Understanding 3 Things The Dark Knight Trilogy Did Better Than Any Other Batman Movie (And One Thing It Got Wrong)
Who’s the best Batman director? It’s an ongoing debate, and everyone has their favorites, though poor Leslie H. Martinson (1966’s Batman: The Movie) gets forgotten the most. Tim Burton made the character cool again, Joel Schumacher made him more homoerotic and toyetic, Zack Snyder made him older and angrier, and Matt Reeves made him emo.
Christopher Nolan, though, is a director who has almost as passionate a fan base as Batman himself, and he’s earned it, having made the first Batman film to win an acting Oscar (for Heath Ledger’s Joker). Nolan can make a biography movie about a nuclear scientist into a box-office hit, and an ancient Greek poem into the highest grossing R-rated movie of all time. Furthermore, The Dark Knight is often credited for the Oscars expanding the Best Picture category to ten so that exemplary blockbuster films have a shot at competing with more traditional art cinema.
His Dark Knight trilogy, starring Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne and Batman, remains the only actual Batman trilogy out there from the same director and star. Technically, Ben Affleck has played Batman the most times — four — but never in a solo Batman movie (Michael Keaton ties him if you include the vaulted Batgirl). There’s a reason for that: Nolan gets Batman right more often than most other versions do. Let’s look at the three things the Nolan version does best…and the one thing it notably doesn’t.
3. It Has a Beginning, Middle, and End
Franchises are inherently open-ended, and big-name superheroes are automatically considered franchises at the box office. In general, that means any given movie featuring them has to leave room for more. Unlike so many horror icons, most heroes can’t simply be resurrected from the dead every time they’re killed — not without straining credulity, anyway.
Christopher Nolan, however, earned the directorial clout to break this rule. His Dark Knight trilogy tells a complete story about Batman, from origin to retirement. Collectively, they function as a complete three-act story: Bruce Wayne becomes Batman, he faces his greatest adversary and has a major setback, then he comes back beaten down for a final showdown and victory, after which he disappears. Nolan leaves the franchise open by suggesting John Robin Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) could inherit the cowl, but the “real” Batman is done.
It was such a striking choice that other franchise heroes followed suit. Marvel killed Iron Man, and MGM had James Bond die. We know they’ll return in reboots, but it allowed the stories at hand to have more meaningful arcs and, if our heroes can actually die, true emotional stakes.
2. Batman Has a No-Kill Rule
Though it hasn’t always been a consistent rule, as the original Bob Kane Batman carried a gun, the comic-book Batman for most of his career has had a rule against killing. Understanding that the murder of his parents emotionally wrecked him, Batman usually sees killing as a weakness that would make him as bad as the criminals he pursues.
Most of the other Batman movies have gleefully ignored this. Michael Keaton’s Batman specifically plans to murder both the Joker and the Penguin, blows up a factory full of people, sets a clown on fire, and more, before finally deciding at the very end of Batman Returns that it would be morally wrong for Catwoman to kill her evil boss. Val Kilmer’s Batman urged Robin not to kill, but he let Two-Face die. George Clooney and Adam West’s Batmen operated like deputized cops, and probably wouldn’t kill, but Ben Affleck’s version was in a Zack Snyder movie, with all that implies.
Bale’s Batman is specifically opposed, albeit with an asterisk. He won’t kill people, but he’s also not obligated to save them if they’re bad guys. So if R’as al Ghul is in a crashing train, or Bane stands in front of Catwoman when she’s firing guns, that isn’t his problem, apparently. But it’s nice that he won’t set out to kill with intent, and that he spared the Joker.
1. Bruce Wayne Is the Mask, as a Feckless Playboy
A Batman trope that’s almost as ingrained as the no-kill rule is that Batman is the real person, and Bruce Wayne is the mask; an ironic juxtaposition given the way they dress. Hollywood, however, wants you to see a movie star’s face, because they’re paying for it and assume you do too. So superhero movies generally will contrive any reason they can to show a masked superhero out of the mask.
In every Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman movie, Bruce Wayne may be waging a driven, one-man war on crime, but he’s also a sad boi who just wants to be loved, and is willing to reveal his secret identity to every new girlfriend who might be the one. Clooney’s Batman doesn’t, but by then he has a full Bat-family, so he’s no longer lonely and unloved. As Bruce Wayne, he’s still visibly cool, smart, and heroic.
Bale’s Batman does make the mistake of revealing his identity to his first love Rachel, but it it is clearly portrayed as a mistake by the end of The Dark Knight, when the Joker has killed her for it. The rest of the time, once he becomes Batman, he portrays Bruce as a shallow billionaire — the kind of guy who throws his money around recklessly and burns his own house down while drunk. It’s all an act, and despite having the most-mocked “Bat-voice” of the bunch, the hero in the suit is the real him.
And One Thing It Got Wrong: Gotham City
Done correctly, Gotham City should effectively be another character in the movie. The 1966 series and its movie simply shot in Los Angeles, but the interiors usually had a bright, comic-booky feel, at least. Tim Burton’s Gotham was a nightmare of German expressionism, while Joel Schumacher turned it into a neon-drenched sculpture garden.
Christopher Nolan basically just gave us Chicago. In Batman Begins, he added a unique variation of the el-train, but by the sequels it was gone. In The Dark Knight Rises, the city only really got some personality after Bane trashed it into a dystopia.
Gotham City should be a place where Batman can brood on top of gargoyles, full of twisted architecture with all sorts of outcroppings for the grapnel gun to exploit. Matt Reeves got it right for The Batman — mash up multiple cities, but be sure there are plenty of old, gothic buildings to make it look like a place where a bat-person naturally belongs.
