Batman Begins

After the catastrophe that was Batman & Robin, it was a long eight years before Batman would return to the silver screen. There were attempts to get a new film off the ground repeatedly, but nothing came to fruition. Finally, Christopher Nolan stepped up to create a unique and grounded vision of the Caped Crusader, starting the story over and rebuilding everything from the ground up with Batman Begins. 

Bruce Wayne (played by Christian Bale) is a man haunted by the night he witnessed both his parents being murdered right in front of him in an attempted robbery gone wrong. Traveling aimlessly around the world, trying to hide from his past and the world, he winds up meeting a man named Ducard (played by Liam Neeson), who sees potential in Bruce and offers to train him as part of an elite and secret crime fighting group known as the League of Shadows, led by a man named Ra's Al Ghul (played by Ken Watanabe). As Bruce trains with them and learns their ways, he gains the necessary skills he needs to fight crime, something he has been desperate to do since his parents died. Things take a turn when he learns the drastic and lethal measures the League takes in wiping out the criminal element. He is further horrified that they have set their next target as Gotham City, where Bruce Wayne grew up. Creating a diversion, Bruce flees and returns to Gotham, greeted by his faithful butler and guardian, Alfred (played by Michael Caine) as well as childhood friend and love interest Rachel Dawes (played by Katie Holmes). He sets out in secret to create a persona to take on as he fights the criminal underworld that is causing his beloved city to fester and rot. He decides to use the image of the Bat, deciding it was time for the criminals to fear what he once did. Raiding the R&D department of Wayne Enterprises, Bruce Wayne is able to find many of the gadgets he needs with the assistance of Lucius Fox (played by Morgan Freeman), including an impressive all terrain vehicle designed for the military that Wayne adopts as the Batmobile. He also finds an ally with one of the few decent cops left, Jim Gordon (played by Gary Oldman). 

This film was a big breath of fresh air in the realm of Batman movies. Writer and Director Christopher Nolan, working with writer David S. Goyer, creates a world for Batman to exist in that is based entirely in reality. Basing the city of Gotham on Chicago (a novel touch, given the Mob heavy criminal element), the film feels more grounded and real than the previous Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher films. In a way, that helps the movies by giving the audience more they can relate to, which the previous films always seemed to lean more towards the theatrical and fantasy. It's also a charge to see, finally, how Bruce Wayne got his start as Batman and his not entirely successful first attempts at it. Each time, he'd pick himself up, dust himself off and go back to Lucius, looking for another piece of equipment to help him out (and Lucius figures out what Bruce is really doing pretty quickly, seeing through his claims of trying out spelunking and base jumping). 

The film is also the first Batman movie to properly capture the relationship between Bruce and Alfred. Both Christian Bale and Michael Caine do a great job at capturing the deep love between the two as they give a sense of the lifelong history Bruce has with Alfred, who takes his job of looking after Bruce very seriously and proves to be his greatest ally in his latest crime fighting endeavor. The one area where the film falters for me is the relationship between Bruce and Rachel. While Katie Holmes is decent in the role, she pales in comparison to the heavyweight acting going on around her and for a love interest she has zero chemistry with Christian Bale. She's not awful or anything, but her role kind of falls flat when it should have had a feistiness or spikiness to it that another actress could have brought to it. 

Overall, Batman Begins is a solid effort and a strong opening chapter to what would be a trilogy of Batman films directed by Christopher Nolan. It took the Batman story seriously while grounding it in the real world and dropping the more fantastical elements to create a genuinely great film backed with an impressive cast. It ranks easily as one of my all time favorite Batman movies, and with good reason.