Sometimes I see a corpse so beautifully preserved, it’s hard to believe they’re actually dead. Such is the case with “Batman Begins”. I almost put away my equipment and ordered him to stop being a wuss and get up.

This will be a short forensic analysis. There are few faults with this movie. Certainly, I’d have attempted to film the action scenes with a little more clarity, and Katie Holmes’ character is nigh-useless, but these are nothing compared with the climactic plan to destroy Gotham City, which is carried out in the stupidest way possible.

And it’s a real pity, because many aspects of the plan are very clever indeed, as one would expect from Christopher Nolan (his dialogue is easy to pick out: it’s the bits that sound like a book of philosophy compressed into ten-second sound bites, while not sounding trite). The ninja’s Blue Flower fear drug is at the core of “Batman Begins”. The ninjas have distilled its essence, given it to the Scarecrow for experimentation, and are planning on spreading it throughout the city to drive everyone into killing each other in a riot without end. Neat-oh. Spread it through the water supply, and then explode all the water into steam with a magic water-steamer and… well, here’s where things have gone drastically wrong.

The moment we hear there’s a device that vaporises all water within a hundred metres, I guarantee everyone in the theatre is thinking “But humans are 70% water!” And it’s a fair cop. The device sits there humming away like a miniature jet engine, and the ninjas are happily ignoring it despite having, y’know, mouths full of steam. At the very least. In any of the old Batman series or films, this would have been fine. Holy hockey-sticks, in “Batman & Robin”, this would have been a highlight, a plot twist towards sanity (even if there were ninjas with steam trickling out of their noses), a welcome relief from an endless stream of non-sequiturs.

But “Batman Begins” has rebooted the series, and up until now things have been making perilous amounts of sense. Every aspect of Batman’s costume and history are sold to us, and we’ve passed over our credit card and are happily signing without looking at the numbers until this great big third-act reality-cheque.

So let’s retreat from the water microwave gun, and see if we can do something better. If they’ve been putting the Blue Flower drug into the water supply for weeks, then people would have noticed by now – anyone who puts on a kettle, or has a hot shower, for example. This would be undesirable for the ninjas. They don’t want any chance of people working it out in advance; they want everyone affected at once. Perhaps the drug really does work in the water, but it requires a separate trigger (more unlikely than inhaling steam) to work. The trigger could be a particular sound, colour, or an extra ingredient (which only needs to be sprayed in tiny amounts, with a crop-duster, say).

But the best possibility is that there is the extra trigger is Fear. In other words, the drug does not cause fear or panic, but instead makes them much, much worse. Like a powerful explosive that requires a detonator to set it off, this drug only works on people once there is a critical mass of fear. Once the drug is in the water supply, Ra’s Al Ghul’s job is simply to trigger that fear. And what better way than to release all the inmates in Arkham Asylum? The fear will then spread of its own accord, starting in the poor quarter, infecting everyone who sees the chaos. Raising the bridges would have no effect – the people on the ‘safe’ side would only need to see the chaos on the other side, and then the slightest trigger would spark the panic and continue its spread. And the ninjas would be spreading it as well; breaking open prisons, sending out inflammatory news bulletins, and so on.

This presents a formidably difficult task for Batman to overcome, which is not to say that the existing scenario was any easier. As the film stands, we don’t have much idea of how the panic was stopped. We have to presume that a lot of people died (including a large number of policemen) as the poor quarter was very thoroughly filled with fear-steam. The rest of the city might have been saved, but there is an implication that many lives were lost.

The good news is that we have quite a bit of set-up for Batman to do much better here: he’s had the fear drug himself, twice, and intimately knows its effects. He doesn’t have enough antidote to go around, which is good: we don’t want this to be too easy. Let’s look at a couple of solutions:

1. Sleeping gas. The panic can’t spread if people aren’t awake to spread it. A decently satisfying solution, but distribution of the sleeping gas throughout the entirety of Gotham City is a little awkward, as is explaining where all the gas supplies came from. This applies to all other antidote-type solutions (such as bat-peace gas, bat-love gas, etc.)

2. The populace have been so downtrodden by fear for so long, they have developed a tolerance, and never reach the critical threshold of fear required for the drug’s effects to kick in. Nice and ironic, but not very dramatic, and doesn’t need the hero (see also: the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark).

3. Radio/TV address/loudspeakers. Calming music is played, or platitudes broadcast, or outright lies stated with firm conviction. “No, that isn’t a rampaging mob headed for your suburb – it’s just harmless pranksters! Hahaha! That’s right, there certainly isn’t anything to get upset about outside. By the way, your water supply has been drugged, and if you become upset, it’ll drive you into a frenzy of rabid face-eating panic. So just stay calm, folks!” This solution could work if the speech is very, very carefully written. If it is, in fact, sufficiently well written, it’s Oscar bait. We’d better not rely on this one.

4. Distraction. “Is that a rampaging mob headed our way? Oh dear. I’m feeling really, really… ooh, look, fireworks!” Works on Homer Simpson and zombies, and even with the latter, only briefly.

But none of these solutions are really satisfactory or “correct”. We need something that stops the spread of fear to people who have not yet been contaminated; and preferably something that draws people who have been contaminated back to a sane state. The latter seems impossible and the former appears to be Just Too Hard to do elegantly such that people don’t feel bat-cheated.

It’s often fun to write myself into a corner like this. It appears Ra’s Al Ghul has created a fiendish plot that is almost too clever to (satisfactorily) defeat. As a side-note, this cut-first approach is a common one in my Forensic analysis: I often don’t have a solution in mind when I introduce new problems or complications to a story. This kind of problem-solving activity can be a lot of fun for a car trip with like-minded forensic fiends. Set up a perilous situation, deliberately block the most obvious solutions you come up with, and see if you can come up with an “of course!” solution. The moment of revelation can be immensely funny.

I was describing the “Batman Begins” problem to some of my forensic colleagues, and had gone through my above list of solutions, none of which are truly satisfying. Dr. Carroll, a particularly skilled mortician, suddenly came up with and idea, and it was not only beautiful and elegant and correct, but it had me chuckling for days.

The answer is money. One of the major themes of Batman Begins is that of Bruce’s (and his family’s) wealth. He deliberately acts the wastrel, incurring the wrath of Katie. Ra’s Al Ghul has previously tried to destroy Gotham City economically. His father had been concerned about the plight of the poor of Gotham City.

Hence, the ultimate distraction; the one thing that (cynically enough) could penetrate the fog of fear and distract everyone else from being scared: millions of dollar bills floating gently from the sky. Bruce Wayne can get a chance to shine, for once: we can set up that he doesn’t trust the banks and keeps millions of dollars around, or perhaps Batman has recently stopped a huge bank robbery (or goes into the city mint and signs a big cheque). Regardless: wherever there is Trouble With The Fear, he scatters money in the streets. People are distracted long enough for order to be restored. As much as money can be an evil, there’s practically no way the fear drug is going to make someone see a dollar bill lying on the street as being scary. Which could be ironic, because selected batches of money (say, the ones being dropped in the worst areas, near the Asylum) are tainted with a contact-sleeping-drug.

Finally, if Ra’s Al Ghul is still at large, cracking open prisons and spreading fear further, Batman pursues him as per the existing film, and leaves the money-spreading to Officer Gordon (and we should get at least one shot of his former partner looking on in awe at Gordon’s armloads of cash as he spreads it around).

If there’s a problem with this solution, it’s that it’s almost a little too on the nose. It ties in with the themes of the film, and (to me) it feels right, but we have to be careful to not underline the themes too much: as far as the characters are concerned, it’s a desperate and inspired way to save the city. We must resist the temptation to have anyone say “You can’t just throw money at the problem!” at any point in the film, or ask Bruce if it was his wastrel ways that inspired him, or have Bruce bankrupted by the spree, or have Bruce’s father appear in a cloud of money and wink at him at the end.

But if we can’t trust Christopher Nolan to treat the themes with subtlety and restraint, what, in the end, can we trust?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 28th, 2005 at 12:41 am and is filed under B, Comic Book, Forensic Analysis, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.