Batman Begins overlooked?

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Why is it when people talk about Nolan's bat films they never mention batman begins? They talk about dark rises and dark knight but not the original?

Batman begins is arguably the best out of all 3 films in Nolan's franchise. So why is it overlooked compared to dark knight rises and the dark knight?

The trilogy when viewed as a whole are rather good and I find them much better watching than the Michael Keaton movies. Looking up I can see the three DVD boxed set on the shelf.

Michael Keaton batman films were outstanding and batman forever was entertaining. Batman and robin though


I applaud Nolan for how well he tries to show the audience how batman could become a reality in the real world which was especially emphasised in batman begins. It's like any average joe if he tried hard enough could become the dark knight.

That's what I like the most about Nolan's films showing us how batman, characters and the comic book villains would fair in the real world. The burton movies offer you a dark gothic surreal experience. His bat films are just as gritty as Nolan's its just there obviously not realistic.

And had inherited huge amounts of money and an international military technology firm.

All the Nolan Batfilms are overrated, Dark Knight stood out for Heath Ledger's performance and a handful of cool stunts and Rises was a bleak, preachy sermon defending Socialism. Christian Bale was almost as weak as George Clooney (and everybody else) was in Batman & Robin. In fact, the whole trilogy were not so much Batman films as they were run-of-the-mill blockbuster action movies with Batman featured in them. Batman Begins did seem to present some promise in the opening reel, but was never really exciting in the way a superhero film should be. Thanks to Ledger, Dark Knight came close, but then fizzled in the end with the too-long Two-Face story.

There are several celebrated directors these days whose reputations are based on flashy CGI-fest action films with pathetically weak stories, often rehashes of tired, unoriginal ideas. Christopher Nolan, JJ Abrams and Zack Snyder (Superman is a Sun God, not a "dark," whiny Emo) all come immediately to mind. Even when Nolan has a potentially intriguing story to work with, as he did in The Prestige, it just doesn't ever live up to it's promise, and pathetic performances like Bale's (most godawful fake British accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins) don't help.

I think it's probably the best of the lot as an overall film. There are bits of the 2nd and 3rd that are better than the first, but they're also much baggier/draggier than the first.

My struggle was the attempt to ground the idea of Batman in some sort of plausible way (the fighting skill, the technology, the very real effect on his body), yet too many moments of sheer implausibility elsewhere.

Funny - I saw it quite the other way. There is emphasis on the philanthropy of the Waynes. You don't get to be a philanthropist unless you're rich, and the philanthropy of the rich depends on the deprivation of the poor. Bane was clearly a bad man, and the people are not to be trusted, as they'll spoil any kind of revolution - witness Selina's despondency at the actual uprising that she had warned Bruce about. At best, I read it as, even if you're upset with or shut out of the present socio-economic order, better that than following, well, Bane.

My biggest problem is how much Bale reminds of of Peter 'brother of Cristopher' Hitchens, who is quite, quite punchable. And I find his acting very 'look at me - I'm acting! Look at me - I'm losing myself in a role!'. Like Calculon from Futurama.

So true. Most of the superhero type films jump from CGI scene to CGI scene, or worse, the biggest longest and what should be the most important moment of the film is just a menagerie of special effects. I think it was the recent Superman reboot which made me start to really despise the current trend. Some movies manage better than others, I'm not knocking CGI altogether. But overall it has become an experience instead of a story, and with improvements in movie technology, the story will just be that much harder to find in future films.

Prehaps it is. If you look at the box office, The two sequels both made a billion while Batman Begins made about a 3rd that much. I guess nobody thought much of it at the time until The Dark Knight came out. Then everybody had to know what would happen next in The Dark Knight Rises.

To compare Christian Bale's performance to George Clooney's is absolutely insulting to him. Clooney's Batman was more of a joke than anything that no one took seriously and led to Batman movies being dead until Nolan rebooted them, made worse by the fact that those movies were meant to sell toys.

Secondly, the Nolan trilogy wasn't exactly a CGI fest, in fact CGI wasn't used all that wildly, save for a few scenes. Even the plane stunt at the beginning of Dark Knight Rises was handcrafted mostly and the whole setting of Batman doesn't really require that much use of special effects, unlike the Star Trek reboots where that would be necessary. Also, tired and unoriginal ideas have been going on long before Batman was rebooted. In fact, every idea has borrowed from another one.

I'd also like to point out that Nolan made the Dark Knight trilogy not simply a standard action movie but also a bit of a philosophical type of movie with an interesting theme to all of them. For instance the theme of using fear as a weapon to defeat crime.

FWIW Christian Bale is actually British, as are quite a few cast members in the Dark Knight trilogy.

I thought this would have more responses by now....

Comparing Bale to Clooney is LAUGHABLE. Batman Begins revived the franchise after Joel Schumacher murdered everything Tim Burton started. Out went the neon, corny puns, homoerotic undertones, Arnie and his dreadful puns and the Batnipples. The recurring theme for the Nolan films was fear, as well as realism.