Batman…

Sunday, lately, seems to be my day to revisit movies I've seen recently, but never actually talked about. Last week was Batman Begins, this week Legend of Zorro. One good, one not so much.

Let's start with the good… Batman Begins, of course.

First off, there's the film's pedigree. Christopher Nolan directs (Memento, Insomnia). David Goyer wrote the screenplay (Dark City, the Blade series). And the cast: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, I could go on, but there's really only one disappointment in that cast, so let's cut to the chase.

Despite the overwhelming quality of the cast, somehow we got stuck with Katie Holmes as the romantic interest/foil for Batman, and you gotta wonder how that decision was reached. (Well, actually, you probably don't. Some genius at Warner Bros. gave Nolan a list of "hot young actresses" and told him to pick one for the Rachel Dawes role and Katie somehow ended up at the top of the list.) Sadly, while she's not hard to look at, she brings nothing to the role and makes a difficult character frankly unpalatable. Her attitude throughout most of the movie is condescending and judgmental and, while this is surely how the character was written, I can't help but wonder if a better actress couldn't have made her a little less annoying.

The only other acting comment I've got regards Ken Watanabe, who was so striking in The Last Samurai. I thought it was really cool, when the casting was announced, that he'd get to play one of the main villains in this movie. But then you see the movie and he gets about 5 minutes of screentime and (SPOILER ALERT) ultimately turns out to be nothing more than a mask for the real Ra's Al Ghul. Tough luck for a really interesting actor.

As for the movie itself, I've got few quibbles. I enjoyed the new spin on how Batman became who he is and liked the way they kept everything somewhat grounded in reality. (I've got at least one friend who didn't like this grounding in reality. He said it's like watching Batman in New York City… he's a comic book superhero — take the comic out of the hero and what do you have left? I'm disinclined to agree with him on this one, but I see the point). Scarecrow has his mask and his gases and chemicals, but he's got a "real world" face as well. Ra's is a fascinating character, whose ends may be noble, but his means are a bit hard to justify. Overall I found the story to be a lot of fun and a great reboot of the film franchise.

There is one last thing that nags at me about the movie, however. We, of course, have our main villain carrying out a ridiculously elaborate scheme to achieve his ends of "cleaning up" Gotham City for once and all. He's stolen some kind of nuclear device that will instantly vaporize all the water in the vicinity, allowing him to release the weaponized gas that he's created to purge Gotham of its evils.

Pretty nifty, huh? It gives us lots of opportunities for some cool special effects and a great train battle and all sorts of other fun moments. Let's ignore the idea, for the moment, that there are probably a hundred easier methods for distributing his delirium inducing gas… this IS a comic book film, after all, so the villain's plans MUST be over the top.

But the one thing that nags at me, every time I see the movie is the whole "vaporizing all the water" thing. I mean, humans are 98% water. So how does their way cool nuclear vaporizer know not to vaporize the water in all those humans standing nearby when it goes off?

I'm just wondering, you know?