Re: Batman Begins (Movie spoilers).
That is a good point, but I'd rather they would have just dropped the whole romantic notion and just had them be good friends, what's wrong with just that?
There was no romance, technically.
Any romance that was going to be there from the roots of their childhood, pretty much died before it could even happen.
The result? Nothing but barely existent pining from Rachel Dawes end.
I think it's genius that they had all the groundwork for a romance --- "hey! it's that cute girl you knew from way back when!" --- but sidelined it.
And it wasn't sidelined because 'they ran out of time to explore it' or 'became less important than the larger plot'.
It was sidelined because it HAD to be sidelined. Just like Bruce sidelines everything else to be Batman.
What I pretty much like about
Batman Begins is that it focuses on a largely ignored aspect of Batman: the man who transcends the things that made him.
I remember way back when reading an article about Batman that says that he's many things, that indicate that he's much bigger than the influences that make him.
For one thing, part of Batman is
a child's wish fulfillment. "I will not be afraid. I will be bigger and scarier than they are. I will never be afraid. Never again." Another part of him began as
the completely selfish pursuit of vengeance. "Crime took my parents. I will make crime pay."
In Batman according to
Batman Begins, Wayne transcends the two influences that made him: His first influence --- the death of his parents at the hand of crime --- made him see things as an eye for an eye. Punish crime and hope to God that crime learns.
The second influence --- an elitist philosophy of The Better Men --- taught him that crime is a symptom of a flawed society. The solution is to purge the world of it through genocide. Purification is the duty of the better man.
The final Batman is the one who transcends wish fulfillment, elitism and revenge by concluding that the only way to fight crime is to fight it like a criminal. By concluding that the duty of Better Men is to take the vast resources at their disposal to better Gotham, and endeavor to make that city one of the world's finest.
The Batman is the one who proves he is better than both philosophies.
