More batman Begins reviews.

Hmm, more Batman Begins reviews rolling in. This is from Trektoday.com BBS. Its from Sunday Herald. Warning If you like Bush, don’t read this review, lol.

((With a cast including Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, plus one of the most interesting directors of the last decade – Memento and Insomnia’s Christopher Nolan – it’s clear Warners and DC Comics are out to kick Spider-Man’s webby ass.

As ever, it all comes down to the tone and the story – which is precisely where I think Batman Begins will raise the superhero genre to a new level. This isn’t Adam West, Burt Ward and a rubber shark. It isn’t even Tim Burton’s oddly dated 1989 outing with Jack Nicholson ad-libbing his way through a two-hour music video for middle-aged Prince fans. Advance word is that Batman Begins is the Godfather 2 of superhero action cinema. One Los Angeles Times critic told me he thinks it’s one of the greatest films ever made.

In order to be clocking up this level of box-office success, these movies must be tapping into something in the American zeitgeist. And the obvious cultural reference is the notion of the individual’s moral responsibility in society. The most famous line in Spider-Man comes when our hero’s dear old uncle tells him that with great power comes great responsibility, echoing Winston Churchill’s comments on America’s new super-power status at the end of the second world war. The overriding message from Spider-Man 2 was that even though the right thing to do might make you unpopular and cause you personal physical harm, your moral responsibilities are just too awesome to ignore: an idea that encapsulates Bush’s America more than any art-house movie I’ve seen since George W snatched the White House. America looks at superhero movies and they see themselves: spandex-clad updates of the noble cowboys who can always be relied upon to do the right thing.

Batman wears this notion more comfortably than any character before or since: a spoiled little rich kid who, after his childhood trauma, dedicates his life to rooting out the same evil that snatched his innocence. Substitute Mom and Dad for the World Trade Centre and Batman for the neo-cons, and you’ll understand why I’d bet the farm that this picture will resonate with Americans like no other.

We all live in the post-9/11 world now, particularly those of us who work in the American entertainment industry. The first thing I did when I was asked to revamp Captain America and the Hulk for Marvel Comics was to have them recruited by Homeland Security and shipped to the Gulf to defend American oil interests. Even poor old George Lucas has peppered his ill-advised Star Wars prequels with revolts in the Senate, dark forces taking over the old republic and an endless war being conjured up by a malevolent, all-powerful empire.

It’s no surprise then that the main villains in Batman Begins are The Scarecrow, a rogue academic who generates artificial fear in the people of Gotham as much as Fox News and their terror alerts do in the real world, and Ra’s Al-Ghul, an impossibly rich, international terrorist who declares war upon America from his secret cave on the other side of the world. These myths are at their most potent when set against a familiar backdrop and what could be more familiar than our own world? Even Batman himself, as Nolan and Goyer stress at every opportunity, isn’t doing anything a developed human body couldn’t accomplish. Everything from the bullet-proof costume to the amazing fight-scenes to the contents of his utility belt have been worked out by experts and grounded in realism to the point where even the Batmobile was designed and built by a real-world military vehicle manufacturer as a functioning piece of hardware.

The resurgence in superhero cinema that coincided with the greatest act of terrorism America has ever known is no coincidence. Its true escapist fantasy always thrives in terrifying times, but something more subtle has been going on too: the artificial recreation of a world that’s very real, but with the safety catch of a controlled environment, a happy ending and good triumphing over evil...))