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Just watched this on DVD, and was, like Cameron, positively giddy. For much of the first half of the film, I alternately laughed and wept—not that it was funny, or sad, but simply so right. Second half considerably less involving—the Hollywood clichés started dropping like bricks, and, as with most superhero moments, massive letdown set in as soon as the main character was actually in costume—but there was a lot that was good here.
I'd like to go back to a comment of Seth's:
I was interested in the effect that using The League of Shadows has on our perceptions of Batman, in that Batman's violent vigilante tactics seem moderate to the audience by comparison. I wonder how deliberate this downplaying of the character's dubious morality was on the part of the writers.
To make him more palatable to the audience, you mean? I can't say. But by showing the character moving explicitly from vengeance to compassion—rejecting destruction and holding out the possibility of redemption—Nolan and Goyer made me consider something about Batman that had never occured to me before.
Batman is a figure of terror, yes (and I loved how frankly he admits that he is, himself, afraid of bats), but also a figure of hope—something that's been lost or forgotten in recent incarnations of the character.
Batman has always been about punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent—and sometimes the former has been emphasized at the expense of the latter. The League of Shadows's absolutism essentially forces him to choose between the two—and he chooses to preserve life. And that protection, that preservation, defines even his actions against the criminal element——he will save the city he loves by excising the cancer that's devouring it, neutralizing the poison that threatens it.
He ended up following in his father's footsteps after all, didn't he? Not just as a philanthropist, but as a healer. |
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