It can't be that easy though, right? Since the BATMAN movie craze started in 1989 with Tim Burton's first flick, things have gotten progressively more depressing. I won't run through the history of those movies again, because I know that pretty much any mention of "Joel Schumacher" or BATMAN AND ROBIN is guaranteed to make people run screaming from the room.

After the last couple movies especially, I know there's no real reason to expect anything from any other movies set in Gotham City. Hell, even Halle Berry's CATWOMAN wants nothing to do with the DC Comics characters, which has to at least be subconsciously motivated by the utter crap factor of Schumacher's two efforts

There was about a year or more of false hopes and stop-stars: BATMAN FOREVER is next! BATMAN: YEAR ONE IS NEXT! Darren Arenofsky is directing! Frank Miller is involved! SUPERMAN VS. BATMAN is coming! FREDDY VS. JASON VS. BATMAN would be cool! Bob Kane wrote a draft from beyond the grave! This taught us all one important lesson -- expect nothing.

We'd put our faith in these movies in the past. Burton's first BATMAN, while not great, was good enough, moody in places and gave a nice framework for future films to follow. BATMAN RETURNS expanded on this, and then BATMAN FOREVER and especially BATMAN AND ROBIN shat on our heads. So even with the past year full of good news and solid casting, there was still enough reason to be wary. Yes, Chris Nolan turned all our heads with MEMENTO and to a lesser degree INSOMNIA, and should be a fine director for this movie. The other casting, especially Christian Bale as Batman and Gary Oldman as a younger James Gordon, really seemed perfect. (When we have time, let's all talk about just how bad the casting of Pat Hingle as Gordon was. After that, we can wonder how the smooth, solid Billy Dee Williams could be replaced by the horribly over-the-top Nicholson wannabe Tommy Lee Jones as Harvey "Two-Face" Dent, too.) Things were looking up.

Still. A good cast does not always a good movie make. And BATMAN had gotten so screwed up that even the talk of taking the characters back to their roots and using the eco-terrorist Ra's al Ghul as the villain didn't do much to asuage anyone's fears about this movie being anything special.

And then I read David Goyer's script. And damn, but I've forgotten all about any former trepidation and replaced it with utter anticipation.

Note: This will be the point that I actually talk about the script and the story, so if you don't want to have that spoiled, skip down to just under the big bat logo.

2004's Sam Hamm

David Goyer's name is everywhere lately, when it comes to comic book movies. Goyer, James Robinson's co-writer on the final year or so of STARMAN and the start of JSA, has written the Hasselhoff NICK FURY TV-movie, as well as BLADE, BLADE II and BLADE: TRINITY, and he's working on a GHOST RIDER script for Nic Cage, too. This last one, I hope is years away from ever happening, if only so we can keep our Nic Cage news headline joke running.

Goyer's comic masterpiece thus far, though, looks to be BATMAN BEGINS. Reading the script had the opposite effect on me as BATMAN AND ROBIN--it made me want to keep turning pages. I didn't cringe once. Actually, I'm pretty sure I read the entire thing with a big smile on my face.

Goyer has taken the best bits of Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's BATMAN: YEAR ONE tale and grafted it onto something more cinematic. He's made Ra's al Ghul and Jonathan Crane's Scarecrow legitimate big-screen comic book villains without delving into schtick. And he made Batman and Bruce Wayne's beginnings make perfect sense, from his motivations to the suit he chooses to wear.

Alright, let's get into it. The script opens on a young Bruce Wayne, playing in his parents' sizable yard with his childhood friend (who will, fortuitously, grow up to look like Katie Holmes). Young Bruce takes a bad fall and ends up having bats be to him what snakes are to Indiana Jones. These scenes are cut in with a bearded, haggard Bruce Wayne doing hard time in a foreign prison. It's there he meets Ducard, the right hand man of Ra's al Ghul, a legendary master mercenary. Ducard, to be played by Liam Neeson, recruits Wayne for Ghul's League of Shadows. It's there that Bruce gets most of his training, as he studies ninjutsu and all kinds of other martial arts under Ghul's (LAST SAMURAI's Ken Watanabe) guidance. But when he finds out he's being groomed to help Ghul's cause of destroying city infrastructures, he strikes back against them, leaving Ghul presumably dead.

While this is going on, the script cuts back and forth to young Bruce, out on the town with his parents who end up dead before the night is through. In this script, Bruce is given a reason to feel even more guilt over this than in the comics, which leads to him leaving the country.

After he returns to the Wayne Manor he planned to leave behind forever, he finds a purpose to his life, thanks to the faithfulness of the Wayne family butler, Alfred (Michael Caine, who looks to be doing less dry humor than Michael Gough's character in the previous films), and a Wayne Industries employee, Lucious Fox (Morgan Freeman. Has there ever been a better comic book movie cast?).

Wayne comes to find that the Gotham his family helped build is almost totally corrupt, from the police force on down. There are a couple honest people in town, like Lieutenant James Gordon, but one man can only do so much. The police force lets mobsters like Carmine Falcone run rampant. Falcone, to be played by Tom Wilkinson, was used to good effect in Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN books that also take place early on in Batman's career. Goyer has done a great job with taking characters and situations from YEAR ONE and the Loeb/Sale books and melding them together. I should mention that 60 pages into the script, an hour or so in the movie, we haven't seen Batman in costume (indeed, he doesn't quite exist yet). But it's not like THE HULK, where you're waiting for the CGI to save you from the dreariness of the rest of the movie (it didn't) -- it's more like SPIDER-MAN, where the first half of the movie, the origin, is done well enough that you're in no hurry for the suit to show up. This movie isn't about showing Batman's origin and then moving on to the villain; the movie and the villain are his origin.

As various elements coalesce and lead to the development of the costume, Goyer even makes the bat ears on the cowl more than just pointy accessories. But he also doesn't over-explain the little things (again I'm looking at you, HULK).

While I was reading this, I couldn't help feeling that it worked great as both a comic book movie and also as a drama for the non-comics crowd. Sure, we get into bits that will make the fans happy, like Dr. Jonathan Crane (to played by 28 DAYS LATER's Cillian Murphy) scaring the life out of people as the Scarecrow, not to mention a DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-inspired Batmobile:

These images, which surfaced on the 'net a couple weeks ago, caused a bit of an uproar with the comic geeks who complain about every movie detail. Message boards were clogged with chatter about the car being "a tank, too big, a truck, ridiculous," not the streamlined Batmobile Adam West drove. All I can say is, again, it all makes perfect sense in the context of the movie. And there's no way that exhaust pipe pictured above won't spit some flames when it fires up, as a nod to the old TV show. Just look at it--it's made to spew fire.

There were maybe two sentences in the entire script that had me roll my eyes and think "eh, I guess they have to throw in a goofy line now and again." Two lines. In an entire script. Which, percentage-wise, is far and away the best of any comic movie I've ever seen (and I've pretty much seen them all). The dialogue is hard-boiled without sounding cliched, and Goyer never takes the easy way out by using dialogue to explain who a character is or why he's motivated to do what he does. Basically, this is a crime drama about a corrupt city and the man who comes along to give the few honest people in town hope enough to fight back.

Even the final act, which reintroduces Ra's al Ghul and leads to what could have been a typically comic book-y big-ass explosive ending (it doesn't, exactly) makes sense. Goyer even throws in a twist that a lot of people won't have seen coming (although COMICS 101's Scott Tipton already postulated this a while ago), and ends the movie with a perfect nod to Burton's first flick (this one functions as a de facto prequel to that). From start to finish, this read as one of the best comic movies ever. And with the cast and creative talent responsible for it, I have even more reason to believe that the finished product will deliver.

You know how, when an artist you don't like takes over drawing your favorite comic book, you just tell yourself you can ride it out, knowing that sooner or later, things will swing back around? Well, this is like the cinematic version of that thinking. This movie is going to wipe any bad taste of Schumacher's movies out of your mind. It's going to make you care that much less about who will end up doing SUPERMAN one of these years. It's going to restore your faith in the Batman character. Bob Kane, finally your characters are once again in good hands.

BATMAN BEGINS Forever:

It's not like this movie really needs a boost, I know. And yeah, there are all kinds of smaller movies that could benefit from a little exposure more than this (I just might have to take a longer look at Trey and Matt's funny TEAM AMERICA puppet movie script), but it's just so refreshing to think that this franchise might right itself. So if you're looking for more information over the next 14 months until the movie opens, here are some places on the 'net to look.

There's the official site, where the Batmobile images came from, but for more frequent and less studio-filtered news, you should check in with Superhero Hype's BATMAN BEGINS page--it's much better and up-to-date. It features frequent set visit reports and spy photos, too. Comics2Film and Batman-on-Film are decent sources, too, and Hannibal Tabu's The Comic Reel column at ComicBookResources.com is always worth a look, too.

Next Week: The Hollywood Reporter's Key Art Awards

/chris

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