I really should have seen Batman Begins sooner than I did. Unfortunately so many favorable reviews popped up that I went into it with what were probably unrealistically high expectations. That said, it almost met them, and that is a stellar achievement in and of itself.

One thing this movie really wins points on is originality. This is the first time that we've actually seen a young Batman in the movies... ever. Well, with the exception of Mask of the Phantasm, but even that mostly took place later in his career. Technically Michael Keaton's Batman was "just starting out" in Batman 1989, but Michael Keaton certainly could not qualify as a young Batman. Both the animated series and Adam West Batman joined his career a few years in.

This was all particularly significant to me because it's the first time that I've ever seen a Batman that's presumably about my age (well, he's two years older I guess, but close enough). Part of it is me getting older, but this is the first time that Batman hasn't at least partly been a father figure (with a Robin in tow or old enough to have a son Robin's age) and instead more like a peer. that alone made the movie interesting, though it doesn't necessarily make the movie good.

The characterization, however, made the movie good. Great, perhaps. Outside of comics, the only depiction that is even remotely as thorough and interesting is that of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, the animated film. While I'd have to give Phantasm a slight edge in the characterization of Batman, where this movie really excels is giving us a much closer look at Batman's perpetual supporting cast of James Gordon and Alfred as well as typically unrepresented Lucius Fox! Particularly James Gordon, a thirty-something depiction that still managed to come across as a somewhat grandfatherly nerd. I was sorry not to get to see more of him.

Though I am not the first to say this, the weakest character had to be Rachel Dawes. A mute district attorney would have won the movie decent political correctness points and would have saved us all from having to listen to her whenever she spoke. Okay, she wasn't quite that bad, but she was even more pointless than most Batman love interests are - and that's saying a lot. The most comparable love interest is Andrea Beaumont from Mask of the Phantasm, which already puts Dawes at a disadvantage because Beaumont was by far the best. But at least Julie Madison from Batman & Robin knew when to get out of the way (which was, thankfully, most of that film). Dawes, on the other hand, just kept talking and talking and talking. If the intent was to have her pulling Bruce towards the side of light, and I suspect it was, it needed to be counterweighed - and not by a villain. She was so unconvincing as to make me want to turn evil. But anyway, more on this part later.

One of the other interesting differences between Begins and previous set of Batman movies is how little it focuses on the villains. Jack Nicholson was the start of Batman 1989, Jim Carrey of Batman Forever, and so on. Begins had a handful of villains and while they were obviously important to the story, they were not the driving factor. We got to know very little about them and that's okay. They weren't the point of this movie. They were just greasing its wheels. But considered all of the villains well played, especially Scarecrow.

The villains backgrounds were okay. It was a bit painful to see Ra's and the League of Assassins/Shadows without Talia. Talia would have been a much better love interest than was Dawes. Or even having one tug him towards darkness and the other towards light. I'm not sure the logistics of it, but I see a two-bird stone in here somewhere. I think that Scarecrow would make an excellent marquee villain given his powers (save for the fact that few know he exists), but Cillian Murphy hit all the right notes and made his secondary villainhood into all that it could be.

The rotating villains also allowed for an outstanding deviation from the typical comic book movie plot, which usually consists of a villain or set of villains who dance around the hero until the tail end of the movie. In this case the villains were (mostly) done away with one at a time. Considering that there were four, it really helped avoid uncomfortable situatins where three or four villains must be dispatched in the span of ten minutes or so, as was in the case of Batman Returns where they essentially had to all dispatch one another.

They did break what I have dubbed the Gyrich Rule, which basically states that you do not use a specific character unless the character is particularly useful for the purpose you are using him. Gyrich, a marginal but recurring character in the X-Men mythologies, was given a bit part and killed in the first movie. That was unfortunate because he could have been used later on. Though few will really care, Mr. Zsasz is a second-tier rogue's gallary villain and most definitely not a mafia hitman. It's unlikely that they ever would have used him, of course, but even so there was no payoff for the fans in using an established character in a throwaway, insignificant role that was very much out-of-character.

But there were other fans payoffs abound for the fans. Commissioner Loeb is black this go-around and incoincidentally not as directly corrupt, but it was good to see him. I didn't particularly like Fleese's character (I liked Eckhardt better from 1989), but his inclusion was also nice. And Carmine Falcone. Though the plot didn't follow Batman: Year One very closely, I liked a lot of the inclusions. It makes me really hope that we'll get to see Sergeant Bullock in a future movie.

The look and feel of the movie was also a strong point. Gotham was less interesting than it was under Burton and Schumacher, but it felt a lot more real. They got a whole lot of the little stuff right. Batman's ability to disappear got progressively better as the movie went along and he got a better feel for how to do it. There was also something about the costume that was aesthetically uncomfortable to me. I'm not sure what it was, but I doubt it was an unintended effect.

Besides Dawes, there was one perpetually irritating thing about the movie. It can be between neutral-to-clever to at one point or another have a character repeat what was said to him earlier in a sort of turnabout fashion. For instance, the quote about intentions and actions recited by both Batman and Dawes was helpful. "Finders Keepers" and the memo quote, however, were not. I found them quite irritating.

The comic book fan in me actually enjoyed the movie more than the Batman fan in me, oddly enough. But both of me enjoyed it and it finds itself kicking Mask of the Phantasm out of my Top Five Comic Book Movies. At the rate Hollywood is going, though, I'm going to have to make it Top Ten before too long.