Why Not Seriouser?

As the anticipation builds for the release of The Dark Knight, I thought I’d share the transcript of a conversation that Fin Fang Doom, Colonel Doom and I had with some friends following our initial screening of Batman Begins several years ago. In fact, it was that night that Fin Fang Doom and I first met.

Two of the conversation’s participants are not members of the Legion, so they shall be referred to henceforth as “Thor Doom” and “Doomwalk” for the purposes of this conversation.

Reading through this, some of us were skeptical, some were ridiculously enthusiastic, some of us were hyperbolic, but we were all pumped up enough by the movie that we wanted to talk. Stumbling upon this transcript this evening reminded me of how exciting it was to see that movie, and it made me really excited for this summer’s sequel.

THOR DOOM: Batman Begins f—ing rocks. I want to start off by saying that.

COLONEL DOOM: I want to start off by saying –

THOR DOOM: You can’t start off, I already did.

COLONEL DOOM: I want to start off my own segment of the tape by saying, in a sense, I’m glad that Gee isn’t here, because he has a very strong anti-Batman agenda.

THOR DOOM: Well then he should be here! We need some opposition!

JIM DOOM: He has an actual agenda?

THOR DOOM: He’s a lot like the Joker, only less violent…less threatening. A nemesis, but not important.

COLONEL DOOM: But just as nonsensical!

THOR DOOM: Does he really not like Batman?

COLONEL DOOM: Have you ever talked Batman with him before?

THOR DOOM: You must be right. He must not like Batman.

COLONEL DOOM: Are we here to talk about Batman or what?

THOR DOOM: Okay.

DOOMWALK: I liked the movie, very much. Best Batman movie.

THOR DOOM: By far. You know what? You go back and watch Michael Keaton’s portrayal of Bruce Wayne, and everyone’s like, “That’s my favorite Batman,” because they were kids, and they’re stupid kids, and they’re like “I like this movie.”

COLONEL DOOM: They were kids and so it was the first Batman movie they saw.

THOR DOOM: But they’re young, and they don’t understand movies.

COLONEL DOOM: They’re young.

THOR DOOM: Exactly. And now you go back, and it’s the most horrible movie in the entire world.

JIM DOOM: You think the first one is the most horrible movie in the entire world?

THOR DOOM: No, you’re right, except for the subsequent Batman movies – it’s the fourth most horrible movie in the entire world, right after Batman and Robin, Batman Forever and Batman Returns. And then, then Batman. And then the best movie ever made, Batman Begins, f—ing brilliant.

DOOMWALK: If they don’t make a sequel, then … I’ll be very disappointed.

COLONEL DOOM: I might kill myself.

THOR DOOM: Here – here’s the thing. Like I’m going to compare the Spider-Man movies. Both of them, both Spider-Man and Batman Begins, there’s like the origin of these two superheroes, crimefighters, but what I liked about Batman Begins is you kind of have his growth into the Batman superhero by a constant narrative, whereas with Spider-Man it’s segmented into a beginning, getting the powers story, the second part where all of a sudden he’s Spider-Man, he’s fighting crime already.

And I think one of the ways they really achieved that in Batman Begins was they gave it a nice constant theme about how fear affects people. How it starts off in the very beginning, and then the Scarecrow, and then a plot to poison Gotham City’s water supply, and then at the end of the movie, it’s so far from where it began, yet it feels like it was a natural evolution of events – it’s not segmented. And it’s f—ing brilliant!

And when the four ninjas pop down, and you’re like, what stance is he going to assume, and he just tackles one off the side of the building?! I swear to God – swear to me! Batman is God! I loved it. Everything about it!

COLONEL DOOM: The movie – it was very Batman. I don’t think they really f—ed up the character at all.

THOR DOOM: No! Katie Holmes, at the end, when she was talking –

COLONEL DOOM: When she said, this is your mask, Bruce Wayne is your mask, then it was like yep, they got it.

THOR DOOM: But it’s not coming from anywhere though! Because you have, through the entire movie, you have Christian Bale just assuming this character, he has to put on this face of a playboy, and you see him do that, and he pretends to be drunk and gives that hilarious speech, you see him pretending to be this playboy, but when he’s around Alfred and Lucious Fox, he’s dark and sardonic –

COLONEL DOOM: And raspy-voiced.

THOR DOOM: You know how it is, weaponized hallucinogenics, that was the best line. I’m nocturnal! All the lines – just clever. And the acting, Gary Oldman. Brilliant!

COLONEL DOOM: One of the best cast superhero movies.

THOR DOOM: Everything was perfect! Ah! I’m just riding this high. Gary Oldman – he mouthed sorry when he hit a car! He just nailed the nuance – Commissioner Gordon totally apologized to no one in the Batmobile when he hit a car. What’d you guys think of the choice to make Gotham more real?

DOOMWALK: I loved how Gotham looked. Everything about how they envisioned it was perfect.

COLONEL DOOM: Well it looked like New York, which is how it’s supposed to –

JIM DOOM: It was Chicago.

COLONEL DOOM: Chicago? I always thought Gotham was New York.

JIM DOOM: Well, but that was Chicago.

COLONEL DOOM: But it had islands.

DOOMWALK: It wasn’t actually Chicago. It was Gotham.

COLONEL DOOM: No, but I mean, like

DOOMWALK: Chicago’s actually on the water.

COLONEL DOOM: No, what I’m saying,was more, yeah, but it’s –

DOOMWALK: And they have great lake.

COLONEL DOOM: Yeah, I know, but –

DOOMWALK: No, but like even how they showed the deterioration of the city, like with the monorail in the 30s?

FIN FANG DOOM: Was it supposed to be in the 30s?

JIM DOOM: No, it was just Gotham’s depression.

COLONEL DOOM: No, there’s no way it was in the 30s. I think it was more like in the 90s.

JIM DOOM: Well they referred to it as being built in the depression, but they later referred to Gotham’s own depression –

THOR DOOM: Engineered by Ra’s Al Ghul’s economic warfare.

JIM DOOM: Yeah. ‘Cause yeah, I was thinking how I really like how they’ve taken it out of a specific time, so you don’t have to get hung up on how Batman’s been around for 60 years, so then when they said his dad had it built in the depression, I was like aw man, that stinks, but then when he refers their own depression, it’s like, that’s all right.

THOR DOOM: And you see Katie Holmes is driving that Ford Tempo, you’re like, oh god, Teal, now we know we’re in the early 90s. Continuity error!

JIM DOOM: No we’re not in the early 90s because she’s a low-paid public servant, so that’s all she can afford.

DOOMWALK: The 90s is when they were paid the highest!

JIM DOOM: Yeah in the 90s that blue tempo would have been awesome. No it just shows you that she works for what’s right and not for the paycheck.

THOR DOOM: I also like how they could have gone completely cornball with these flashbacks with Bruce and his father, and it was either the acting or very careful screenwriting, and it never went over the edge too sappy, like when you have his father saying, “When you fall, what do you do?” When they flashed back to that, they easily could have gone overboard, but I never felt that it went too much. I think it walked the line.

DOOMWALK: They didn’t dwell on it too long, but it was just the very idea of that relationship.

COLONEL DOOM: There was no soft dissolve with Thomas Wayne in the corner, being like, “What do you do…when you fall down…son?”

DOOMWALK: And when he winked at his son at one point, at the opera? I really liked that. “Ah, I just need a bit of fresh air, a little bit of opera goes a long way.” That was nice. That was something that Thomas Wayne does.

JIM DOOM: I’d like to be treated by him when I get sick.

THOR DOOM: A lot of people would leave that out, because they think it wouldn’t make sense to have a billionaire industrialist also be a doctor. But he is a doctor!

DOOMWALK: Well going back to how it could be done horribly horribly, in Spider-Man, Uncle Ben was terrible in the way they showed him.

THOR DOOM: Yeah, in the flash back sequence, what was that line?

DOOMWALK: With great power comes great responsibility.

THOR DOOM: And with this one, they kind of pose it as, when you fall down, and the question was never answered as this overdubbed flashback voice, it was like what do you when you fall down? Oh, you rise up, triumph over the bad guys!

JIM DOOM: I’m going to be the bad guy here, but I think in terms of showing a main character who is struggling under their own guilt, I think Spider-Man did it a lot better. And I think that’s probably just because Toby Maguire can seem more pathetic than Christian Bale, but I didn’t feel the guilt of Bruce Wayne as much as I did in Spider-Man.

DOOMWALK: His anger outweighs his guilt.

THOR DOOM: He’s not a guilty guy. He changes.

DOOMWALK: But Toby Maguire did a great performance, it was…

JIM DOOM: I would put this beneath the two Spider-Man movies.

FIN FANG DOOM: I would agree with that.

JIM DOOM: And another thing that really bugged me about this, was that this obviously had references to Year One, yet instead of going back to Batman as a detective, it went back to Batman the movie Batman, and it re-envisioned the movie Batman rather than getting back to what makes Batman Batman.

COLONEL DOOM: Well it did bother me that Ra’s Al Ghul never once called Batman “Detective.” I was completely serious when I say that.

DOOMWALK: But Ra’s Al Ghul was completely different than in any situation where he would call him detective. It would just be distracting and weird.

THOR DOOM: It was so much about who he is and how he became Batman, and it has so much with his dad, and kind of donning this mantle of vengeance and justice, and sorting this whole complex character of Bruce Wayne’s evolution into Batman, and then to like add the detective elements to it, I think it could easily muddle it.

JIM DOOM: But that’s who he is!

COLONEL DOOM: I could only hope that the detective would be, um, yeah I think JIM DOOM’s right in that Batman obviously is the world’s greatest detective.

JIM DOOM: The gadgets just enable his detective work.

THOR DOOM: But he becomes the world’s greatest detective. I mean we’re talking about the origin.

COLONEL DOOM: He’s the ninja detective.

FIN FANG DOOM: They could have easily put that in there, like they didn’t have to have him go to Gordon to find out where the drugs were going to be. They could have just had him figure it out himself.

DOOMWALK: His interrogations were pretty good, I think that shows some of the detective work.

JIM DOOM: But he just happened to be at the apartment where the stuffed animals were … I would just liked to have seen just another scene where he figured something out. Just even one – just one more scene – where he’s figuring something out through detective skills, it would have just cast everything after that moment in a different light.

COLONEL DOOM: They could have done that, and it might have just been cut out. You know a movie with that much money thrown at it, they’re going to cut everything they can.

THOR DOOM: You’d ruin the pacing of the whole film. What are you going to show Batman looking at a piece of material, going back to the Batcave Crime Lab that doesn’t exist? There aren’t a lot of options. Interrogation right now, I think, is his only option. Plus it keeps the pacing, it’s all this action going on, it starts building this momentum that doesn’t stop until the train ride at the end. And if he has to stop to find where things are going, it’s like I think that would really take away from the feel of the movie. And there’s plenty of time in future movies to have him be a detective anyway.

DOOMWALK: I think they were going to go into that, because he said here’s a piece of evidence – a card – and Batman says “I’ll look into it.” What does that mean? Detective work.

COLONEL DOOM: Who brought up the Year One references in the first place?

DOOMWALK: JIM DOOM.

COLONEL DOOM: I mean, if you’re going to talk about Year One references, there’s almost no detective work in Year One.

JIM DOOM: There’s a lot of spying and stuff, because he has to set up Carmine Falcone –

COLONEL DOOM: Yeah, but he was still doing surveillance in this movie, spying on people, like when he’s looking through the window, and he has his Bat receptor,

JIM DOOM: What I’m referring to, I guess, is putting something together, not just spying. There’s a lot of spying in this movie, but it’s his brain that puts things together. For all the crap that he can do with his fists, it’s his brain – I would have liked to have seen at one point, him go from point A to point B rather than go from A to C to E to G…

THOR DOOM: They did really capture one of Batman’s other strengths, another part of his mind – his willpower, his uncompromising righteous attitude toward justice. They captured that pretty well. I mean in past movies, he’s just been a wise-cracking beat-em-up martial arts expert.

COLONEL DOOM: Just to compare this to Spider-Man, since both of you liked Spider-Man better, and you think one of the flaws in this was that it didn’t stress Batman’s detective work, but one of the flaws in Spider-Man movie was that they never stressed Peter Parker being a scientist at all.

FIN FANG DOOM: That’s not true. Spider-Man –

COLONEL DOOM: He builds his own web fluid and web shooters in the comic!

THOR DOOM: That’s never made sense.

COLONEL DOOM: Yeah but what I’m saying –

THOR DOOM: It’s a flaw, but they made a better movie because of it.

COLONEL DOOM: I’m not going to argue that, I’m just saying there’s one key component of the Spider-Man character that’s missing from the movies.

FIN FANG DOOM: But in Spider-Man 2, he met with Doc Ock before Doc Ock turned evil, and at the end, he figured out this is what you need to do to shut down the machine or else

COLONEL DOOM: What cool it down? Throw it in the water? That’s not-

THOR DOOM: But even then, it shows him in class, taking notes, he’s really smart, then at the end … I’m just saying assume Batman goes from point A to point C and does his detective work in between.

COLONEL DOOM: I’m going to agree with THOR DOOM and say that he just doesn’t have his detective skills yet because he just doesn’t have the resources yet, and I’m going to site Year One the comic, where he’s really not doing that much detective work.

JIM DOOM: But in Year One the comic, he doesn’t have all this military arsenal behind him either. He’s still just a guy, and that’s what I really like about Year One, is that it’s a guy who just has to – like I really like in Year One where he wants to go out and start beating up people, or fighting crime, but he goes out and he’s just Bruce Wayne,

COLONEL DOOM: He gets his ass kicked.

JIM DOOM: He realizes that’s not going to work. I don’t know, I just really would have liked to have seen more of –

COLONEL DOOM: But they kind of did that here too. Like that first time he goes to see Gordon, he’s got that ski mask, and he jumps over that thing and almost annihilates himself on the fire escape, and then he decides “Oh, maybe I should go get armor.”

JIM DOOM: Well he had the armor, but then he decides he needs to float. And I don’t like flying Batman.

DOOMWALK: Yeah, he flew too much.

COLONEL DOOM: But he’s not flying – he’s gliding.

JIM DOOM: He was definitely using his glider as a – I don’t mind Batman using his cape to stop his fall, but he was totally gliding as a means of transportation. I mean I’m glad he didn’t have a Bat Plane, but getting back to the gadgets, I really like how they made an effort through Morgan Freeman’s character to explain why all this stuff existed, because I think that’s something that’s really really important in Batman. He’s just a normal guy, so –

COLONEL DOOM: No, he’s like the richest guy –

JIM DOOM: He’s a man without powers.

COLONEL DOOM: He’s not a metahuman.

FIN FANG DOOM: And he doesn’t know how to make a grappling hook, he needs someone else to do it for him.

JIM DOOM: I really like that they made the effort to justify all these things existing. But I hated when they go to that much effort to make things have a place in this world they create, and then his super freaking heavy all terrain vehicle can land on this rickety old roof and not drop six floors, stuff like that bugs me. They really want to suck you into the logic of the world, and then they’re just like, can you pause that for a second?

DOOMWALK: Maybe in the extras, they’ll have the scene with the architect saying “Nothing can destroy this roof!”

COLONEL DOOM: Maybe it’s a tenement where like we’re going to create the strongest, most enduring low income housing ever in The Narrows!

THOR DOOM: I think that, I like that they put a lot of that in, for the same reasons you did. And I think the acting was one of the cornerstones of why this movie was so good. And I think that Morgan Freeman – Lucious Fox – explain his gadgetry in such a convincing way, made it really easy way to swallow that all these crazy gadgets existed. It was just very conversational, didn’t seem awkward. But these fantastic machines that he created – they could never really exist – but his portrayal of the character made these things seem possible.

DOOMWALK: And their interaction was great too. Just how they were talking to each other.

THOR DOOM: And so it made everything that was going on, while it may have been crazy and extreme and fantastic, seem more commonplace and more real.

JIM DOOM: I think the strongest points and the weakest points in this movie were the attempts at humor. When it was the natural exchange between Bruce Wayne and Lucious Fox or Bruce and Alfred – the humor that came from their kind of old-married couple way of interacting, I thought it was fantastic. But when it was stuff like “Nice coat,” stuff like that I thought “Just forget the last Batman movies and stop doing that stuff!”

DOOMWALK: And just why does that bum need to be a character as the witness there? What are the odds that the same bum that he gave the coat to right before he left was there? I mean it didn’t bother me too much, but yeah

JIM DOOM: It’s just really contrived humor.

THOR DOOM: It’s Batman’s amazing memory skills! He can see someone years ago, spend years in solitude halfway across the world, come back and recognize the same guy and recognize his coat.

JIM DOOM: I guess it did show his detective skills. No really, it just drives me nuts that they can do such a good job with natural interaction humor that’s so flawless and then just bomb so much on the attempt at jokes.

THOR DOOM: Different styles for different people, but I agree with you. I didn’t think that was funny. The part that I really liked in the part when he is having a conversation with Liam Neeson, before he’s revealed, and they’re talking about what are you afraid of, getting to know each other, Ra’s is talking about how he was like Bruce, how he had all this pain, and Bruce is like “Well what stopped it?

What stopped this transcript was that I ran out of enthusiasm for logging the tape.