We just watched Batman Begins tonight. I don't intend to give a detailed exposition on the movie right now, but I did want to make a few comments while they were still fresh in my mind.
Overall, I did not really care for the movie. There was no single point of failure, but it simply was not very interesting - or at least not as interesting as it might have been. It was not as dark as the 1989 Batman. They could have traded "dark" for "gritty" or even campy, but they didn't. This version just seemed somewhat flat. Probably the weakest point of the movie though is its depiction of Bruce Wayne's preparation to be Batman. Instead of being a motivated and focused person who is brilliant forensic scientist and an excellent martial artist, we get a character who is really good at beating people up (though he does get some ninja-like training along the way, but not of his own initiative) but not especially educated (it is implied he flunks out of Princeton) and who only becomes focused enough to really become a crime fighter after being rescued from a Chinese prison (where he is at because he is practicing crime - though he is not really a criminal, or so he claims, since he is stealing from Wayne Enterprises) by another crazy vigilante type. I found this change in the character to make Wayne a much less interesting person. Batman also did not really come across as very intimidating, despite that being an emphasis of the story. There is a Lower Wacker Drive cameo though; can't complain about Lower Wacker appearances.
By the way, with all of the massive revisions that can happen in comic book character's stories in such a brief period of time, is is any wonder mythological stories and other legends get so confused? (I was just reading the other day about the Arthurian legends - what a mess those were - but now that I think about what happens to comic book characters, I can see that we still have the same problem.)
This makes me want to go back and watch the 1989 movie, as well as maybe the animated series from the 1990s, just to see how they handled the early part of the story (I think their treatment may have been rather brief), though the animated series is definitely one of my favorite versions of the Batman story. But most of all it makes me want to go buy Batman Chronicles: Volume One which contains the first few Batman comics featuring Batman starting from 1939, and which can be had for about $15.
