Oppenheimer (2023)

Last week was the fifteenth anniversary of The Dark Knight. It was a seismic and seminal moment in blockbuster cinema, a sort of coming-of-age for me as a filmgoer and for superhero cinema writ large. It was the movie that made comic book movies a billion-dollar business, and after a decade and a half it hasn’t lost a step. But it also made Christopher Nolan a household name – no mean feat for a director to become ostensibly the auteur star of his own show.
 
Oppenheimer is Nolan’s sixth film since The Dark Knight, which is (for better or worse) the North Star for his entire career. I think you’d be hard-pressed to say that The Dark Knight isn’t still his best film, a perfect diamond absolute of a film, but Oppenheimer is in a way his most ambitious since, precisely because it’s Nolan without his characteristic science-fictional flair, his high concept effects wizardry. It’s still got all his stylistic quirks and puzzle-box structure, but for a director who has been criticized for being impersonal and unemotional, Oppenheimer is a riveting three-hour character study of one of history’s greatest enigmas.
 
Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of American quantum physics and director of the Manhattan Project, which yielded the world’s first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Nolan’s intricate approach to the biopic catches three distinct moments in Oppenheimer’s life – his path to Los Alamos, his 1954 security clearance investigation, and a 1959 Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), an American bureaucrat who frequently butted heads with Oppenheimer.
 
Nolan has cited Oppenheimer as “the most important person who ever lived,” which – coming from one of the most important directors who ever lived – is high praise and certainly fair justification for the man who created Inception to turn his camera toward one particular scientific genius. Nolan has become one of those directors whose decisions (and films) may seem initially inscrutable, but like any good magician (cf. The Prestige) Nolan has a way of hiding his endgame in plain sight, only revealing his purpose at the moment when it best suits him. There are many moments in Oppenheimer that take one’s breath away – the Trinity bomb test certainly is orchestrated that way – but the film’s final exchange of dialogue recontextualizes the film by delivering Nolan’s ultimate thesis.
 
Nolan is both academic and prestidigitarian, technician and artisan, but what’s somewhat surprising about Oppenheimer is the example it sets of Nolan as a friend – of humanity, sure, but of his entire cast of players. Cillian Murphy has been a veteran of Nolan’s company since 2005’s Batman Begins, but his turn as Oppenheimer is a gift any performer would be envious to receive: three hours of, more or less, a one-man show about a living cipher, a man who embodied contradictions and challenged binaries, insisting all the while on neutrality and unreadability. Even his greatest triumph, the creation of the bomb, cannot be rendered in anything but code, as when he tells his wife over the telephone, “Bring the sheets in.”
 
As his wife, one of the two unwieldy women in his life, Emily Blunt is another performer treated by Nolan with kindness and grace. While the film is nominally her husband’s, Kitty Oppenheimer is given her own moments to shine, her own room to be her complicated self, petty yet resilient, sturdy and yet agreeing with her husband that they are “awful selfish people.” Blunt can do plenty with a steely look, particularly in two impactful sequences late in the film, but she can equally channel that quiet nerve into an explosion of emotion. Meanwhile, Florence Pugh is heartbreaking as Oppenheimer’s mistress Jean Tatlock, unable to articulate her own desires or her needs from a man who is himself less than forthcoming. Pugh is arguably one of our preeminent scene stealers; case in point, she was the only ray of sunshine in the paint-by-numbers Black Widow, though her work in fare like Midsommar proves she’s equally gifted as a lead performer.
 
And speaking of Marvel performers, Robert Downey Jr. is already being fitted for a Best Supporting Oscar for his monochromatic antagonist Lewis Strauss. For those of us who are used to Downey as the flawed-yet-saintly Tony Stark, his turn as Strauss is a reminder of how versatile he can be. Strauss is instantly dislikeable, vindictive and self-righteous, and Downey creates an all-time classic screen villain. I can’t recall ever seeing a Downey character as loathsome as this one, but I certainly hope it’s not the last time he plays the heel, because it’s equally apparent that he is having a ball interpreting Strauss’s version of the story.
 
I did not join with so many of my fellow moviegoers in partaking of the “Barbenheimer” double feature. Truth be told, I was enervated after three hours of Oppenheimer. Not that the film was overlong and stupefying – quite the opposite. The cast is chock full of characters, some of whom are played by quite famous faces in surprisingly small roles, but each of them adds something quite special and unique to the stew. (Shout-out to Gary Oldman in one scene as Harry S. Truman.) But in telling a story out of sequence, as Nolan is wont to do, he takes the audience on a scenic tour through one man’s life, which as it turns out might well be the fulcrum point of human history. But Nolan’s method of delivery is not unlike an atomic bomb itself – a bright flash of light, followed by a roaring shockwave of impact. If you let out a breath as the credits rolled, as I did, it would have been one of recognition, of understanding. And before you draw air again, you’ll have to reckon with a sobering proposition that followed Oppenheimer all his life. And that, dear readers, is the most amazing magic trick of all – that Nolan created a biopic with a surprise ending, an interpretive twist that shouldn’t be spoiled.
 

Oppenheimer is rated R for “some sexuality, nudity, and language.” Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, and Kenneth Branagh.

Dunkirk (2017)

For a while there, Dunkirk ruined more than a few movies for me. The trailer for this movie, particularly the seven-minute IMAX preview, is so good that every time I saw it, I thought to myself, “Well, forget this movie. I want to see more of Dunkirk!” Thank heavens it’s finally here, so I can get back to my regularly scheduled programming, and thank heavens it was worth the wait because it shall come as no surprise that this Christopher Nolan disciple found much to love in the master’s latest work.

Dunkirk is the true story of the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk, France, in the midst of World War II, told across three intersecting narratives – the land evacuation (starring Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles, and Kenneth Branagh), the civilian boats recruited to aid the effort (starring Mark Rylance and Cillian Murphy), and the air cover provided by British fighter pilots (starring Tom Hardy).

With Interstellar in 2014, Nolan drew more than his fair share of comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – including from myself when I said that Interstellar “combin[ed] Kubrick’s science-fictional aesthetics with Nolan’s knack for tight and highly personal storytelling.” Surprisingly, though, Dunkirk also feels a bit like 2001, with its trio of timelines looking at what it means – and takes – to be human in a time of crisis, but Nolan out-Kubricks Kubrick by intermingling the timelines (one week, one day, and one hour) and playing them off against each other in a cerebral way that takes for granted an audience’s ability to keep up. For those of us who didn’t need navigational charts for Inception and Interstellar, Dunkirk is similarly smart, though it is less self-reflexively clever than past Nolan ventures; where Inception had occasional bouts of exposition and Interstellar made the MacGuffin of time travel a function of the plot, Dunkirk proceeds with its narrative play as a matter of course, again cycling back to the classic Nolan theme of the subjective experience of the time and the way we form communities around common goals.

Nolan veterans like Tom Hardy (playing to type as an unintelligible masked man) and Cillian Murphy (playing against type as a shell-shocked soldier) turn up and do the good work we expect of them, while Nolan newcomers like Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance – the closest we get to expositional figures – appear as sobering reminders of the moral challenge presented by Dunkirk, gifted actors prepared for the subtle challenges of their sophisticated roles. Dunkirk is largely, however, fleshed out by fresh and nameless faces who don’t have long and recognizable filmic pedigrees like their named counterparts, but there is something even more humanizing about a nameless sea of evacuees, and these actors are remarkable for their abilities, like Keaton or Chaplin, to evoke a range of emotions in largely silent stretches of the film.

In this way, too, Dunkirk evokes 2001 with its extended, silent, balletic scenes of aerial combat, of divebombing and running along the beach. 2001 began and ended sans dialogue, and there are similarly few conversations in Dunkirk, opportunities for Nolan and his performers to show off their command of the visual language of film. And again Dunkirk steps beyond 2001 with a dynamite score by Hans Zimmer; 2001 included the “Blue Danube Waltz” and “Also Sprach Zarathustra” but by and large didn’t carry the auditory weight that Dunkirk does. Like Inception before it, Dunkirk succeeds largely on the shoulders of Zimmer’s score, which is masterfully, unrelentingly, elegiacally tense.

“Unrelenting” is probably the best word for Dunkirk. From its first scene, the film grabs the audience by the shoulders and demands attention until the film is over. There are moments when that ending seems to come sooner than expected – even without noting that the film is, at 1:46, much shorter than most Nolan fare – doubtless mirroring the false hopes given throughout the Dunkirk evacuation, but Nolan’s actual finale grounds the film in a surprising way, a kind of echo of Inception’s last-frame fakeout but with more heart than Nolan is often acknowledged as having. It is an affirmation of Nolan’s continued status as a master filmmaker and – and I do not throw this word around lightly – a true genius.

Dunkirk is rated PG-13 for “intense war experience and some language.” Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Based on a true story. Starring Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard, Barry Keoghan, Harry Styles, James D’Arcy, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Hardy.

Transcendence (2014)

While I spend a lot of time on this blog heralding the innovative vision of Christopher Nolan, I’ve never mentioned the name Wally Pfister, Nolan’s chief cinematographer and a key guiding hand in the creation of that aforementioned vision.  The shadow of Nolan looms large over Pfister’s directorial debut Transcendence, though the end result feels more like the work of an impressionist than a disciple.

Transcendence stars Johnny Depp as Dr. Will Caster, an artificial-intelligence scientist shot with a radiation-laced bullet by anti-tech terrorists.  During his last weeks, Will’s wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) works to digitize and upload her husband’s consciousness, to the dismay of their friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany).  Max fears that the program Evelyn activates isn’t really Will, fears that take on weight when “Will” quickly advances beyond the realm of the possible.

Transcendence clearly rides the post-Inception wave of high-concept science fiction, a wave dominated by the technical achievement of Gravity.  With Transcendence, Pfister and screenwriter Jack Paglen tackle the issue of the singularity, a post-human digital environment epitomized by the idea of “living long enough to upload.”  The film poses a number of important questions about this technology – how much of a personality is changed during the dehumanizing process of uploading?  What are the upward limits of “transcendence”?  And at what point does AI surpass our understanding of conventional morality?

Unfortunately, Transcendence never really answers those questions, stopping short at presenting them.  What’s frustrating, though, is that the film presents these questions as though they will become important plot points, as when anxiety arises about whether “Will” is really Will; though at least one scene teases an answer to the question, it’s never revisited until the conclusion, which takes the answer for granted.  To be fair, this is Paglen’s film debut as well as Pfister’s, and he’s already offered something smarter than most science fiction does, but it is only half the battle.

Just as the script only takes us halfway there, the rest of the film never quite emotionally engages.  Depp and Hall have genuine chemistry together, playing the quirky-scientist-couple brilliantly in the one scene they have together before Will is shot, and Hall proves herself the actual star of the show with a commanding lead as the increasingly-distraught Evelyn.  As for Depp, he acquits himself rather well, playing a subdued performance that you won’t believe comes from the same man as last summer’s Tonto.  The rest of the cast, though – Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy among them – are basically interchangeable, which is a shame given the range they’ve displayed elsewhere (and largely in Nolan films).

This, then, is the larger weakness of Transcendence – its inability to pass the Plinkett test,¹ which requires characters to be distinct beyond physical appearance and function to the plot.  Will and Evelyn for all intents and purposes pass the test, though none of the other characters do.  The result is a fairly uneven film, in which two out of three running plotlines proceed purely on the requirements of the narrative itself.  The film needs an antagonist for its central AI-based protagonist, so a thinly characterized terrorist group (RIFT) is created, with oblique gestures at their motives.  Common sense suggests that the US government might object to the existence of “Will” on their soil, so a team of government agents chases the plot wherever it goes.

I’ve never fully understood why some moviegoers have difficulty connecting emotionally to Christopher Nolan’s work.  Despite the overtly cerebral nature of his films, they’re anchored by very human stories, such that the very ending of Inception cares more for how its protagonist acts than whether what’s happening is actually real.  (The same can’t be said for twist-ending flicks like The Sixth Sense, where the revelation is all.)  With Transcendence, though, I feel like I’ve approximated that sensation; Will and Evelyn aside, I couldn’t engage emotionally with any of the characters on screen and indeed found several of their decisions – mostly shifts in allegiance – to be baffling beyond the necessity of the plot.  I have no idea, for example, how Freeman’s character goes from desk-jockey scientist to FBI analyst, or why (potential spoilers ahead) Paul Bettany’s character joins up with RIFT – beyond, that is, the need for characters in a film to move toward the conclusion of the plot.

At the core of Transcendence is a very moving, very meaningful science-fictional take on a hetero-organic marriage between a woman and her computer – the dark response, I suppose, to Spike Jonze’s Her.  Orbiting that compelling story, though, is a series of narrative false steps and mechanical storytelling that make Transcendence more of a disappointment than Pfister’s promising career to date would have foretold.  One wonders what would have come of “Christopher Nolan’s Transcendence” had a more deft filmmaker been at the helm.  Transcendence is just shy of a failure, feeling more like the training wheels on Pfister’s bike were taken off a bit too soon.

Transcendence is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi action and violence, some bloody images, brief strong language and sensuality.”  There are a few shootings with a fair amount of blood (mostly seen as bloodstains on clothing), and some viewers might be ooked out by the moments when machines augment human bodies via healing or implantation.

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1 Plinkett dismantles the Star Wars prequels in a series of YouTube videos for many reasons, most prominently its failure to create characters as rich as the ones from the original trilogy. A focus group in his Phantom Menace review is able to describe with great precision the personalities of Han Solo and C-3PO but is unable to do the same for Qui-Gon Jinn and Queen Amidala.^↩

Armrest Review - The Dark Knight, Part One

Welcome to another edition of “Armrest Reviews,” a new series in which I, The Cinema King, will partner up with a fellow filmgoer to review films as we watch them.  That’s right, we’ll be writing our unexpurgated observations as we watch the film, meaning you could theoretically read the review while watching the movie and “watch along” with us.

I’m joined again by The Popcorn Prince, who’s been watching movies for almost as long as I have.  He’s a big Batman fan, so I’m pleased to have him by my side once more.  For today’s Armrest Review, we’ll be watching The Dark Knight, the middle – and perhaps greatest – installment in The Dark Knight Trilogy.

Armrest Review - Batman Begins, Part Two

Welcome to the first edition of “Armrest Reviews,” a new series in which I, The Cinema King, will partner up with a fellow filmgoer to review films as we watch them.  That’s right, we’ll be writing our unexpurgated observations as we watch the film, meaning you could theoretically read the review while watching the movie and “watch along” with us.

A further welcome back for the second part of our Armrest Review of Batman Begins, the first entry in Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight Trilogy."  As before, I’m joined by The Popcorn Prince, who’s been watching movies for almost as long as I have.  He’s a big Batman fan, so I’m pleased to have him by my side for the next installment of this series.

Inception (2010)

Before I launch into my review of Inception, let me just say that this is a fantastic film, downright dynamite and an absolute must-see. I'm just giddy about it. And now, the review proper:

Christopher Nolan's Inception is one of the most anticipated movies to hit Hollywood in a long time - probably the first of that anticipatory magnitude since Nolan's last and perhaps greatest venture, 2008's The Dark Knight - for a few very good reasons. First, it's Christopher Nolan's next film, and everyone's dying to see if he can continue his winning streak after making a comic book movie that's in the runnings for "instant classic." Secondly, Inception's marketing campaign is tantalizingly vague, unrevealing in an expertly intriguing way. Finally and most significantly, it's one of the only movies this year to be wholly and unequivocally original; it's not a sequel, a prequel, a remake, a reboot, an adaptation, a rip-off, or a retread. Inception is wildly imaginative, delectably innovative, and enthusiastically entertaining - unquestionably one of the best films of the year and a strong contender for the year's top honor.

Those in the know (namely, those who have seen it) are extremely reticent to talk about Inception on a plot level, desperately afraid that the uninitiated will have the movie spoiled for them. But what's delightful about Inception is that it's practically unspoilable; the major joys of the film come not from what happens, but how and why it happens. Still, if the following plot summary is in any way lacking, it's because I'm holding back; after all, being there is half the fun.

Inception introduces us to a radical new world, one in which dreams can be invaded, manipulated, and harvested. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Cobb, a self-styled "extractor" who specializes in entering dreams and stealing important information from his marks - extraction. Already on the run from the law after mysteriously parting ways with his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) who regularly appears in his dreams, Cobb is offered a chance to return home by pulling off a heretofore unheard of and presumably impossible task - inception, planting an idea rather than stealing one. And so, assuming inception can be done, Cobb assembles a team (which includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page as researcher and dream architect, respectively) and sets to work.

Essentially, Inception is a heist film turned on its head; it's a heist film in which the object is to plant, not to steal, but thatn's not where the similarities end. Here we have the protagonist with a dark past, the characteristically complex team of misfits, the young novice (Page, who respectfully restrains her trademark snarkiness in deference to the film's concentration on verisimilitude), the mark (Cillian Murphy as a coolly cold corporate heir apparent), the shady yet wealthy backer (Nolan standard Ken "Fake Ra's" Watanabe, who adeptly handles the shift from suspicious to endearing), and the twist-upon-twist format that Nolan employed to widespread approval in his fabulous magician's duel The Prestige. Inception warrants comparison to The Prestige because both films relied upon warning the audience they were about to be tricked, but Inception takes it one step further by letting the audience in on the game; we're not on the sidelines but rather in the field with the team, figuring it out as we go along rather than letting our protagonists do it for us.

If I had to review Inception in only two words, I'd choose the phrase "mental calisthenics" because I can't remember the last time a movie made me keep my mind so concentrated to the point where I actually felt tired at the end of it all. Never mind those who say that the movie is "confusing" because what it actually is is engaging; Inception spells itself out for you, but it's up to you to follow along. The concept of "inception" is explained once and only once, so pay attention; this is a thoughtful movie but it's also a high-octane adventure picture with no time to backtrack or recap. Like the train that features into the film's climax, the course of Inception runs fast and unrelentingly forward.

There really aren't enough positive things I could say about Inception. It's a downright brilliant film, anchored by sharp and solid performances from all around. TheWrap.com recently argued that the coming generation doesn't have an A-list in the bunch, but DiCaprio and JGL are obvious contenders for the next breed of A-listers. Riffing on his role in Shutter Island, in which he also had difficulties separating reality from imagined delusion, DiCaprio takes center stage here and holds the audience's attention, proving that he's at his best when he's playing a character with a few cards hidden - both from his fellow characters and from the audience. JGL is much more straightforward, doing a great job as a serious actor after proving he's got solid comedic chops in (500) Days of Summer. And working with very little character description, Cotillard is a vision (often literally) as Mal, maintaining a perfect balance between the mystery surrounding her character and the sense of importance underlying her many appearances. I've already spoken well of Page, Murphy, and Watanabe, but let's not overlook a small but vital role from Michael Caine as Cobb's mentor and tether to the world Cobb has had to leave behind.

The script is smart, the performances sterling, but the visuals are downright eye-popping. Nolan boasted of filming in six different countries (up from three in The Dark Knight), and it shows - scenery is strikingly gorgeous, ranging from Tokyo bullet-trains to the nighttime cityscape of Paris to the snowy mountains of... well, someone's dream. The standout visual piece, though, is a hotel in which conventional rules of gravity no longer apply (to explain why would be to betray one of the film's better surprises); while the scene has Kubrickian undertones with a rotating corridor straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Nolan ups the ante by staging a fight scene in zero gravity - and it's one of the most breathtaking fights in recent cinematic history, outdoing the "bullet time" of The Matrix and the quick-cut style of the Bourne trilogy. Nolan's style is one that continually leaves his audience breathless because Inception insists on outdoing itself - visually and creatively.

If you haven't already figured it out, I'm nothing short of gaga about Inception. Before this review turns into abject gushing, let me close by noting once more that Inception is undebatably a top movie of 2010, a must-see for a myriad of reasons, and a sheer delight to behold. As if I weren't already stoked about Nolan's third Batman movie.

Inception is rated PG-13 "for sequences of violence and action throughout." Overall, it's pretty tame, with more emphasis on thrills than gore, although blood appears sporadically but never explicitly.

Batman Begins (2005)

It's perhaps difficult to appreciate now, three years after Batman began, what director Christopher Nolan did for the comic book movie genre. For land's sakes, folks, Bryan Singer's Superman - the all-American Boy Scout ambassador of good will - was considerably more angsty in response to the smash hit called Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne, alias Batman. With a new take on the quintessential origin story, a few plausible revamps to the old rogues gallery, and a solid cast, Christopher Nolan redeemed the Batman franchise from the Schumacher debacle.

And all that with nary a Batnipple in sight.

How does every Batman origin story need to start? In the alley behind the theater where Thomas and Martha Wayne were gunned down by oft-faceless hood Joe Chill (not The Joker, Tim Burton, but nice try), right? WRONG. In typical Nolan fashion, Batman Begins toys with the audience's expectation of chronology that origin flicks like Spider-Man and Superman led us to anticipate. As Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, one of the best living actors) receives his training from Ra's al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) and the League of Shadows - especially personal mentor Henri Ducard (the perma-divine Liam Neeson), his backstory is fleshed out. By the time he returns to Gotham to clean up the city and (in the words of Jeph Loeb, arguably one of the greatest Batman writers of all time) make good on his "promise on the grave of my parents to rid this city of the evil that took their lives." Among the evildoers are Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy, immaculately exuding creepiness through his eerie eyeglasses) and mob boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) - but there is good in Gotham. Detective Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and legal beagle Rachel Dawes (a bland Katie Holmes, the only strained link in a pitch-perfect chain), as well as Wayne associates Lucius Fox (the ever-eloquent Morgan Freeman, who just gets better at playing himself as time goes on) and butler Alfred (Michael Caine, whose moments of levity are well-appreciated), are on hand to assist in the neverending battle.

If it smacks of an ensemble cast, it's not. The focus, make no mistake, is on Bale's Dark Knight. With a cavalcade of great actors (only two of whom, I might add, hail from the continent which birthed Batman in the first place), it might be easy for any one of them to get lost in the shuffle, but thankfully each holds his own. You'll pardon the sexist language, but Holmes is out of her league here - then again, I can't think of an appropriate modern actress who wouldn't be (I say appropriate because Judi Dench would rock but might be more believable as Alfred's love interest). What helps the cast along is a whizbang screenplay by Nolan & David S. Goyer which not only sets the groundwork for a franchise but stands alone on its own merits, not the least of which is its clever use of repetition to further plot points and recall earlier hints and foreshadowings.

So the cast is mostly impeccable, the screenplay tight as a pimped-out ride. Of the direction I have only positive things to say. Nolan is a master both at intense action scenes such as a Batmobile chase scene and at moments of "arranging matches" drama as when Falcone explains the law of Gotham to Bruce. Relying on CGI to the point of nihilsm, Nolan gives his hyper-realistic take on Batman that extra layer of authenticity by showing us reality on the screen. Chicago never looked so corrupt - nor worth saving. Additionally, a score composed by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard deftly bounces between peaks and troughs of action. Though it's not as "listenable" as some of Zimmer's other soundtracks (such as the uber-catchy scores for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise), the score here doesn't call attention to itself but rather supplements the visuals in a way that is almost subconscious.

It's an intelligent movie. The heroes are walking that fine line between good and evil, bending society's conventions and occasionally the laws to achieve real justice. The movie, in a theme that would be more fully fleshed out in its sequel, also asks where the line is and whether Batman is crossing it. The threat of escalation, too, lingers over the whole shebang, further questioning the label of "hero." And the villains are even less civil than previously; Scarecrow, for example, is less than reluctant to target innocent women and children so long as they fear him. Where Spider-Man 3 hit heavy the metaphor of "villain [Venom and the black suit] as revenge," Batman Begins is an elegant contemplation of fear and power, even if the bullet-train climax is less than wholly realistic.

And for a movie that drew applause not precisely at the end of the movie but rather 30 seconds prior to conclusion with the mere turning over of a playing card within an evidence bag, Batman Begins is a movie that needed no sequel. Certainly I won't grumble over The Dark Knight or even deem it unnecessary. But Batman Begins is more than able to survive and thrive in independence, with a complete ending that we might believe could occur in the real world.

Of course, then came a little film known as The Dark Knight, which shattered expectations - and box office records.

Mr. Nolan, I never got a chance to thank you for Batman Begins...

"And you'll never have to ."