“You are in Hell, little man. And I am the devil.”
“You’re not the devil… you’re practice.”
Being a Batman fan from around the time of Frank Miller’s one–two punch of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, I tell you this: I am worried.
Warner Brothers is setting up a revival of the franchise of Batman movies, so memorably destroyed by Joel Schumacher in just two films. Some of the news has been good, and some of it bad. The director is Chris Nolan, director of Memento and the underappreciated remake of Insomnia. The casting is beyond top–flight, including Michael Caine as Alfred the butler, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson as the second–level bad guy(!), and Gary Oldman(!) as James Gordon, not yet commisioner of police.
That’s all good. The (potentially) bad? Katie Holmes is the love interest. (I’ll come back to this.) Some things may be too over–the–top to be taken seriously. (One word: ninjas.) Christian Bale is Batman/Bruce Wayne, and I’m a little nervous about him. He’s a fine actor, but… well, I’m just nervous.
And the script is by David Goyer, whom I have previously accused of lacking soul.
Well I was wrong on that count. Having now read the script, I am here to tell you that, excepting perhaps Orson Welles’s abandoned attempt at it, this is the best Batman movie ever written. (Note: That was almost certainly a hoax. Too bad.) It is not perfect, but it’s very, very good.
The script opens with two sequences that play off of each other. We see Bruce Wayne as a child, falling down a well and encountering fear for the first time. And we see Bruce Wayne in his 20s in a Bhutanese jail, attacked by other prisoners and laying them out with only a little effort. He is sent to solitary, but when he arrives he is not alone.
A man named Ducard offers Bruce the thing he has been looking for. “And what am I looking for?” Wayne asks. “Purpose.”
Ducard is second to Ra’s al Ghul, who is head of the League of Shadows. They are dedicated to…
No, not yet.
First, they train Bruce, physically and mentally, to join their league.
The training is intense, but Bruce gets through it. Then they tell him their purpose.
David Goyer went to the University of Michigan. He is a writer, and now director (the upcoming Blade Trinity) in Hollywood, where he has been working steadily for more than ten years. That he made this decision, under these circumstances, shocks me.
Ducard says:
“By blowing out this candle you renounce your mortal life. You renounce forever the cities of man. You dedicate your life to solitude. [...] [H]elp us destroy the city. [...] When Gotham falls, the other cities will follow in short order. Nature’s balance will be restored and Man will finally return to solitude.”
Warners is releasing one of its biggest films next year, and it’s making the bad guys environmentalist nutjobs. Doesn’t it just blow your mind?
Naturally, Bruce Wayne has a problem with that agenda, and his teachers don’t like his lack of obedience. He fights his way out of a mountain fortress, and returns to Gotham City to reclaim his old life, and his role as head of his father’s company, Wayne Enterprises.
We have now reached page 38 of the 129 page script. If the film does not undergo restructuring in the editing room, then it will be about 38 minutes into the film just now. No Batman. The groundwork has been laid (I am, of course, leaving out many details of the story), but Batman does not appear until page 58.
There is a lot going on here, and none of the 129 pages is wasted. Training, backstory, corporate shennanigans, urban decay, political corruption, psychological intimidation, and of course the plot to destroy Gotham City.
There is so much that is good here that I feel like a killjoy complaining, but I have a few complaints.
First, Batman ends up relying too much on his gadgets. The gadgets are cool, and he is a multimillionaire (or billionaire), but I’ve always preferred Batman when he relies mainly on his wits and his skill. Batman does not need to fly, for pete’s sake. (Actually, he glides, but still….)
Second, Goyer fits in a lot of familiar names from the comics. Not just those mentioned above, but also Joe Chill, Carmine Falcone, the Scarecrow, Mr. Earle (although in the comics he was a politician, and here he’s an executive in Wayne Enterprises), and likely several others that I don’t recall from the books. After a certain point, the script becomes overpopulated, and some of the characters, and their places in the mythos, get short shrift.
Third, the Love Interest. Rachel Dodson may be a character from the comics, but if so I don’t recall her. Goyer writes her as more than just the Love Interest, thankfully. She serves as a conscience for Bruce, and has known him since they were children. Nevertheless, she gets dropped into the role of Woman In Peril toward the end, which was certainly unneeded.
Katie Holmes may be about the right age for this character, but she usually plays younger. Much younger. Dodson is a tough Assistant D.A., about 30 years old. Katie Holmes is still playing teenagers this year and, while I like her and think she’s quite cute and sexy, “tough” is not a word I would ever use to describe her.
But the rest is good. Very, very good.
The best treat for me was that Goyer resurrected one of the finest moments from Sam Hamm’s script for Tim Burton’s Batman, which was edited out of the film, or at least so clumsily edited that it had nothing of the impact it should have.
There is a scene where Batman has been knocked out, and one of the bad guys takes off his mask. This is it—terror! His secret identity will be revealed! But of course the baddie sees his face and… nothing. He’s just some guy.
Priceless.
So, I am looking forward to Batman Begins next summer, confident that at least the script is right. As for the rest, we shall see.