While Batman is arguably the world’s most popular superhero, his journey through Hollywood hasn’t always been a smooth one. The Caped Crusader’s first theatrical appearances date back to the 1940s, in the form of serials. His first feature-length adventure was 1966’s Batman: The Movie, an extension of the legendarily campy TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. Finally, in 1989, Tim Burton brought Batman to full blockbuster status, creating a stylized Gotham City with a dark, Gothic edge, and a Batman twisted enough to outright kill The Joker.
1992’s Batman Returns mostly continued this success, and is today remembered nearly as well as its progenitor. Unfortunately, that’s where Joel Schumacher came in, taking over the reins of the Bat-series as director. While 1995’s Batman Forever has its fans, 1997’s Batman & Robin earned widespread derision, taking things to a level of silliness not seen since the West/Ward days, and turning formidable villain Mr. Freeze into a laughingstock.
Thankfully for Bat-fans, then-rising director Christopher Nolan arrived to fix the franchise in 2005, granting Bruce Wayne’s cowled alter-ego the origin story he deserved in the form of Batman Begins. Presenting a more realistic take on Batman’s ascent to arch protector of Gotham, Batman Begins showcased the evolution of Bruce into the hero he would eventually become, and chronicled his training at the hands of Ra’s al Ghul’s League of Shadows. Now, years after covering Nolan’s follow-up efforts The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, Screen Junkies has given Batman Begins the Honest Trailers treatment. Check it out in full above.
As was the case when Honest Trailers tackled The Dark Knight, the series’ signature deep-voiced narrator does spend some time admitting that Batman Begins is a pretty damn good film. Still, that doesn’t stop Begins from receiving some of Honest Trailers’ signature humorous barbs, including highlighting the multiple criminal acts that Batman commits in the supposed name of justice, such as attempted murder, arson, and manslaughter. As the narrator points out, it’s still murder if you have a train do it.
Perhaps the biggest target of the narrator’s mockery is the League of Shadows’ rather absurd master plan involving vaporizing Gotham’s water supply and causing mass chaos using The Scarecrow’s fear toxin, which is arguably just as ridiculously illogical as anything Cesar Romero’s Joker might have come up with in the ’60s. To be fair though, at least Ra’s isn’t going around cracking one-liners about how the ice age killed the dinosaurs.
Source: Screen Junkies
