Batman Begins

"[slurring] Everyone? Everybody? I want to thank you all for coming here tonight and drinking all of my booze. No, really. Thats the thing about being a Wayne: that youre never short of a few freeloaders like yourselves to fill up your mansion with. So heres to you people. Thank you. [takes a drink] Um, Im not finished. To all you phonies, you two-faced friends, you sycophantic suck-ups who smile through your teeth at me: please leave me in peace. Please go! Stop smiling. Its not a joke. Please leave. The partys over. Get out. [party guests leave, revealing Ras al Ghuls men]"

"Its not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me."

"In this retelling of the story, Bales Bruce Wayne is the son of an idealistic American billionaire, an FDR-style patrician liberal who withdrew from the day-to-day running of the family corporation to practise medicine and donate vast sums to establishing a proper public transportation system for Gotham: a gleaming new monorail. As a child, Bruce remembers riding on this train with his parents, instead of in a limo, but Nolan neatly contrives that it is this monorail which, in the denatured and decadent city of Waynes adulthood, is the scene of Gothams operatic Armageddon."

"If Bales superhero and Katie Holmes assistant district attorney were more romantically inclined in Batman Begins, you could imagine her telling her gal pals, "Theres just something about his chin."

"Batman starts stripping away each layer of Gotham crime only to discover a sicker and more monstrous evil beneath, his rancid city simultaneously invokes early 90s New York, when criminals frolicked to the tune of five murders a day; Serpico New York, when cops were for sale; and today, when psychos seek to kill us all at once rather than one by one."

"Batman has a twisted and repressed relationship with Holmes Rachel (read: Peter Parker and Mary Jane). The idea is frustratingly underdeveloped, but then, he is Batman; hes not going to go on Oprah to profess his love."

"Nolan asked a very simple question for what would come to define his Batman movie. Why would a grown man dress up like a bat? This is a query that Tim Burton glossed over in 1989, because the world he created didn’t need an explanation. Nolan took a wholly opposite approach. Citing influences like Richard Donner’s 1978 adaptation of SUPERMAN, he wanted to ground Batman, as much as possible, in a world similar to our own. Instead of Batman being a product of a fantastically gothic world, he’d be a man who could justify costume dress-up as a lifestyle choice. To help with the shift, he brought in life-long comic book fan David S. Goyer to co-write the first draft of the screenplay."

"I admire, among other things, the way the movie doesnt have the gloss of the earlier films. The Batman costume is an early design. The Bat Cave is an actual cave beneath Wayne Manor. The Batmobile enters and leaves it by leaping across a chasm and through a waterfall. The Bat Signal is crude and out of focus. The movie was shot on location in Chicago, making good use of the murky depths of lower Wacker Drive and the Board of Trade building (now the Wayne Corp.). Special effects add a spectacular monorail down La Salle Street, which derails in the best scene along those lines since "The Fugitive."

"Most of the Batman comics offer little true motivation for Bruce becoming Batman. They say, merely, that he witnessed his parents murder and swore to avenge them by cleaning up Gotham. Batman Begins takes this further. It gives a real sense of who Bruce Wayne is and why he must fight criminals. Further, it shows the moment when Bruce gains understanding that he cannot fight crime just as a man, that he must become a symbol, a myth, a legend."

"The main piece of advice from just about everyone who saw Joel Schumachers terrible take on the Dark Knight in Batman & Robin was to focus on a single villain. Nolan has ignored this advice. He focuses on no villains -- the focus is all on Batman. However, there are more villains in Batman Begins than any Batman film since the camp 60s flick. Yet it works, because this is a story about The Batman and none of the villains comes close to overshadowing the bat."

"Remember how stiff Batman was in those other films? Guess what -- he can finally move his neck! The battles in Batman Begins are frenetic, fast and almost impossible to see clearly"

"They told me there was nothing out there, nothing to fear. But the night my parents were murdered I caught a glimpse of something. Ive looked for it ever since. I went around the world, searched in all the shadows. And there is something out there in the darkness, something terrifying, something that will not stop until it gets revenge... Me."