It sounds like the sort of thing you’d read on a scam Facebook post, but last month I won a 65” 4K UHD Sony Bravia. It wasn’t out of sheer luck though, or from a Niarobi prince who needed help transferring his millions into a New Zealand bank account. I took part in a ten-week, 100-question film quiz run by a local film-related website. All that movie-watching has finally paid off big time.
The first film we watched in 4K UHD was Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. We’re aiming to watch the rest of the trilogy over the coming weeks, particularly for the jaw-dropping IMAX sequences in both the Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. I’ve road-tested these already, and they look immense on the new television.
My favourite of the three films though is the first one. Released in 2005, it very nearly passed me by. Like most people, I was put off by the thought of another Batman film after Joel Schumacher had all but run the franchise into the ground with 1997’s Batman & Robin. I even remember being sat in a bar in Manchester’s Castlefield, when our good friends Vini and Bucko told us to wake up and go see it.
A few days later, we saw the film on Manchester’s IMAX screen, and was absolutely blown away. I had already seen Memento by this point, Christopher Nolan’s art-house breakthrough, but he landed firmly on my radar with this film. And he’s been there ever since. Oddly, I associate Batman Begins with Werther’s Originals, as I found a full, unopened packet of the sweets in that IMAX screening. Maybe somebody forgot about them as their jaw had dropped so much, watching the film.
On first watch, the training sequences at the top of the film feel old-hat. Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is being trained by his mentor Henri Ducard, played by Liam Neeson. We’ve seen this sort of thing before, many times. But now, the scenes seem to have been imbued with some sense of mythology after their use as flashbacks in The Dark Knight Rises.
The narrative jumps in this first hour of the film – between the murder of the Waynes, Bruce’s ‘lost weekend’ years in Asia, and his subsequent training in Bhutan – feel effortless. A lot of time is spent setting up, but it pays off hugely. The orchestral swell at the mid-point of the film, as Batman stands atop Gotham following the scene where he takes down Falcone and his thugs, is sublime – a cinematic and musical statement to announce that a new hero is in place.
Much was said at the time of release that Batman Begins is unique in that it’s the first Batman film actually about Batman. It’s true, and the use of two fairly minor villains in Scarecrow and Ra’s al Ghul helps to not detract from Bruce’s story.
The casting is great – Bale all but reprising his role as American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, and one of the greatest ensemble casts this side of the turn of the century: Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson, Rutger Hauer, Cillian Murphy, Katie Holmes, Ken Watanabe and Tom Wilkinson. That’s a lot of talent, and a lot of Oscars. We even get treated to short cameos from genre-king character actor Shane Rimmer, a young Jack Gleeson who went onto play the evil boy-King Joffrey in Game of Thrones, and one of the oddest castings of Tim Booth, vocalist of ‘90s indie band James, as Gotham serial-killer Victor Zsasz. Cillian Murphy might be the weakest link in the whole picture – too handsome / feminine for the role? You wouldn’t know whether to kiss him or kill him.
My favourite element of the film is its real-world building of the Batman character; a huge influence on Martin Campbell’s reboot of the James Bond universe with 2006’s Casino Royale. Gotham City looks amazing, a real living, breathing city; aside from a couple of too-clean CGI shots of the train entering the city at the opening of the film. Aside from this mis-step, the CGI is spot-on, particularly the drug-induced visions suggested by Scarecrow’s weaponised poison. Throughout his Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan managed to keep everything as practical and in-camera as possible, expertly deploying CGI to clean up and remove cameras from shots, for example.
The new Batmobile, the Tumbler, is awesome and the chase away from the police mid-way through the film might just be one of the greatest action sequences of the decade. It’s a perfect sequence, and doesn’t even feature an antagonist, relying purely on Batman’s need to evade the Gotham PD.
Kudos has to go to Christopher Nolan and his co-writer David S. Goyer, who not only ignored the previous films, but started afresh and rebuilt the Batman legend from the ground up. It’s a stunning achievement, setting the film up for a pair of terrific sequels. It’s a wonder that Nolan could get these films so right, but the DC Extended Universe it led to has so far failed to match his success with the character.
The other integral component to Batman Begins is the musical score, by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. A fairly obvious reflection on Danny Elfman’s thunderous, brass-heavy scores to the Tim Burton-directed Batman and Batman Returns, their collaboration manages to meld traditional, heroic orchestral tropes with modern synthesisers and sequencers. It’s a perfect marriage of sounds, and has influenced every action and super-hero soundtrack since – most notably the Marvel films, which have borrowed heavily from the Dark Knight trilogy in many ways. Who needs innovation and originality when you can build your own formula from something so strong?
Hit: Vespertilio
Hidden Gem: Antrozous
It’s a hard life being a soundtrack nut. Last week, I was waiting online to order a copy of the score to Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter [spoiler alert – as the fourth instalment of eleven films, it was far from being the final chapter] from the always excellent Waxwork Records. At 2am, when I found out that the record was going on sale in the USA at the equivalent of 5am NZ-time, I went to sleep for three short hours before waking up to place my order (a double LP in 
Vinyl Stylus 