Comic Book Films

"Tim Booth – Victor Zsasz"

"Mark Boone Junior – Detective Flass"

"Rutger Hauer – William Earle"

"Linus Roache – Dr. Thomas Wayne"

"Tom Wilkinson – Carmine Falcone"

"Cillian Murphy – Dr. Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow"

"Morgan Freeman – Lucius Fox"

"Gary Oldman – Detective Jim Gordon"

"Michael Caine – Alfred Pennyworth"

"Katie Holmes – Rachel Dawes"

"Liam Neeson – Henri Ducard/Ra's al Ghul"

"Christian Bale – Bruce Wayne/Batman"

"This Summer, Evil Fears The Knight."

"The Legend Begins."

"“Like [Frank] Miller’s Batman, Mr. Nolan’s is tormented by demons both physical and psychological. In an uncertain world, one the director models with an eye to our own, this is a hero caught between justice and vengeance, a desire for peace and the will to power,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times. But Nolan memorably made his mark with the death scene that incites Bruce Wayne’s eventual transformation. There’s certainly no shortage of Bruce Wayne’s parents dying in film and television, but Nolan’s interpretation, which builds for a surprisingly long time before Batman appears in full cape and cowl onscreen, has become one of the defining iterations of the sequence, exploring the man behind Batman more so than most films had before. (As the Washington Post‘s Desson Thompson put it, the film had a “thoughtful, methodically structured narrative that works on you for days afterward.”)"

"In Nolan’s world, Batman isn’t so much a character as an idea. He is a construct that Bruce Wayne creates to galvanize the people of Gotham to improve their rotten lives. His goal isn’t an eternal war on evil, but a targeted campaign against corruption and crime. Most of Batman’s toys were created by Fox for military application. The only thing Bruce adds are black paint jobs. Gordon isn’t so much a piece of expositional furniture as in the previous series, but a partner and confidant for the winged avenger. Only together can they wage war on the mob and clean up the police force. In this Gotham, it takes a village to make a Batman. And that all feeds into the underlying draw of this Gotham. Events and characters have repercussions, because this time the city isn’t a fantasy island. In the previous four Batman pictures, Gotham always went through a subtle or massive reworking. The only major consistency for the urban environment is it was always created on back lots and sound stages. In Nolan’s iteration, Gotham is the scariest thing of all…an American city. Shot primarily in Chicago, Batman inhabits a living and breathing urban jungle. The film still pulls from Batman’s pulpy roots for its backdrop to a point. The initial threat is super-sized organized crime, reminiscent of 1930s gangland. However, Wilkinson’s deliciously broad mobster is soon suppressed by what the filmmakers know really scares us today. The villains are more than just criminals or the madmen of the comics. Scarecrow isn’t a demented gangster like Jack Nicholson’s Joker. No, these are terrorists. The League of Shadows is an ideologically driven organization of non-state actors who want to make a statement by destroying a major American city. You can find that just as easily in a newspaper as a comic book these days. What is Scarecrow’s master plan? It’s to infect the city with a toxin that would literally cause citizens to destroy each other out of fear. In a post-9/11 world, that isn’t exactly a subtle metaphor. Nolan may have originally pitched this as a Batman origin story, but what he made was an unbridled epic reflecting its time. He and Goyer pulled from several comic book sources, most notably “Batman: Year One” and Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s “The Long Halloween” and created a protagonist who more closely resembled his modern comic book likeness. This Batman would not kill, was not created by his villains and he was a worldly super-ninja detective. However, even if it still features a guy jumping off rooftops and gliding to our rescue, he now fights bearded fanatics bent solely on our destruction. It is a theme that would only become better articulated in its sequels, but it works just fine in BATMAN BEGINS. This is the movie that brought Batman back from the dead and reintroduced him as the king of superheroes for a whole new generation. It gave depth to Bruce’s problems while also telling a rip-roaring adventure. Even if it suffers from a far too conventional third act, BATMAN BEGINS’ overall approach was anything but that in 2005. It took the franchise and genr to new heights. And it did come in black."

"Nolan asked a very simple question for what would come to define his Batman movie. Why would a grown man dress up like a bat? This is a query that Tim Burton glossed over in 1989, because the world he created didn’t need an explanation. Nolan took a wholly opposite approach. Citing influences like Richard Donner’s 1978 adaptation of SUPERMAN, he wanted to ground Batman, as much as possible, in a world similar to our own. Instead of Batman being a product of a fantastically gothic world, he’d be a man who could justify costume dress-up as a lifestyle choice. To help with the shift, he brought in life-long comic book fan David S. Goyer to co-write the first draft of the screenplay."

""Batman starts stripping away each layer of Gotham crime only to discover a sicker and more monstrous evil beneath, his rancid city simultaneously invokes early '90s New York, when criminals frolicked to the tune of five murders a day; Serpico New York, when cops were for sale; and today, when psychos seek to kill us all at once rather than one by one."

"Batman has a twisted and repressed relationship with Holmes' Rachel (read: Peter Parker and Mary Jane). The idea is frustratingly underdeveloped, but then, he is Batman; he's not going to go on Oprah to profess his love."

"If Bale's superhero and Katie Holmes' assistant district attorney were more romantically inclined in Batman Begins, you could imagine her telling her gal pals, "There's just something about his chin.""

"The idea that Batman has a dark side has had mixed success at the box office. Michael Keaton seemed disoriented and sad, batty rather than dark. The preening Val Kilmer perfected an air of preoccupation, but you suspected it was merely with himself. I spent most of Batman Foreverworried that any moment Kilmer would stop proceedings to ask "Does my bum look big in this?" And George Clooney? Well, George Clooney looked like a man who'd turned up in fancy dress to the wrong house. The latest model, Christian Bale, offers some hope. We've already seen him as a pale screw-up in Velvet Goldmine and considerably more screwed up in American Psycho."

"But Nolan's film gives us an interesting new twist. After 13 years in the joint, this mugger is up for a parole court hearing, proposing to offer inside information that could convict Gotham's biggest villain Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). It turns into a Jack Ruby-style bloody fiasco; Bruce flees abroad to find himself and brood on who the real bad guys are, and winds up thrown in jail in China where he encounters a mysterious sect of righteous assassins, led by Liam Neeson, who propose to instruct him in the vocation of the masked avenger. This is the movie's big influence: a wholesale borrowing from the new wave of action movies like Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Batman's big credibility gap has always been that he is the superhero without superpowers. Nolan's film imports the concept of Asian martial arts to bolster Batman's credentials. Back home, the young corporate princeling works on his new persona, with the help of his butler and confidant Alfred, amiably played by Michael Caine. As Batman, Bale does look quite creepy, especially close up, his mouth and chin transformed into something bestial - with a growling voice that drops an octave when in character. His batmobile isn't the sleek black convertible of old but a chunkier Humvee-ish ride, more suitable for paranoid urban combat and originally designed for the military by the Wayne group's tech maestro (played by Morgan Freeman). Bale brings to this some of his American Psycho performance, a rich loner compulsively assuming a new identity to purge his self-loathing, and indeed ambiguous loathing of a father who failed to stand up for himself. Certainly, the muddy colours of Nolan's visual palette make everything look appropriately dark - and dark is what so many movies nowadays claim to be, perhaps confusing darkness with factor, however, by casting Cillian Murphy as an unprincipled psychiatrist who specialises depth. (I am tempted to say: you want dark? Try the daylit nightmares of Neil LaBute or Michael Haneke.) Nolan certainly intensifies his own darkness-visible in getting obvious villains off on insanity charges, and is involved in a plot to use a fear-inducing poison gas. Murphy, with his uniquely sinister good looks and sensuous, predatory mouth, is the scariest actor I know."

"In this retelling of the story, Bale's Bruce Wayne is the son of an idealistic American billionaire, an FDR-style patrician liberal who withdrew from the day-to-day running of the family corporation to practise medicine and donate vast sums to establishing a proper public transportation system for Gotham: a gleaming new monorail. As a child, Bruce remembers riding on this train with his parents, instead of in a limo, but Nolan neatly contrives that it is this monorail which, in the denatured and decadent city of Wayne's adulthood, is the scene of Gotham's operatic Armageddon."

"It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me."

"[slurring] Everyone? Everybody? I want to thank you all for coming here tonight and drinking all of my booze. No, really. That's the thing about being a Wayne: that you're never short of a few freeloaders like yourselves to fill up your mansion with. So here's to you people. Thank you. [takes a drink] Um, I'm not finished. To all you phonies, you two-faced friends, you sycophantic suck-ups who smile through your teeth at me: please leave me in peace. Please go! Stop smiling. It's not a joke. Please leave. The party's over. Get out. [party guests leave, revealing Ra's al Ghul's men]"

"They told me there was nothing out there, nothing to fear. But the night my parents were murdered I caught a glimpse of something. I've looked for it ever since. I went around the world, searched in all the shadows. And there is something out there in the darkness, something terrifying, something that will not stop until it gets revenge... Me."

"And perhaps that quest to ground Batman in a believable world is Begins‘ greatest lasting impact. Nearly every superhero origin story to which the words “dark and gritty” could even vaguely apply is framed in terms of its similarity or dissimilarity to Batman Begins—and from Daredevil to Arrow, Batman Begins has a number of direct descendants within the superhero genre. But Begins was originally favored, and continues to be such a source of inspiration, because of its content, too—not just its structure or its style. Batman Begins cared about making its billionaire-playboy hero someone audiences could relate to, even if he had some serious problems to work through."

""Batman Begins" at last penetrates to the dark and troubled depths of the Batman legend, creating a superhero who, if not plausible, is at least persuasive as a man driven to dress like a bat and become a vigilante. The movie doesn't simply supply Batman's beginnings in the tradition of a comic book origin story, but explores the tortured path that led Bruce Wayne from a parentless childhood to a friendless adult existence. The movie is not realistic, because how could it be, but it acts as if it is."

"I admire, among other things, the way the movie doesn't have the gloss of the earlier films. The Batman costume is an early design. The Bat Cave is an actual cave beneath Wayne Manor. The Batmobile enters and leaves it by leaping across a chasm and through a waterfall. The Bat Signal is crude and out of focus. The movie was shot on location in Chicago, making good use of the murky depths of lower Wacker Drive and the Board of Trade building (now the Wayne Corp.). Special effects add a spectacular monorail down La Salle Street, which derails in the best scene along those lines since "The Fugitive.""

"Bale is just right for this emerging version of Batman. It's strange to see him muscular and toned, after his cadaverous appearance in "The Machinist," but he suggests an inward quality that suits the character. Rachel is at first fooled by his facade of playboy irresponsibility, but Lt. Gordon figures out fairly quickly what Batman is doing, and why. Instead of one villain as the headliner, "Batman Begins" has a whole population, including Falcone, the Scarecrow, the Asian League of Shadows leader Ra's Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) and a surprise bonus pick."

"As we saw in Burton's films, the portrayal of Gotham is often directly related to the overall take on Batman. Burton's Gotham was like a twisted nightmare come to life. It was surreal -- beautiful to look at, but not an actual city. The Gotham City of Batman Begins, which was filmed largely in Chicago, is a sprawling Metropolis. It looks like a real city, in part, because it is a real city. The altered Chicago is made to look like a vast metropolis, too big for its own good. So large, in fact, that it feels inescapable. Connecting the sprawling city is a commuter rail built by Bruce Wayne's father just short of his murder. It's one of the few noticeable CG images in the film, but the train plays a vital role. Gotham is vibrant and its demise into poverty is explained in the film. This isn't just a version of New York gone bad, Gotham is a city that has been bludgeoned by corruption and crippled by an insidious economical plague. This is a city that has lost the war to save itself. What hope does Batman have?"

"Bruce has indeed wandered the world and had some training. However, that singular purpose often shown in the comics is not evident at first. He is merely rage without direction. It is Ducard (Liam Neeson), who finds Wayne and gives him the training and guidance he needs to get on the proper path. It should be noted that Ducard is never referred to by his first name Henri, nor does he bear a French accent (thankfully)."

"This is blood for blood, and by the gallons! This is the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days!, they're back, there's no choices left, and i'm ready for war."

"I love hitmen. No matter what you do to them, you don't feel bad."

"That there is one damn fine coat you're wearin'. [repeated on several occasions]"

"It's beautiful Goldie, it's just like I said it would be, only better And when his eyes go dead, the hell I sent him to must seem like heaven after what I've done to him."

"Walk down the right back alley in Sin City and you can find anything..."

"She says her name is Goldie."

"The night is hot as hell. it's a lousy room in a lousy part of a lousy town. I'm staring at a goddess, she's telling me she wants me. I'm not going to waste one more second wondering how I've gotten so lucky. She smells like angels ought to smell. The perfect woman. The goddess. Goldie."

"Guess when I shot you in the belly, I aimed a little too high. [Shoots him in the crotch]"

"I've been framed for murder and the cops are in on it. But the real enemy, the son of a bitch who killed the angel lying next to me, he's out there somewhere, out of sight, the big missing piece that'll give me how and the why and a face and a name and a soul to send screaming into hell."

"He never screams. Not even when the mutt's had its fill. Kevin's guts are lying all over the place and somehow the bastard is still alive, still staring at me. Not even when I grab the saw and finish the job, he never screams."

"Aww, Jerks! They should've shot me in the head...and enough times to make sure. It's so stupid. Everybody knows what's coming but they go through the motions anyway, what a waste of time. Month's fall off the calandar while I breath and eat through tubes. Night after night I wait for someone to come and finish me off. After awhile I realize it's not going to be so easy as that. I'm on my feet for about ten minutes before the cops kick them out from under me. They don't ask me any questions. They just keep knocking the crap out of me and waving a confession in my face, and I keep spitting blood all over it and laughing at how many fresh copies they come up with. Then along comes this worm assistant district attorney who turns the recorder off and says if I don't sign their confession, they'll kill my mom. I break his arm in three places and I sign it. From then on, it's the circus everybody wants it to be. They nail me for the works. Not just the people I did kill but even Lucille and the girls that Roark and Kevin ate and even Goldie."

"Lucille's my parole officer. She's a dyke, but God knows why. With that body of hers she could have any man she wants."

"[During his execution] Will you get a move on, I haven't got all night."

"You can scream now if you want."

"[Last thoughts as he shoots himself] An old man dies, a young woman lives. Fair trade. I love you, Nancy."

"Just one hour to go. My last day on the job. Not my idea. Doctor's orders; heart condition. Angina, he calls it. I'm polishing my badge and getting myself used to the idea of saying goodbye to it. It and the thirty odd years of protecting and serving and...blood and terror and triumph it represents. I think about Eileen's slow smile, about the thick fat steaks she picked up from the butcher's today. I think about the one loose end I haven't tied up. A young girl who's out there, somewhere, helpless in the hands of a drooling lunatic."

"This guy smells awful. Like bad food. Like a corpse left in a garbage dumpster in the middle of summer, he stinks so bad I want to throw up."

"Let go of my coat, Bob."