Retractions

I must offer a retraction of a previous diatribe on the Internet. As I offered in my caveat here, I had not yet seen Batman Begins, so I meant it when I said "comic book movies are just not going to be 'adult fare' anytime soon, if ever."

I should note here that Bryan Singer in the X-men movies I really feel tried genuinely to approach things with some maturity. The plots were so idiotically cliché, and the action so banally stylized that the ambitions were mostly lost in the shuffle. I enjoyed them, but only because I am one with the Common Man.

I couldn't begrudge "Stanus" for hating it, but I could try and point out the limitations of the genre by shamelessly calling up modern classics as if they were relevant. So now I must eat my words, because I have seen Batman Begins, and it has shown me "adult comic book movie." I think by adult I really mean serious, because there is still a guy in a bat suit here, at least he takes himself and the world he is in seriously. Is it better than "Superman II," the "best superhero movie of all time" according to Stever (and me)? No, but Superman sure looks stupid now, even if he didn't resort to copying Spiderman 2's gimmick for a climax.

Right, Batman is smart this time, and has the compassion and logic to see the causality between poverty and crime. Not quite smart enough to further extend that logic to his own super-trillionaire trust fund status and the poverty around him, but whatever it's not as if he's out to fix the system and fight injustice or anything. Since the plot raises questions without answering them, this kind of reasoning is inevitable. I didn't expect Dostoyevsky when I walked in; it's the movie's fault—and a testament to its strength—that I did expect it by the time the latter half began. I settled for the standard comic-book movie ending, though, and at least Liam Neeson handily embarrasses Lucas for not putting him to better use in the prequels.

The point is that I expected a somber, dark comic book movie, but not a philosophically challenging one. The ending wasn't a good cliffhanger, but the beginning leaves a small taste of the new possibilities for storytelling based on comics.