1st Aug 2005

“Would You Feel Fear Or Love a Singapore's Batman?”

“Yeah…yeah…Walao!…its another Batman movie.” Well imperative to what major Singapore's reviewers and critics were rating about the movie, I still choose to rate this movie with a strong 6 out of 5 stars. This is a one original movie that normalized the, all too familiar, comic book fantasy about a man who chooses to be a bat.

In Singapore's context, phantom enemies were conjured since the dawn of time to keep great empires and armies' troops in line. How could we forget those kampong school days where a strict teacher uses his/her bamboo “weapon of fear” on potential dozing students or an Indian policeman togged up in a turban staring into the every exploitation of an innocent yet potential law-breaker?

Eschewing completely the previous batman franchise, my favorite director of “Memento” and “Insomnia”, Christopher Nolan, has accomplished using natural environment and realistic humane trails in Batman's bonafide and origins. The years of endless teasing debate in whether it is “cartoonish” to go around saving the world in a costume has been truly answered by this relevantly grounded, adult, psychological movie.

With the recent terrorist attacks and our local National Kidney Foundation (NKF) controversy, fear or at least skepticism seems to ruin the every fabric that binds our present society. Everyone from the highest level of society to an average ‘Joe' have that nominal fear. Is there a counter action for these reactions? Do we truly need a Batman?

The reasons to Batman's beginnings are simply these: A decaying society's solution, mimicking closer to our home, is to enforced fear itself into these decadent criminal frighteners . In Nolan's movie, fear is the only relevance against these offenders especially in this pop-culture war-society today.

Like all reality heroes, symbol and leaders, the constant tempting agony of perching oneself between vigilante and justice is exactly true in today's context. It may be an insignificant wrongdoing or an unpublicized good deed; everybody still have to answer only to themselves and draw that true motivation and fearful impulse that defines our actions between what is right and wrong.

Nolan's movie addressed these present day issues with also a tint of hope. Maybe we can have a symbol, a hero, or even, are we ready, a Singapore's Batman. We just have to truly ask ourselves, is there any cause for hope even for today? Is fear truly the final answer for us all?

By Andrew Toh