10. Leaving Ra's Al Ghul On A Crashing Train In Batman Begins
"I won't kill you...but I don't have to save you." One of the most controversial moments of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy relied, as Nolan himself has pointed out, on a "technicality": Batman had already established his "no kill" credentials -- in stark contrast to those of his mentor, Ra's al Ghul, who preached "doing what was necessary", including wiping out hundreds of civilians if push came to shove -- but when Ra's found himself on a careening, out of control monorail train, Batman left him on said train with nothing but the above wisecrack. The scene inspired (and continues to inspire) a seemingly endless number of online debates. Was Bruce Wayne technically responsible for
murdering Ra's? The act was certainly more than justifiable -- after all, Ra's was a
terrorist cult leader who was planning to reduce an entire city to madness with a hallucinagenic weapon, and didn't seem to show any signs of rehabilitating any time soon -- but did it conflict with Batman's own moral stance? Ra's had put himself on that train to begin with (considering the speed at which the train was traveling, was it possible Ra's had basically intended this as a kamikaze mission to begin with?), but could Batman have rescued him, pulled him to safety? What is perhaps most interesting about this little moment is the fact that it was clearly a conscious choice. David Goyer's original first draft script had Batman and Ra's al Ghul battling hand to hand on top of the speeding monorail train; Ra's put Batman in a headlock, Batman used his cape to escape at the last minute, and Ra's was sent to a screaming death -- still a little morally ambiguous, perhaps, but much less ambiguous than how the scene plays out in the final film, where Batman has clearly incapacitated Ra's and still leaves him on the train to fend for himself. Why muddy the waters morally? Perhaps it's to show a rookie Batman -- in his first real case -- making a misstep, one that he quite pointedly corrects in the next film; when Batman throws the Joker off a construction tower at the end of The Dark Knight, the scene is underscored with the same music as when Ra's meets his fate...but this time, Batman catches the Joker with a grappling hook, and pulls him to safety. This is one of those fan debates that will probably never be settled...and it is one that, ironically enough, in answered within the films themselves. When Marion Cotillard's nutty, wild eyed version of Talia confronts Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises, there's no cutesy wisecrack or tidy moral technicality to get him off the hook. In her eyes, as she tells Bruce, he "murdered" her father. Maybe she's right. And speaking of Talia...