‘Batman Begins' Celebrates 20th Anniversary As ‘Superman' Takes Flight

Forbes

14 hours ago

20 years ago this summer, director Christopher Nolan and screenwriter David Goyer's Batman Begins revived DC's and Warner Bros.' theatrical fortunes. With writer-director and DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn's reboot film Superman opening this weekend to good numbers, it's worth looking at how director Richard Donner's landmark 1978 film Superman influenced both Nolan's and Gunn's franchise-saving approaches.
Christian Bale stars in "Batman Begins"
What Nolan's Batman Began
I had the honor of speaking with Christopher Nolan for the 10th anniversary of Batman Begins, and you can read that interview here. I'm among the heathens who thinks Batman Begins is the best film of the Dark Knight Trilogy. And part of why it's such a perfect Batman movie is the fact it made all of the right choices about how to tell an origin story and make it at once grounded and real, yet mythical and legendary.
Batman Begins arrived in the early stages of the 21st Century's growing love affair with superhero cinema, and it's incredible to look back and feel it only continues to get better with age, even as so many other films of that era or even more recent years seem dated or at most retain their status but don't shine brighter with the passage of time.
The Batman supplanted Batman Begins as my personal favorite Batman movie and my pick for best Batman movie of all time, but it's a close race and I love both films tremendously. The Dark Knight is of course within the same top tier of superhero movies, as is The Dark Knight Rises (which I agree with Nolan is probably his most underrated, or underappreciated, film – although Following is a strong contender), but for capturing everything I love best about Bruce Wayne and Batman and bringing it to life the way I always dreamed of seeing, The Batman and Batman Begins can't be beat.
And so perfect was the full origin and creation tale in Nolan's first of the films that it remains the best Batman origin story ever told, in any medium, so much so that for me and many fans it's the definitive conception of Bruce Wayne's loss, choices, training, and superhero first outings. It's so good, nobody else wants to try to do it again, because how do you match that?
One of the things that makes Batman Begins so definitive a depiction of Batman's origin is that this film, like its sequel The Dark Knight, depicted Gotham City as a living breathing character in the story. The city's arc defined much of the story's development and the main characters' own arcs, in deeply rich ways that connected those threads at every opportunity while making it seem effortless.
For what it's worth, this is where I think some of the (relative) decreased praise for The Dark Knight Rises over the years is significantly rooted in the fact its depiction of Gotham is more centered around specific groups and created a negative sense of the population as a whole, depicted mostly by the angry masses who rise up to take advantage of Bane's rule, leaving the cops and government officials along with some wealthy board members to represent the side of Gotham worth saving from the League of Shadows' wrath.
The same sense of the whole city and why it's always fighting its way toward the light even in the darkest of times felt lost thematically in The Dark Knight Rises, except in a few instances where necessary to reflect Bruce's lost sense of purpose, and there was no sense of how a resolution between the varying factions would come about, nor what the city as a whole learned or wanted to learn from all of this. It wasn't hard to imagine what came next and how the city would try to put itself back together and move on after the first two movies, but Bane broke Gotham and there was no prison doctor to smack its bones back in place so it could climb out of the cruel hole into which it had fallen.
This is what I suspect leads a lot of viewers to come away still impressed and entertained, and with plenty to discuss and think about, but not as enamored and without as much feeling that we returned to a place we knew and rooted for. Gotham's arc feels unfinished, after having seemed to reach a dark place from which no personalized recovery seemed evident. That's my guess, anyway. I still love the film, but I admit not as much as I did after walking out of the first screening emotionally overpowered and thrilled by all of its many fantastic elements.
Nowadays, I still rewatch The Dark Knight Rises and love it, but no longer consider it the ultimate Batman story by giving him an ending. Batman Begins, though, is still so great and aging like fine wine that my mental canon is to treat The Batman as a rough sort of continuation of the first two Nolan movies (so Rises is off in some distant future) with Begins as his origin story. I know this will eventually run into continuity issues my mind can't resolve simply, but that's no different than the case with the decades of best stories in the comics.
I still believe Batman Begins is one of Christopher Nolan's best films (Dunkirk is his best, and among the finest war films ever made), an effortless blockbuster effort from an emerging filmmaker who brought a commitment and vision – along with David Goyer – similar to the efforts around Donner's Superman. Nolan created an epic, operatic myth.
The inspiration from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner was also exactly right. Nolan's own noir cinematic sensibilities, in close proximity to his then-recent trio of neo-noir releases (Following in 1998, Memento in 2000, and Insomnia in 2002) were like preparation for his destiny to turn Batman back into a cinematic icon.
Batman vs Superman: Who Wears It Better?
Batman Begins smartly looked back to the lessons established in Richard Donner's seminal 1978 blockbuster Superman, which established the superhero movie template so perfectly that it's still the most successful approach and widely used today. Marvel Studios' MCU is premised on learning the lessons of Donner's Superman and applying them to great effect.
But as I already mentioned, prior to 2005 the only really successful superhero franchises still in theaters were Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man. By that time, both Batman and Superman franchises had gone off the rails and remained dormant. Only X-Men utilized the template of Donner's Superman.
Batman Begins not only revived the Caped Crusader's theatrical fortunes, but also reminded Hollywood that their biggest tentpoles and IP could be revived by returning to their roots. For DC, as the ones who established the superhero genre and the template for adapting comics to film, it was natural and good to rediscover their own lightning-in-a-bottle success. It also infused superhero cinema with artistic legitimacy and seriousness in a broader way than X-Men had been able to accomplish up to that point.
The lesson landed, and it influenced Iron Man three years later, which gave birth to the MCU. The same year, The Dark Knight became the first superhero movie to top $1 billion, making Batman Begins look even more brilliant in hindsight.
Batman Begins had precisely that recipe, and applied it as masterfully as Superman did back in 1978. With DC Studios' Superman once more attempting a return to the template including tonally and visually, not to mention so much overlap of musical score and iconic elements like the Fortress of Solitude and certain thematic and story beats, and now with blockbuster box office numbers alongside critical and audience praise, it looks like Gunn's reboot will take its place alongside Batman Begins for reviving and perfecting a franchise by returning to superhero cinema's roots.
Of course, it's not enough to merely apply the moving parts and stylings of the Superman template. You must have a terrific story to tell and heroes the audience relates to, or the rest won't matter. But when you've got that story and that hero, the sky's the limit. Just as Batman Begins applied the right lessons the right way 20 years ago, I think Superman will fly high.