate plot or far too many simple ones in rapid succession.
At risk of hyperbole, I’d
venture to say that not even George Lucas has ever made a film quite this
bad.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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