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I wouldn't ordinarily combine commentary on two movies, but we
saw them both in the same night, they're both based on comic books (from D.C.
and Marvel respectively), they're both "origin" films which are hoping
to launch (or relaunch) franchises, and they're both aimed at the same audience
but take such entirely different tacks it's hard not to compare.
I'll say up front that I am not a professional
comic book reader. For me, comics are something I
enjoyed as a kid with a bowl of cold cereal on a Saturday
afternoon. My brother, in contrast, has probably spent
enough on comics and graphic novels over the years
to have bought a good-sized truck. He can tell you
how many versions of Superman's origin there are,
who wrote which, what the villains have done, and
which reboots have crossed over into what other universes.
I'm still waiting to borrow the one where Supergirl
dies just so I can read it. (I even offered to let
him hold it and turn the pages with tongs so I wouldn't
soil it. No dice.) So I'm not approaching either storyline
with a nitpicker's magnifying glass to ask why so-and-so
was written thus-and-such a way, mainly because I
wouldn't know.
 Batman
Begins is definitely the superior film. Much
like Spider-Man, Batman Begins spends
almost 40% of its script on setting up how an ordinary
man accepts the responsibility of becoming an extraordinary
crimefighter. Familiar names are dropped (Lucius
Fox, Joe Chill, Commissioner Gordon in his beat-cop
years) and the murder of Bruce's parents is faithful
to the standard story. But unlike Peter Parker,
Bruce Wayne has no obliging radioactive mutant fairy
godspider to grant him Matrix-like abilities.
He has to earn everything the hard way: training.
This verisimilitude is the major hallmark of the
movie. Batman's story unfolds as though it could
actually happen.
Told in an interestingly involuted
fashion, a lushly Art Deco Gotham is revealed to be
corrupt to its overripe core, and owned by a local
crime lord; Bruce is haunted by the fear of bats and
the guilt over his parents' murder. After many years
of petulant lashing-out, he's finally tempted by Qui-Gon
Jinn to join a League of Shadows, which is basically
a very well-choreographed band of ninja vigilantes.
(He was played by Liam Neeson with a similar li'l
goatee, I never did catch the character's name, he
was acting like an arrogant Jedi, and using a sword
for most of his screen time. Qui-Gon it is.) The League
of Shadows wants to be a League Of Justice Of Our
Own. Bruce finds freelance executions to be icky,
and leaves (but not before blowing up the temple-like
house on the Nepalese hillside and saving Qui-Gon
from burning to death). The crime lord has steadily
bought up Gotham's cops (and robbers), and employs
a pet psychiatrist -- a slithery androgynous fellow
who looks like he's channeling Johnny Depp in Sleepy
Hollow through Smallville's Tom Welling
and adding a little Ed Grimley for spice -- to declare
any of his jailed cronies "insane" so they
can be safely shipped to Arkham Asylum. Rachel, the
assistant DA who was Bruce's childhood friend, tries
to object to this. Rachel is played by teenybopper
nobility Katie Holmes with the dramatic impact of
a Cabbage Patch
doll,
so the bad guys are understandably unimpressed.
Re-enter Bruce, on a mission to clean
up Gotham. He builds his persona/outfit a piece at
a time with the help of gadgetmeister Fox and clever
butler Alfred. (I'm sure nobody will get the reference,
but there was a old Wonder Woman comic where as a
teenager, she had to find each piece of her costume
in various risky parts of the world and could only
earn each item by completing some dangerous task.
I can't imagine the filmmakers are familiar with that
story, but it's a nice parallel.) There are more similarities
to Spider-Man here too, as Bruce has to find
a symbol, design a costume, and learn the limits of
his abilities and his toys. The gadgets are cool without
being too unbelievable. (Except for the car. The Batmobile
is reimagined as a Bat-tank, ugly and rough and with
a strange firing sequence which requires 15 seconds
of the driver taking his eyes off the road to get
down on his elbows to shoot.)
Some of the dialogue, especially in
the beginning when the crime lord is talking about
fear to a college-age Bruce, is clunky and obvious,
designed to push forward the plot rather than to sound
like human beings talking, although that's how a lot
of comic books read in the day. Once the expository
speeching is completed, the real action gets underway,
and that's much more interesting.
The Buddhist Jedi Ninja training makes
Bruce rip apart each fear, each layer of guilt, and
face it until he owns it so that it no longer interferes
with his life. He rebuilds, re-creates himself psychologically
to accept his past and to embrace his new mission.
But it's his mission, not Qui-Gon's -- he won't
murder or destroy on a whim or on someone else's command.
So when he returns to Gotham, he's filled with his
own purpose, ready to find the tools and allies to
proceed.
Along with Alfred and Fox, those allies
are the previously-mentioned featherheaded love interest
Rachel and a completely submerged Gary Oldman
as Officer Gordon. (Oldman is just fantastic at that
kind of acting. He wore minimal makeup or latex, if
any, and he didn't do anything special, and once I
looked on the IMDb and realized who it was he clicked
immediately. But not knowing it was him? I would never
have guessed that was Sirius Black in the trenchcoat.)
Gotham's good guys are way outnumbered -- Gordon's
partner is openly on the take from the crime lord,
or maybe he was a bad guy who openly rode with the
cop -- but keep fighting even as they're drowning.
Batman's goal is clear: he wants to
make Gotham clean and honest again. He goes after
lower-echelon punks and works his way up the scummy
ladder, passing evidence to the police and getting
the criminals arrested so they can go through the
actual justice system. This is important to Bruce.
He's not a mere lone hunter; he's trying to help the
law enforcement officers who are overwhelmed.
In keeping with this very realistic Batman universe,
one of the "bad guys" is a garden-variety
boardroom shark, played by a square-jowled Rutger
Hauer. The head of the Board works through the film
to take Wayne Enterprises public, and to invest in
sectors like weapons research, to assure the future
and profitability of the company. Of course, no comic-book
movie would work without some costumed nutjob, and
the Scarecrow makes a small but important appearance.
And it is a comic-book movie, for all
its plausibility. Gotham cop cars get flipped and
battered and torn and bashed in the misguided pursuit
of the Bat-tank, which, given Bruce's commitment to
rule of law, kind of bothered me. Parking garages,
buildings, and apartments are torn apart without consequence.
(One cop car is skidding across a roof gouging up
the tiles, and all I can think is "oh my god
all that slate! That's going to be insanely
expensive to replace!" Gotham City Council is
going to have to increase its repairs budget exponentially.)
The League of Shadows claims responsibility for sacking
the empires of Rome, London, and the current Yankees
lineup.
What makes Batman Begins so
rich is that it takes itself seriously. The characters
move from point A to point B as genuine people would,
without narrative gimmicks or shortcuts. (Other than
infinite cash, but even that gets an attempted explanation.)
It feels honest. The acting is strong throughout,
with the exception of Holmes, who wasn't annoying,
merely pointless. Gotham feels gritty and sad. We
see the beautiful WayneTrain, swirling with curves
and shiny with chrome and promise after the Depression,
rattling through bad neighborhoods and covered with
graffiti like it just escaped from Fort Apache
the Bronx. The details matter. Alfred nags Bruce
to keep up the family name and reputation -- to stay
a visible playboy, to take up a sport to explain his
bruises and strange hours, to cover his purchasing
tracks for the Bat-accoutrements. The film is well-paced,
taking just the amount of time needed for the protagonist
to become a hero, and then the hero has a proper adventure.
The "proper adventure" is
something missing from Fantastic 4. It's technically
as much of a "beginnings" movie as Batman
Begins or Spider-Man, but everyone spends
a lot of time Becoming and precious little Being.
The four heroes bicker, whine, argue, nag, complain,
snipe, show off, and generally try to dodge the great
responsibility which has come with this great power.
It takes the moron of the movie, Johnny Storm the
Human Torch, to be the cheerleader for being superheroes. "Am
I the only one who thinks this is cool?" he asks
his petulant sister Sue Storm and worrywart geek Reed
Richards (the Invisible Woman and Mr. Fantastic respectively).
The Storms, Richards, and pilot Ben
Grimm join another rich scientist type, Victor von
Doom (who knew orbital engineering was so profitable?),
on von Doom's personal space station to observe the
effects of a Plot Complication Cloud. (Okay, so only
those five were up here? No redshirts, no NPCs, no
lab assistants on a highly technical and complicated
scientific mission? On a space station big enough
to have gravity plating, shields [I have to assume
they were talking about metal, not forcefields], and
a Bridge, there wasn't even a janitor to sweep
up the cosmic dust from those cavernous hallways?)
Moving on. The five start sprouting
gifts, or problems, depending on your point of view.
Whiny, self-doubting, spineless Reed becomes rubbery,
allowing him to be infinitely flexible in his desperate
attempts to squirm away from anything involving adult
emotional responsibility. Sue has two entirely unrelated
tricks: she bends light around her so she can't be
seen, and she can create and hold force fields. Johnny
can hit something like four thousand degrees Kelvin
and can fly, which sounds to me more like he should
have been called the Human Roman Candle. Ben, the
salt-of-the-earth Brooklynite, becomes a walking pile
of rock. (The Hulk should be so lucky.) Victor lives
up to his potential as tin-plated dictator and slowly
morphs into living titanium.
If any of these sound vaguely familiar,
it's because The Incredibles did this much
better last year. (We will now pause for a moment
as everyone matches up the Four with the Parrs.) The
difference is that, like Batman Begins, The
Incredibles believed in itself. It had a story
to tell, and a universe which hung together. Fantastic
4 just sort of shoves it all out there and asks
us to accept it. Reed is famous but bankrupt, according
to a magazine headline, yet can still afford a four-story
penthouse apartment in Manhattan and can have
a cosmic-storm simulator and resonance chamber built
in a week or so. The Four are mobbed in the streets
but nobody's figured out what building they're all
living in. Engineers and scientists can make gazillions
with their inventions, and can be unmade overnight.
Batman is built on the classic
structure of the Hero's Journey. The hero starts out
in familiar surroundings, something happens to set
him on his quest, he leaves and undergoes many trials
with the help of a wise mentor, he achieves his quest,
and brings back to the familiar surroundings the prize
and knowledge. Fantastic 4 should follow this
pattern as well -- but it doesn't. There is almost
no growth from anyone until the last 10 or 15 minutes,
when the three male heroes get over themselves. The
bad guy just becomes more evil and demented, losing
what little subtlety and sophistication he had. Sue
doesn't change at all; she just waits for Reed to
get his act together. They don't examine themselves
or look too deeply into why each one morphed as s/he
did, or try very hard to fix their underlying personality
problems.
There's one thirty-second montage where
the Four are sort of shown having adapted to their
abilities -- Reed stretches across the hall for toilet
paper, he walks in on Sue when she's inexplicably
invisible after a shower, Johnny pops a Jiffy-Pop
in his hand. What we should have seen is a growing
accumulation of scenes where the Four (or five) are
actually getting to use their powers on a daily basis,
coming to understand these new parts of themselves,
and getting a taste of what it might be like to enjoy
living like this instead of rushing back to boring
normality.
Frankly, though, they're fairly boring
even as mutants. Poor Ben -- the man made of stone
-- is the only one with any personality. (Michael
Chiklis does a very good job bringing the big costume
to life. Excellent decision to put a guy in a suit
rather than CGI.) His wife abandons him, even after
seeing the good he can do (Bitch.), and his mourning
for her becomes part of his misery at being trapped
in a body only capable of blunt force. Reed is a math
geek. Um, and that's about it. Johnny is a young daredevil.
Um, and that's about it. At least Torch tries
to have some kind of fun with his flame and flying,
but he does it in such an irresponsible way that I
wanted to slap him around.
The Four only join forces to combat
badness when it affects them directly -- when von
Doom, who's been spying on their pathetic lives, unFantastics
the Thing and kidnaps Reed. (Which, if nothing else,
is a refreshing change from the girl getting kidnapped
all the time.) Then he takes on the others, in an
increasingly ridiculous shower of SFX which heaps
another round of abuse on New York City. (At least
the first thing the Four do is save a ladder of firefighters
and their Dalmatian. Anyone who rescues the FDNY can't
be all bad.) But they don't ever seize their destiny
as crimefighters. They're just mutant astronauts in
matching suits. Johnny yells "What if we were
given these powers for a reason?" The
line would have more resonance if he hadn't just come
from a bike rally where he proceeded to use his powers
to make a flaming spectacle of himself.
The attempts at humor are juvenile,
even below what used to be considered "comic
book level." I realize that the movies are staying
true to their source materials, but come on -- in Fantastic
4, even the names aren't trying very hard.
Storm? Grimm? von Doom? (And as an ENT fan, hearing "Reed" repeatedly
as a first name was distracting.) The Cute Chick ends
up nekkid a couple of times. Johnny's ego-trips, which
I understand are accurate to the character, are tiresome.
Fantastic 4 isn't a great movie
in and of itself. Seeing it just after Batman Begins,
it really looks poor.
As heroes, the Four hardly match up.
Individually and collectively they have more power
than any of Fox's widgets could accomplish, but they
focus on...uh...popcorn and bike flips. Bruce Wayne
already is a billionaire, and could live his life
in comfort and decadence, jetting around the world
if Gotham gets too stale. He devotes eight years to
training himself to be a Jedi Ninja so he can take
on Gotham's criminal underworld practically by himself,
because it's the right thing to do for the innocent
citizens of Gotham.
Contrast billionaire businessmen Bruce
Wayne and Victor von Doom. When a jerky Chair of the
Board takes Bruce's company public, he uses numerous
technical vehicles to buy up the lion's share of the
stock to
seize back ownership secretly. When von Doom's stock
goes belly-up, his Board gives him a mere week to
turn things around, and his IPO tanks because he's
too busy zapping light sockets and picking staples
out of his forehead. Bruce goes swimming fully-clothed
in a hotel fountain to prove a point and lives in
an elegant castle going back to the Civil War. Von
Doom whines about the cameras only shooting him from
the left side on Larry King and has an enormous
ego-stroke of a V made into the decor of his apartment.
And speaking of the hotel fountain escapade, compare
playboys Bruce and Johnny. The Torch collects grungy
fangirls at a motorcross rally. Bruce Wayne has a
pair of European supermodels.
Sadly, however, the two main women
have much in common: they're both invisible, literally
or figuratively. As happens so often to comic-book
women, Rachel is overpowered and kidnapped by the
bad guy and must be rescued by the hero. He gives
her a macguffin, which she must then take to one of
the other male heroes to help save the day. Sue Storm
can become visually transparent, but her standard
clothes can't -- so she has to strip down until she's
naked and barefoot to escape. Twice. It's played for
laughs, but I was so humiliated for her I had to look
away until the scene shifted. (But her spacesuit becomes
entirely invisible, just as Reed's stretches and Johnny's
doesn't burn. Do the suits have built-in boxers and
support panels, or do they all have special space
dainties?)
Both films are set up to allow for
sequels. Given the quality of writing, I'd be just
as happy to leave Fantastic 4 on the slow boat
back to obscurity and do a few more rounds with the
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