Wow!!!!!

Rating: 10/10 (31 August 2005)

Forget Joel Schumacher's camp, crappy Batman. Actually, with all due respect, forget Tim Burton's moody, dark take on the hero, too: this is the Batman film fans have been waiting for ever since Bob Kane created the character in 1939.
Burton's movies were great in terms of atmosphere and mood, but still left us with some questions: why did Bruce Wayne become Batman? What made him choose a bat as his symbol? Where did he get all his gadgets from? Christopher Nolan answers all these questions in a gritty, realistic superhero opus that combines a big budget, an uncompromised directorial vision and some of the best writing and acting the genre's ever seen.
The story (written by Nolan and David "Blade" Goyer) focuses on Bruce Wayne (a superb Christian Bale) returning to Gotham City after a very long time spent abroad, trying to find himself and learning martial arts from Ra's Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) and the mysterious Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson,excellent). While trying to get his company back, he also decides to fight crime in order to avenge the murder of his parents, but he can't do it as a normal guy. He has to become something else, a symbol or, as Ducard put it, a legend. Hence the Batsuit: "Bats frighten me. It's time my enemies share my dread.".
The script is bulletproof, much like Batman's costume, and so is the look of the film: Nolan, an experienced director of psychological thrillers (Memento and Insomnia), takes inspiration from Burton's brooding aesthetic but tones it down a notch, keeping the movie firmly rooted in a world that is as real as possible (the only hint of grandeur is contained in the music, a masterclass in film scoring that stems from the combined effort of Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard).
For the same reason, all the characters are undeniably human: sure, Bruce Wayne does dress as a bat, but he has a plausible reason for doing so, and his gadgets, designed by Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), are all based on existing military technology - there's no James Bond extravaganza here. Rather than the Justice League or, even worse, Robin, sidekicks are limited to the indispensable Alfred (Michael Caine, brilliant as usual) and Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman, same as Caine), with a little help from Katie Holmes (not bad, actually) as a potential love interest. Even the villains are, by superhero standards, normal, Tom Wilkinson being particularly great to watch as an Italian-American mob boss. Granted, there is a slight concession to Burton's typical imagery in the form of the demented Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy, best Bat-nemesis since Jack Nicholson), but just like the rest of the film, it works astoundingly well.
Verdict: quite simply the best superhero movie ever and the best film of summer 2005. I'm already waiting for the sequel.