Batman Begins (Nolan, 2005): Everyman Screen on the Green, 10.30pm
This is part of the The Cinema of Christoper Nolan season (35mm) and also screens on May 31st. Full details here.
Time Out review: Christopher Nolan’s
films (‘Following’, ‘Memento’, ‘Insomnia’) are about the dependence of
identity on narrative: we know who we are only because of the stories
we make of our own lives. With ‘Batman Begins’, Nolan successfully
applies this mode to a character who is essentially a self-crafted
living legend – and, in the process, reinvigorates a franchise that had
been lost in self-pastiche. ‘Batman Begins’ is a film of two halves,
if not quite dual identity. Nolan’s touch is more plainly evident in
the first hour, a confidently non-chronological narrative covering
Bruce Wayne’s privileged childhood, his parents’ murder and the
self-doubt that leads him from Gotham’s underworld to a Himalayan
backwater, where Liam Neeson pops up to offer enlightenment and ninja training on behalf of mysterious guru-potentate Ra’s al Ghul. Suitably honed, Bruce (Christian Bale)
returns home to take advantage of Wayne Enterprises’ curiously
neglected combat research facilities. Only then does the familiar
pointy-eared persona coalesce and the narrative straighten out
accordingly. The latter half offers a more conventional (and cluttered)
city-in-peril plot, pitching the novice crimefighter against Cillian Murphy’s psycho psychiatrist, ‘the Scarecrow’, whose fear toxin threatens to plunge Gotham into anarchy.
Ben Walters
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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