Where to Begin?
The Pyscho-Pirate returning characters to the continuity (Animal #23):
I’m sick of fear. I’ll never let you out [Scarecrow].
Though Crane and the effects of his weaponised aerosol hallucinogens were the parts of Batman Begins that most consistently entertained me.
(This isn’t a review, just thoughts, indulge me if you will. I thought the prequel was boring and had lousy music - but the movie contained enough entertaining elements to keep me from hating it.)
+1 for inclusion of ninjas, especially the gorgeous stealth fight between Bruce and Ra’s amongst ninja choreography. +1 for the Batmobile - broom, broom. I liked the abstraction of most of the action (though it remains focal and unfunny - it’s no comic or cartoon or TV series).
I loved Falcone in his introductory scene - there Bruce sees fear, power, symbolism, theatricality - but he takes way the wrong lessons (as he later does doubly with Ra’s). Falcone is just a man.
Good on Rachel for doing what Padme never does in AOTC - acts human - absurdly delivering two slaps for Bruce’s interrupted attempt at vengeance. But if Rachel is a somewhat-better-Padme, Ra’s is a shithouse-Qui-Gon. He sounds like one of those Nietzscheans that TV was writing about a while ago.
(This next bit is nothing like what I’d expect in a review!)
What really got me about this film was how it parties like it’s 1989. After 16 years and films like The Matrix, Mystery Men, Unbreakable, X2, Spider-Man 2, even Catwoman, all I got was Batman Again? With the end a dark reflection of Spider-Man it seems deliberate. Playing inside baseball, I don’t blame Frank Miller - DK2 should be enough to disclaim his responsibility for what people think of Dark Knight Returns. I blame Christopher Nolan.
Nolan’s directorial debut, Momento, was a film that made the main character’s story an origin designed to be iterated forever, inhuman, freed from time, nothing but a lame puzzle. I can see how he could go in for a project exactly like this. Though, unlike superhero comics, the obssession with origin is a major feature in superhero movies.
Contra Fiore, when I was growing up, Batman didn’t have an origin, and wasn’t about symbolism or terror. He was a superhero without superhuman powers, a detective and a lab scientist, with B-movie foes. He was friends with Superman. Of course this comes from mid-Eighties Australian giant-sized b+w reprints and the TV series.
I’d like to see more movies follow X2. Almost no issues of comics are origin stories. Almost no episodes of TV series are origin stories. Yet most people must have come in after #1 or the pilot and not been too confused.
PS
Why did I go see this film, when from the ads it seemed like something I wouldn’t like? Andrew, Dave, John, Mark.
Mark:
Danny Baker has rightly observed that ‘dark’ is now the laziest and most cliched term of approbation in contemporary cultural appreciation.
As a Star Wars fan I know this only too well! 
I’d also like to do away with words like: mythology, deconstruction, postmodern, realism, seriousness, faithful, unbelievable, franchise, cynical, “see it on the big screen”, “the fourteen-year-olds in the audience”, “either love it or hate it”, “so bad it’s good”, “what the director was trying to do”, “like a computer game”, “I’d like to see”, etc, etc.
PPS
Superman quote from the last Batman story I read (JLA Classified #3):
These “no-nonsense” solutions of your just don’t hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time-travel.
I’d like to see Grant Morrison write a Batman film. “Slow down!” Booom.
(So many elements above that I hate in reviews. Are they okay in conversation? How can I escape/accept them?)
PPPS
Not knowing older Batman stuff, I once did a search on the internet for his origins. Then, I got confused, and thought that he was given a two page origin story nine years after his first appearance. It seems that the two page origin happened after six months, in Detective Comics #33. This was expanded from a flashback into a full thirteen page story nine years later in Batman #47. You can see when a lot of elements were added to his story here.