Nolan’s Batman, Past & Present

BATMAN
I don’t have the luxury of friends.

Luckily for us at AD, we have the lavish luxury of countless friends. Some of those friends have blogs, and better yet, some of those blogs are all about movies. I’ll get around to linking to Stephanie Zacharek’s TDK pan eventually (maybe), but on the eve of the opening it’ll be more fun to link to our friends Nick Plowman at fataculture, and Alexander Coleman at CCC (Coleman’s Corner in Cinema). Nick writes from South Africa, and by dint of his dedicated ambition has managed to score a sweet pass to an early screening of The Dark Knight. Alexander on the West Coast is resident expert on past masterpieces, and looks back to 2005 for an illuminating retake on Batman Begins.

Nick ventures into the dark night of the soul:

Broadening his visionary scope to almost unimaginable lengths, Christopher Nolan’s poetic continuation of his methodical origin tale “Batman Begins” is a darkly ambitious crime-epic focusing on an unusual amount of existential dilemmas more than it is simply a glossy comic-book adaptation. Relentlessly heavy, but never heavy handed, “The Dark Knight” is a flawed film, even if only because monumental expectations allow the film’s ruthless determination to be a vigorous reinvention of the comic genre to be all the more apparent.

But that doesn’t stop it from being an immense debate on the implications of the clean-cut decency vs. malevolence friction and malleability of power in the hands of ruthless men ever present in the justice starved, beleaguered and allegorical Gotham City that never ceases to take a moment to reflect or even breathe.

Alexander rewinds to where it all began:

In Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, the themes and obsessions that have animated Nolan’s worlds, from Following to Memento and Insomnia to The Prestige are actually crystallized, enlarged upon and finally made whole.

If there is a single young auteur out there who can claim to be the artistic heir of Fritz Lang–in terms of themes and obsessions–it’s indeed Nolan. Like the great German titan, Nolan’s films are fixated on the vexatious dilemmas, secrets and moral perplexities of the search for justice in what is a frequently unjust world, the makings and deconstructions of identity, what that identity means and what it doesn’t mean and the savage vengefulness that resides in the heart of fallen man.