Reviews

I do not reveal the "ending" of the show in this review, i just spoil the content of 2 episodes ;-)

This show i believe is a mini series, since i have seen all 9 episodes and it appears to "end" on the 9th episode. It saddens me because this show had the potential to be extremely good.

The strangest thing about Sleeper Cell is if you only see one episode you will have a completely warped perspective on what political message the show is trying to send.

let me give an example, the first episode made the al queda sleeper cell to appear extremely non descript, 2 fluent naturally English speaking Arabic men, 3 Caucasian men, and 1 African American Muslim. The goal of the show at first seemed to be "lets scare the Sh*t" out of the American public by making them even more paranoid about terrorists than they already are. The terrorist cell acted like the Joe pesci, deniro, and Ray liotta in Goodfellas. In the first episode they confront a fellow member by burying him up to his head in sand and stoning him to death for bragging to his friends about their planned attack. To me it was even more charactered than a Mafia movie.

So my thoughts were after the first episode were "Wow this is definitely some sort of anti Muslim, scare American, propaganda show"

but i was extremely surprised that in a following episode the political message seemed to completely 180.

A young Muslim boy from Afghanistan comes to America hoping to be recruited to the sleeper cell. Through out the episode we learn that he was wrongly accused of being a terrorist by the American, when he was actually a farmer in Afghanistan. His rival neighbor had sold him and his family out to the American army for a large cash reward. You then follow his story to the Abu Garib prison where he was tortured over and over again until he admitted he was an Al queda member. Upon his release, by this time he had harbored so much hatred against America that now he actually wanted to commit terrorism The episode almost tried to make you sympathize with this character for "the Americans turning him into a terrorist".

very strange show indeed, although sometimes very campy and hard to take seriously, this show still makes me paranoid, question the war on terror, and realize that a terrorist attack either real or hoaxed can happen at any time.

I honestly expected to like this movie much more than i did. Part of it was the amount of time I'd been following the development of begins. I never expected the movie to actually come out...So when it did i was extremely surprised It took many liberties with the Batman origin story from the comic books, but was able to capture the feel of the the comic better than any of the previous 5 Batman pictures (including the Adam west 70's movie).

semi-spoiler warning - some of the stuff below reveals specifics about the movie but stuff that in my opinion wont truly spoil anything.

any ways I'm going to give some bizarre comments on aspects of the movie which other people may not find important.

• Music - One of my big worries was what will the new Batman theme sound like? Danny Elfman's batman theme for 1 & 2 was some of the best music ever written IMO. The theme and music composed in a similar style was used throughout Batman: the animated series, which is by far my favorite screen adaptation of Batman thus far. The opening title music from Batman Begins was very dark and ambient, had some electronic elements but was mostly just acoustic sounding drones over slow taiko-like drums. A very drastic change from all previous batman films. Not a theme song really, but it was a good atmospheric opening to the film. Later the score reminded me of the eerie but emotional piano music from "Unbreakable" or "The Sixth Sense". This was mostly played during the flashback sequences from Bruce Wayne's childhood. Some of the action oriented symphony music was good but not too memorable during Wayne's training. Later in the film when you actually see Batman fighting for the first time the music turned very cheesy Jerry Bruckhiemer-like. I'm not sure if this where Hanz Zimmer stepped in, but whoever is responsible for this atrocious cookie-cutter music should resign. Sorry for sounding so angry but when these regurgitated "time is running out" Vin Deisal themes start i get a little pulled out of my suspension of disbelief. Other than the 10 minutes of this awful music spread out over the last 45 minutes of the movie, the soundtrack was pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty good (Larry David voice).If i had to choose I'd sadly pick the Batman Forever soundtrack over Batman Begins.

• Scarecrow psychedelic weapon - this was definitely the best aspect of Begins for me. They portrayed the Scarecrow as a realistic and almost likable guy, aside from the fact that he caused hallucinogenic waking nightmares upon unsuspecting people. The visual effects team did such a wonderful job that i was sad we didn't see more of the Scarecrow's Datura-like gassings.

• Batman - Christian Bale was great as Bruce Wayne, but as Batman i still think Keaton was better. The horse scary voice whisper Bale does in the close-up Batman dialog makes him seem less intimidating than even Val Kilmer. When Batman first appears on screen it is a very scary moment. Bale still does a great job (when not speaking) of making batman seem like a frightening and almost evil man in many scenes. This is what makes up for his sometimes sheepish batman character interaction.

overall i give the movie a 7 out of 10, i felt the ending was unfulfilling, some stuff ruined the great atmosphere at times, but it is definitely a breath of fresh air in the batman movie franchise.