Of late my theme for Sunday posts has been lightweight and eclectic, so hey, here is another!
Recently I had the opportunity to introduce a young adult to the first in the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy, Batman Begins, now they want to watch all three of this amazing trilogy.
To me, Batman Begins is the greatest of the three, but others may argue for The Dark Knight and the genius of Heath Ledger, or Dark Knight Rises and the combination of plot and Tom Hardy as Bane. For sure, though, this is one of the greatest trilogies of all time.
To me I will always pick Batman Begins among the three Nolan films, and for one key reason, that is fundamentally reinvented the action movie genre when it was released 17 years ago in 2005. Without Batman Begins there would have been no MCU.
In watching it the other day under strict “Wittertainment code of conduct” (including no talking, no bathroom breaks, no food or drink other than “quiet food” (this is serious stuff!), I noticed a few things in particular:
- Batman Begins truly takes its time with the origin story, one is at least halfway into the run time before Batman starts to confront his “arch-enemy” for this particular movie
- From this, the character development is so powerful, something that is missing in almost all of the MCU movies (Iron Man and GoTG are exceptions, and, no surprise, among my favourite MCU films)
- The Hans Zimmer theme is so powerful in driving the music throughout this movie from ths start, then in fact the entire trilogy. Nolan has his favourites, and the Zimmer scores are critical not only to this trilogy but also Inception and Interstellar in particular.
- Despite being 17 years old, the movie still feels fresh and current
So, a few thoughts on what I feel is one of the top three film trilogies, the others being Star Wars (if you need to ask which three films I have nothing more to say!), and The Godfather. Close behind those is certainly LoTR, then I would also bring into the mix
- The Millenium Trilogy thanks mostly to both the plot and Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyquist
- Matrix. Yes the first one is far better than the other two, but as a piece they were amazing in their time
- The Dollars Trilogy, the three “man with no name” Clint Eastwood westerns. Again driven by the soundtrack (Sergio Leone), particularly
- Toy Story, then if you have sons, you can add Toy Story 4 and you have the greatest four movie series ever x
PS In the first year or so of this blog, I wrote many weekly posts called “Movies with Meaning”. If you have a movie you’d like to see my thoughts on, the complete list of (over 70) movies is here.