Film After 11 Podcast | Batman Begins (2005)

We’re all done with that alphabetical marathon on the Film After 11 podcast and, at the moment at least, not beholden to any specific theme. If you think of one, please let me know. In the meantime, this week’s episode is timed to correspond with the theatrical release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I figured that would make a decent excuse to watch Nolan’s Batman Begins with my son.

Thomas was extremely fidgety while watching the movie, to the point it seemed like he was bored and couldn’t wait for it to be over. I know it’s long (perhaps too much so), but I worried that his interest was fading before we even hit the half-hour mark. Nevertheless, he insisted in our discussion afterward that he liked it. Kids are really difficult to read sometimes.

As any parent can attest, kids can also be enormously difficult when you want to do something with them. This week especially, it’s really clear that Thomas did not want to sit and record a podcast episode. I made him do it anyway, because that’s just what kind of cruel parent I am. I hope someday he’ll appreciate the time he spent doing this.

Batman Begins (2005) - Katie Holmes
Title:Batman Begins
Year of Release: 2005
Director: Christopher Nolan
Watched On: 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Also Available On: Blu-ray
HBO Max
Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

For my part, I hadn’t watched Batman Begins in ages, and to be honest, it didn’t hold up terribly well to my memories of it. The movie is overlong and takes forever to get to the good parts. The “grounded” and “dark” tone is tiresome and not much fun at all considering that this is a movie about a guy who dresses up in a bat costume to fight crime. As I say in the podcast, Tim Burton summed up this entire Batman origin story in about two minutes and did a better job of it.

The Tumbler chase is still pretty cool, but all the rest of the action is shot in annoying shaky-cam style that’s dated terribly. Worse, I’d forgotten just how bad the dialogue and Christian Bale’s performance are. Frankly, with the way he growls every word, I think he’s worse than Katie Holmes, who certainly looks way out of place and lost here. Every line spoken in the entire movie is a speechifying attempt to deliver exposition that only Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman (and to a much lesser extent Liam Neeson and Gary Oldman) manage to somewhat sell.

Overall, I guess the movie’s fine. It’s definitely not as bad as The Dark Knight Rises. Still, I think I’m done with it at this point and won’t feel a need to revisit it again for a long while.

The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Batman Begins began its existence on Blu-ray in 2008. I believe I had a copy of it at that time but later upgraded it to a SteelBook in 2011 for obsessive collector reasons. I did likewise for the two sequels. I bought all three movies again in 2017 bundled together in a Dark Knight Trilogy 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray box set. I then pulled all the discs out of that box and currently store them in the SteelBooks.

From the information I can find, the movie was photographed and finalized on film with no Digital Intermediate, as Christopher Nolan insists on doing. However, this one pre-dates his fetish for IMAX. The entire movie has a consistent 2.40:1 aspect ratio.

The 4K image is quite sharp and has strong and vibrant colors. Contrast is rich with nice use of HDR, though detail is occasionally lost to black crush in the shadows. I’m also a little bothered by the almost complete lack of grain. Perhaps the film was always shot on fine-grained stock, but something about the look leaves me a little dubious. It doesn’t have the mushy textures of DNR, but I wonder if a newer form of grain management occurred. In any case, the disc looks pretty good.

The Dark Knight Trilogy 4k Ultra HD Blu-ray box set

The new Blu-ray that accompanies the 4K disc in the Trilogy box set shares the same video transfer as the 2008 Blu-ray and has not been remastered in that respect. The Blu-ray also frustratingly continues to auto-play the movie immediately upon startup, whereas the 4K disc has a main menu. On the other hand, the Blu-ray has been re-authored so that the disc no longer defaults to lossy Dolby Digital audio. Instead, the soundtrack has been re-authored into DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. (The older disc offered Dolby TrueHD in addition to its plain Dolby Digital.) Because both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio are lossless audio formats, sound quality between them is equivalent, aside perhaps from a default master volume setting that can be easily adjusted with the Volume button on your A/V receiver remote.

As before, the soundtrack is very loud and of course very bassy, as Christopher Nolan demands. The thunderous roar of the Tumbler vehicle is especially impressive. Nolan famously hates Dolby Atmos and doesn’t particularly like surround sound at all anymore, but Batman Begins still has some strong directional effects to the back of the room. A helicopter effect also convincingly moves overhead with Dolby Surround Upmixer engaged.

Like the earlier Blu-ray, both the 4K disc and the new Blu-ray for the film lack any supplements. All bonus features are found on a second Blu-ray disc and they all appear to be recycled from an early DVD (and all in standard-definition). A 5-minute parody Jimmy Fallon did for the MTV Movie Awards is almost halfway funny. After that are a handful of bog-standard making-of featurettes about the stunts and gadgets, the costumes, the new Batmobile, and so forth. A trailer and a teaser for sequel The Dark Knight round off the disc.

Note: Screenshots on this page were taken from the Criterion and Sony Blu-ray editions of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.

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