The Lindsay Brothers

Month: December 2010

Batman Begins

Extraordinary
Adventure
88

One might suspect that there would be a lot of superhero movies on a list of extraordinary adventures. But superheroes are a strange lot, preferring to stay in one place most of the time and fight petty criminals.

Occasionally you’ll get a supervillain who has some dastardly world-domination plot, but even these are usually run out of the basement of some abandoned building in the superhero’s home town, and involve the theft of nuclear warheads which are conveniently being transported via the nearest forest road.

Even if the superhero has great abilities for travel and high resistance to danger, they don’t use it much. Superman can fly into space and back, but only to retrieve lost nuclear warheads or stop time. The Flash can run at near lightspeed, but only finds it useful to beat the rush hour in the local business district.

Gotham City: Surprisingly still crime-ridden in spite of billionaire vigilante justice

There are no historic artifacts in superhero stories (nuclear warheads don’t count), no epic battle scenes (it’s usually just a brawl between a couple of invincible people, and Hulk vs. the entire U.S. Army does not count), and the costumes, while exotic in one sense of the word, lack the worn-in look of classical adventure fare.

Don’t get me wrong. I love good Superhero movies, and there are several that are pretty awesome. But few embody the spirit of adventure like Batman Begins.

I am tortured, oh so tortured, by my uncanny physical skills and immense wealth.

Let’s face it: Batman is a character that is famous for doing all of those things I just mentioned. He stays in Gotham, butts heads with the local criminals, and dresses in black latex. But when Christopher Nolan took over the franchise, he brought Batman to the world.

Here is a hero on a search for meaning. This goes beyond the typical armchair psychology of superhero stories. Bruce Wayne travels to the ends of the earth in order to know and understand suffering. In the remote mountains of Asia, he is trained in the art of survival, in the martial arts, and finally in the mystic practices of the ninja.

This is not a still from Viggo Mortensen's "The Road," but rather a scene from Batman's quest for a rare flower (seriously)

Ra’s Al Ghul is the secret man/organization that takes Bruce under his/its wing and teaches him that periodically civilization must be broken down to its primitive roots or suffer the consequences of indulgent humanity. This is a far cry from a crazy nutjob like Lex Luther or the Joker, because their evil is incomprehensible. But Batman, while troubled by their methods, kind of sees their point. It does not hurt that Ra’s Al Ghul is fronted by Liam Neeson, who has already appeared in at least one of the stories on our list, and may yet appear in more.

"And it was there, right in the middle of my cage match with The Cobra, that I thought up the idea for a kevlar suit that would showcase my pectorals while at the same time protect me from getting punched to death."

In the second half of the movie, Bruce returns home, secretly infiltrates his own corporation, constructs a massive underground lair with the help of his spry, remarkably fit 70-year-old butler, and sets about dismantling a web of corruption in the city.

It is amazing to me that Nolan was allowed to make a Batman movie in which Batman does not appear for nearly an hour. This isn’t like Jaws, where maybe the rubber suit didn’t look real enough. This was a full-on resurrection of a franchise (after the disaster of Batman and Robin) and Nolan’s solution was to keep the rubber suit off the screen.

When we finally see Batman for the first time, he is exiting a laundry, having just dry-cleaned his cape.

The first half of Batman Begins – the hero’s journey into the Abyss, his taking up the mantle of goodness, his befriending of strategic allies – is for my money as good as it gets in superhero movies. Even the Dark Knight, which may be a superior film overall (though not as adventurous) does not have a sequence as good as this.

The end of the movie does veer back into conventional superhero territory with an exciting train chase into the heart of Gotham, but we can forgive them, since it’s a law that every superhero movie must have at least one extended CGI sequence. But it doesn’t dilute the power of the story. When Ra’s Al Ghul shows up at the end, having targeted Gotham as the civilization to bring down next, it proves that sometimes shadowy villains are more menacing than a killer clown or a guy that dresses like a penguin.

Portrayed here by Jon Lovitz

The performances are solid across the board. There is the aforementioned Liam Neeson. Christian Bale is by far the best Batman. Michael Caine simply is Alfred (hey, Michael Caine on our list again!), and it’s hard to go wrong with both Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman in your movie. But where Batman Begins really excels is the script, which manages to externalize a man’s inner demons and tell a compelling adventure story that spans continents. All that and Batman-shaped throwing stars.

Yay!

Next up, #87

December 9, 2010
The Empire of Blue Water

Extraordinary
Adventure
89

Aside from Attack of the Clones, one would be hard pressed to come up with a more pulp-inspired title than The Empire of Blue Water, but seeing as it’s about the true-life story of Captain Henry Morgan, it is (happily) extremely fitting. If you were to try to come up with a pulpier title, you might think about subtitling it “Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, The Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended The Outlaw’s Bloody Reign.” Which, believe it or not, is exactly what Stephan Talty subtitled it.

The subtitle would've been longer too, but they couldn't find a smaller picture of a pirate ship.

Unlike The Silmarillion, which is fake but seems real, The Empire of Blue Water is real, yet seems fake. Who would believe in a mad welsh pirate captain who was brought up from nothing to command what was called The Great Pirate Army? Even more preposterous was the fact that not only was it called “The Great Pirate Army,” but was done so with a straight face. Who would believe that after decades of mobbing and drunken debauchery, the Jamaican city of Port Royal would be all but wiped out by a massive earthquake a few months after Captain Morgan died, thus bringing not only the death of the man, but a seemingly supernatural vengeance on all of piratedom? Who would believe that this man Captain Morgan actually looked like the picture on the rum bottle that’s named after him? Who would believe that the rum Morgan actually drank was called Kill Devil?

I hereby claim this barrel of rum in honor of my dear beloved mustache!

Who would believe that when he returned to England a prisoner for violating the English treaty with Spain that he was acquitted and instead of imprisoned, he was knighted? That when he returned to Jamaica he was made governor and began hunting the very pirates he had helped make famous? You see Henry Morgan was technically a privateer: a private soldier of the seas given permission by the English to loot and pillage the Spanish. Much like Dean Koontz does to Stephen King in our present time. Also, much like Stephen King, actual pirates were awarded a bigger share of the booty if they lost a limb. Although in their case it was usually while trying to overthrow an enemy ship. This accounts for all the hooks and peg legs and is also coincidentally the origin of the phrase “it cost me an arm and a leg.”

Also pirates were awarded extra booty if they spontaneously grew fish parts in the midst of a raid. This was apparently very common.

The Empire of Blue Water is filled with action and fantastic naval strategy, especially Morgan’s attacks on Porto Bello and Meracaibo. Talty however does veer off on a few tangents, mostly due to the story of Roderick (an amalgamation of what a typical pirate would be), but his major weakness comes in telling us the origin of the word Buccaneer. Apparently it comes from the people who lived in the Caribbean who ate a special kind of barbeque called “Buccan;” thus “buccaneer.” This is not at all an interesting origin for such a cool word and is perhaps something that would have better remained lost to history.

Next up … 88!

December 6, 2010
The Inferno

Extraordinary
Adventure
90

There are some difficult hikes out here in our country for the average day trekker, of which the Timberline Trail in Oregon seems to be the toughest. It features several places where you can fall, drown, or create a landslide. And it probably doesn’t hold a candle to hiking in Hell.

Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Inferno is a literal trip into the abode of Satan, as seen through the eyes of a relatively good person who is just passing through. He has as his guide an angelic figure (in the form of the poet Virgil), which is helpful in many situations, such as when you forgot to renew OnStar or when you need the opposing quarterback to break his leg, but is especially so when meandering the streets of the condemned. It is not quite so easy to pull over and ask for directions when the guy in the gas station is having his liver eaten out by a murder of crows.

Dante's traditional outfit conjured up images of heat, power, and anger, in spite of the tights. He would later go on to headline Cirque du Soleil.

The Inferno is an express elevator into a kind of terrible imagery that even Stephen King can’t touch. It’s palpably discomforting to read, containing scenes that are at the very least disturbing, are often disgusting, and almost always laced with symbolism. That the poem presents this from a relatively religious perspective is what saves it from devolving into a bad Saw sequel (which begs the question, are there good Saw sequels?)

There are apparently video game adaptations of epic poems, proving once again that there is no story too dark for children that a supersonic hedgehog can't fix.

Apart from the sinners and the occasional scary animal, The Inferno is populated by monsters and malformed creatures of myth: Minotaurs, ghastly ferrymen, leathery bat-like infestations. It’s like Halloween at Universal Studios, without the E.T. Ride to take the edge off. While they do not directly menace the hero (Dante, playing the role of the journeyman), they do unspeakable acts to the sinners caught in their snares, including immersing them in a river of boiling blood, burning off their feet, melding their bodies onto giant insects, and turning classic Mel Brooks comedies into musicals.

The plot is of the allegorical kind, meant to represent man’s trek towards God. The Inferno begins that journey with a downward spiral into sin until finally arriving at the darkest corner of the Abyss. If this seems like a bit of a downer story, it is only because The Inferno is Part 1 of a larger work known as the Divine Comedy, which continues the story into purgatory and finally into Heaven. Perhaps the entire work should have been part of this Adventure series, but The Inferno has the most dramatic hero’s journey, and so stands alone.

Red was Dante's favorite clothing color. Here he is, graduating from Stanford.

You’ll find many of the popular trademarks of Hell here, including the Nine Circles, each of which maps to a particular Care Bear. Or maybe to a particular type of deadly sin, I forget. It is said that all sins are equal in the eyes of God, but that doesn’t stop Dante frame ranking them. As he heads down the circles, the sins get progressively worse. Listening to Air Supply puts you at around Level 2. Treachery and genocide somewhat lower.

They've really got them crammed in there. Does Hell have a 'burbs?

At the very bottom is the giant, hairy figure of Satan, his lower half encased in ice, while his three mouths chow down on history’s greatest betrayers, such as Brutus, Judas, and Hitler – which is totally weird, since The Inferno was written in 1308. Satan himself is the escape route, as Virgil instructs Dante to climb down Satan’s hairy back and into a hole in the ice, whereby they pass through the center of the earth. After the momentary disorientation of a switch in gravity, they then proceed on to Purgatory.

And so you also have survived the 9th circle of our countdown of the 100 Most Extraordinary Adventures (in any medium). When next we meet, it shall be for #89…

December 2, 2010