Having engaged on the film on other threads, I have come to realize that my enjoyment of Begins is rapidly disintegrating. Another aspect that bothered me with the film was the treatment of the Scarecrow. I did not have a large problem with him being reduced to a henchmen; my problem was that Nolan's secularization really robbed him of the iconic imagery associated with him in the comics. Excluding the scene where he rides the horse at the end, the man hired by R'as to distill the chemical was not the Scarecrow. If anything, his characterization was more Arkham - Amadeus or Jeremiah - than Crane. Don't get me wrong: Murphy gave a magnificent performance and helped anchor it closer to the source material (in fact, I'd argue he was the best part of the film.) Having said that, I still feel the best depiction of Scarecrow was in Arkham Asylum. I like to believe that in some alternative universe, an authentic portrayal of the Scarecrow was committed to film: a variation of the Western Preacher-y costume from The New Adventures of Batman & Robin, Murphy cast as Crane/Scarecrow, and Gothic/surreal imagery.
If anything, the more I think about it, Begins felt like an Elseworlds Tale. It was hardly a Batman film; it was an interesting experiment, but it was not until the sequels that the creative team delivered a film that legitimately looked and felt like a Batman film.
