I finally caught up with Batman Begins last weekend. I don’t plan to do a full review, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s too late in its run to be worthwhile; secondly, the guys at Hoopla pretty much covered all the points I would make about it. I didn’t like it as much as they did: I thought as soon as it moved in to action film mode it was pretty poorly made, and that its take on vigilante justice was fairly confused (I actually think the deceptively light and frothy Spiderman films, particularly the second one, balanced substance and action with considerably more finesse). But they got it right about the political undertones of the film, and I certainly found the film much more interesting than its predecessors. This is the other reason I don’t want to write a full review, however: having written so much about the political undertones of Revenge of the Sith and War of the Worlds I didn’t really want to wade too deeply into those waters again.
So this post is just a quick postscript to those previous pieces of writing (here, here and here). Because even as I want to move on to other things, I think it is remarkable that these themes are popping up with such regularity, and in such interesting ways. This is proving to be the American summer in which the effects of September 11 2001, and the political events that followed, were finally reflected in a considered way by the films emerging from the Hollywood production line.
Of course, we have seen knee-jerk reactions. The first phase was the frantic pulling of movies considered too insensitive (Collateral Damage) or challenging (The Quiet American) to release in the post-September 11 political environment. And there have been a few awkward, self-congratulatory references to America’s response to the attacks, such as the displays of solidarity by the New Yorkers at the conclusion of the train chase in Spiderman 2. Yet these moments have been fairly positive in their tone: we haven’t yet seen, for example, the mooted Rambo IV in which Rambo went back to Afghanistan to kick some terrorist butt. If you think of the Hollywood movies of the Reagan era, there was a lot of acting out of violent patriotic fantasies: not just the Rambo films, but also Rocky IV (Stallone versus Russia), and the Missing in Action films. You might have expected a nation that had received such a huge psychic jolt to revive the old right-wing genres such as Dirty Harry or Deathwish-style revenge thrillers, and send a few one-man armies after the terrorists.
That hasn’t really happened. We’re now seeing films that have been conceived, written, and shot well after the events, and can respond not only to the attacks, but to the political fallout afterwards. And what is the Hollywood take? Revenge of the Sith warned about the dangers of politicians who use security threats to erode civil rights. For all its confusion about vigilante justice, Batman Begins still makes the point that vigilantism and terrorism are two sides of the same coin, and is also a pretty interesting take on the way in which the primary weapon of terrorism is fear itself. War of the Worlds showed the folly of the hero’s son’s desire to pursue a military response to the threat. And to judge by reviews such as this, Land of the Dead has a few interesting points to make also.
I don’t have any big conclusion to make about all this, except that it could have been much worse. The wider response to September 11 has been incomparably depressing, but Hollywood’s surprising reluctance to take the low road has been heartening.