Met up with a few friends today to watch Batman Begins. It was a brilliant movie and arguably the best movie of the year. Its properly the best ever Batman too – not seen the first 2 for ages though.
The movie was a very much British affair. Of couse Batman himself played by Christian Bale is British (Welsh), Michael Caine (Alfred), Gary Oldman (Jim Gordon) and Liam Neeson (Ducard) is Irish. Also the director Christopher Nolan is English.
The main bad guy was the scarecrow – played by Cillian Murphy (was in the brilliant movie 28 days later). It would have been good if he was in the movie abit more.
Christian Bale is one of the best, if not the best Batman. Certainly better than George Clooney and Val Kilmer. You could tell he had worked hard to get into shape. His previous movie was the Machinist where he lost loads of weight – in Batman he is certainly not skinny any more. He is said if this one goes well, he would not say no to doing another Batman 
The movie starts of slow and shows how Batman became Batman. The fight scenes were great – the way the camera was moving fast made the fights even more impressive. In some ways it would have been better for the camera to zoom out abit and not move as fast so you could see the fights better.
The batmobile was really cool – it had 5.7l V8 engine in it. The designers of the new batmobile actually went to the normal American companies who make the vehicles seen in movies and were told it could not be done. They went back to the UK and they said no problem Its much better than the other batmobiles – certainly better than the one seen in Batman & Robin.
One thing I also heard was that in the movie there are a few shots of Batman stood on top of really tall buildings right on the edge or on top of towers etc – Michael Caine told the director it was the best CGI he had ever seen. It was not CGI but a stuntman tied to the tower. He wanted it to be as real as possible. You can tell this when watching the movie.
There was one major plot hole in the story involving the main weapon in the movie. *** Minor spoiler (highly the following area – text is in white) It basically involves the instant vaporisation of water – for some reason it didnt vaporise the water in humans who were near it (we are made mostly of water – something like 70-80%). (End of spoiler) ***
I highly recommend seeing this movie – one of the best movies for a long long time.
Related links
BBC Movies
Official site
IMDB Batman Begins
This is one of the coolest things I have ever seen!! Its called Google Earth. “Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.” It basically allows you to view pretty much any place around the world from a birds eye view. However, its not just that – you are able to drag the ‘map’ around, display roads, get birds eye view directions, view the 3D building (only in certain US cities like New York) and loads more.
The trailer for the highly anticipated movie King Kong is now online. The actual movie is out December 2005. It looks amazing!!!
