‘Batman Begins’ Taught Us How to Take Batman Seriously (Onscreen)

15 years ago, Christopher Nolan‘s first entree into the world of superheroes, Batman Begins, premiered in cinemas. The film was a hard reboot of a movie franchise that had fizzled out with the campy extravagance of 1997’s Batman & Robin, a movie best-remembered for prominent nipples on the Batsuit. Nolan’s take on the Batman mythos stripped away the canon’s more surreal elements and repositioned Batman as a dark and gritty hero defined by trauma. The film was an instant hit and opened the door for its magnificent sequel, The Dark Knight, as well as a sea change in superhero films.

Since Batman Begins debuted in 2005, Batman films have become almost synonymous with grim imagery and super-serious storytelling. The superhero genre itself has become a respected box office juggernaut, and not the nerdy niche it once was. For better or worse, Batman Begins was the film that taught mainstream film audiences to take Batman seriously. (Maybe even too seriously?)

Comic book fans have always taken Batman seriously. The Caped Crusader made his big debut in 1939’s Detective Comics #27 and has taken an almost ubiquitous hold on the psyche of America since then. Born Bruce Wayne, the privileged son of Gotham City elite, Batman’s origin story is defined by grief. As a boy, Bruce witnesses his parents gunned down in front of him. After growing up under the watchful eye of butler Alfred, the adult Bruce devotes his life to cleaning up the streets and taking down the unhinged villains who would wreck more havoc on the citizens of Gotham. He proverbially picks the form of a bat because he himself has a phobia of them.

Batman’s popularity has long soared off the page. As early as 1943, there was a theatrical film serial series wherein Batman (Lewis Wilson) did battle against a cell of Japanese spies in Gotham City. In 1966, Adam West starred as the hero in the uber-popular (and deliciously camp) Batman. The series has become as famous for its swinging ’60s vibe as its incredible stable of guest stars filling out the rogue’s gallery of villains. However, it wasn’t until 1989 that Batman got his very own live action feature. Tim Burton’s Batman took the character’s legacy seriously but set the dramatic battle between Batman (Michael Keaton) and the Joker (Jack Nicholson) in a hyper-stylized world that riffed on Art Deco designs. The film was a thrilling, gothic, caricature of noir. A series of sequels followed, and each installment became more bonkers and felt further from the realm of reality.

15 years ago, Batman had respect, but in live action films the character had never been granted the kind of depth found in comic arcs like The Long Halloween, The Killing Joke, the critically-acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series, and animated feature Mask of the Phantasm. Christopher Nolan wanted to remedy that. Already a popular filmmaker thanks to Memento, Nolan wanted to retell the Batman myth with an emphasis on the psychology of the character. That meant starting at his beginning and anchoring the storytelling in a version of Gotham City that felt real.

The first thing that you notice about Batman Begins is how relatively mundane its opening sequence is. We watch a young Bruce Wayne playing with a younger version of Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes). He falls in a well dug below his parents’ estate and is frightened by a swarm of bats. Later, when his parents take him to the theater, he is scared of the extras who remind him of the winged mammals and beg his parents to leave. They do so and meet their destiny. The Waynes are murdered in the alley and young Bruce forever feels guilt for it.

Throughout Batman Begins, Nolan takes pains to balance the sensational aspects of the story with skepticism, satire, and even physical bruises. This version of Batman isn’t a superhero, but a rich boy running from his pain by rushing into battle. One of the film’s best sequences is a relatively quiet one: a battle-scarred Bruce is roused out of bed by Alfred (Michael Caine) and the audience sees first hand the toll that Batman’s late night escapades have taken on the young man’s body. While he snaps back into the rhythm of his workouts, Alfred brings up the fact that a famous face like his own is going to need an alibi for his late nights and even later starts to the day. While spelunking comes up, Bruce eventually decides to put on another mask, that of a degenerate party boy. It’s this costume he wears for Gotham society and it’s one that puts him even further adrift since it disgusts his one true friend, Rachel.

The thing that sets Nolan’s trilogy of Batman films apart from earlier adaptations was the insistence that masked heroes are more the avatars for good in a battle against evil. Batman Begins uses emotions and psychology to explain its characters actions, using grief in the same way other films might use a radioactive spider bite. Other superhero films had laced psychology into their storytelling, but Batman Begins put it front and center. (One of the villains is a psychiatrist obsessed with pushing patients over the edge with a compound that elicits fear.) Nolan didn’t root his films in “gritty” reality; he anchored them in emotion.

As it happens, the most compelling superhero stories also come from a place of true human emotion. Whether it’s Peter Parker’s quest to earn the respect of his chosen father figure, Steve Rogers’s battle to conquer his own feelings of inadequacy in order to be a hero great enough to stand up for everyone, or Diana Prince’s righteous, tragic compassion in the face of a world war, superheroes aren’t super because of their wild powers. They’re super because they are driven by their emotions.

The popularity of Nolan’s take on Batman has encouraged other filmmakers to approach comic book adaptations with the same level of intensity. Just this year, Joaquin Phoenix won an Academy Award for playing Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, and yet another screen version of Batman is in production starring Robert Pattinson. Superhero stories like Batman’s are taken seriously now both as cultural touchstones and works of art. However, that doesn’t mean that Nolan’s influence has been wholly good. After all, some filmmakers have interpreted his success to mean that superhero films should be visually dark in order to earn respectability. Nolan’s color palate was stark, but his filmmaking was rooted in a spectrum of emotion.

Batman Begins might not be your favorite Batman movie, but without it, there’s no Dark Knight, no Joker, and no sense that Batman is a cinematic character of pain and pathos over puns and “pow” visual effects. Batman Begins made us take Batman movies seriously.

Where to stream Batman Begins