10 Movies That Struggled To Define Their Own Rules
8. What Counts As "Killing" Someone - Batman Begins
Though the Batman movies have generally played pretty fast and loose with the Caped Crusader's no-kill policy, the gritty groundedness of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins suggested a more serious-minded engagement with notions of the superhero taking a life.
Despite the movie making it abundantly clear that Batman (Christian Bale) doesn't kill, there are two instances where both his action and inaction clearly cause people to die.
When Bruce flees the League of Shadows' HQ by burning it to the ground, he very clearly leaves unconscious foot soldiers to burn to death or suffocate.
And at the end of the film, he opts not to save Ra's al Ghul (Liam Neeson) from the very accident he instigated, as if that absolves him of creating the circumstances of the villain's death.
This set a rather wishy-washy precedent which continued in the next two Batman movies: in The Dark Knight Batman killed Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) in order to save Gordon's (Gary Oldman) son, and in The Dark Knight Rises he caused Talia al Ghul's (Marion Cotillard) hijacked Tumbler to crash, killing her.
There's no argument that most of these kills were for the greater good and absolutely worthwhile, but the vaguely sanctimonious, hand-waving air with which Nolan's films clearly hold these deaths suggests he doesn't entirely appreciate the gravity of Batman taking a life, no matter whether "warranted" or not.