Spotlight: The Knight Shift... (Part Two)

Darren Aronofsky was hired to work on a gritty adaptation of Frank Miller's YEAR ONE, and the script took some pretty crazy liberties. After seeing his parents gunned down before him, young Bruce Wayne wanders catatonically through the streets, where he is taken in and raised by a black auto mechanic named Big Al (replacing the Alfred character). He makes a Bat-suit from junk and drops a school bus engine into a Lincoln Continental, declaring guerilla war on the crooks who seek to conquer Gotham's meanest streets. Only at the end does he seek to reclaim his seat at the end of the Wayne empire. Kurt Russell, who had been tapped as a possible Batman had BATMAN TRIUMPHANT happened, was rumoured to be the film's pre-Commissioner Jim Gordon. But the script was just too far away from the source material, and it, too, was shelved in favor of waiting for the right approach to come along.

 Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer sought to treat Batman not as a comic book but as piece as classic literature like THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. He sought to build Batman into a legend and chose Christian Bale as his Bruce Wayne. Bale, who'd been acting since he was a boy (in Spielberg's EMPIRE OF THE SUN), had been a fan favorite for Batman since his fabulously kooky performance in AMERICAN PSYCHO. And when it comes to Batman on film, Bale's legacy will forever be the one to beat.

By smartly using Ra's Al Ghul as Bruce Wayne's final mentor, 2005's BATMAN BEGINS not only gave Batman a formidable foe but also gave Nolan an excuse to give us a sword fight between Christian Bale and Liam Neeson on a real glacier. We finally saw Bruce traveling the world learning the skills he'd carry into battle as Batman and, more importantly, we were given the best explanation yet of why a man who could go anywhere or be anything would choose to become a hero. And that's an important word. "Hero." Already burned by the Burton films that wrongly cast the Joker as the killer of Thomas and Martha Wayne, some fans were initially concerned to find out that Joe Chill would be a character in ...BEGINS. Did we really need another version that gave the shooter a face and a name, even though Chill had done the deed in many incarnations of the comics? 

We did. And here's why:

By seeing Chill gunned down in front of the courthouse by an assassin sent by the mobsters he'd just testified against, Bruce Wayne could have claimed closure and gone on with his life. But he didn't want revenge. He wanted justice. Not just for himself, but for all of Gotham. And that's why Bale's Batman is the best. All of us who've ever felt out best was never enough no matter how hard we tried can relate to Peter Parker, for example. But it's harder to get your audience to connect to a billionaire. Nolan and Bale did it by showing us the heart of Bruce Wayne without taking anything away from the power of Batman. For Bale's Bruce, it wasn't just about striking fear into the hearts of criminals. It was also about inspiring the good people of Gotham to stand up for themselves. As a man, he could be destroyed. As a symbol, he could -- and would -- be everlasting. 

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