It's amazing what an excellent cast, a solid screenplay and a regard for the source material can do for a comic book movie. Unlike Robert Rodriguez, whose faithfulness to Frank Miller's comic sucked the juice out of Sin City, Nolan approaches Batman with respect rather than reverence. It's obvious that Nolan has made a close study of the Batman legacy, but he owes a specific debt to Miller's 1980s rethink of the character, which resurrected the Dark Knight side of his identity. Like Miller's Batman, Nolan's is tormented by demons both physical and psychological. In an uncertain world, one the director models with an eye to our own, this is a hero caught between justice and vengeance, a desire for peace and the will to power.
That struggle gives the story its requisite heft, but what makes this Batman so enjoyable is how Nolan balances the story's dark elements with its light, and arranges the familiar genre elements in new, unforeseen ways. Weaned on countless comics and a handful of movies, we may think we know the bat cave like we know the inside of our childhood bedroom. But to watch Bruce Wayne stand in the atmospheric gloom of this new cavern, surrounded by a cloud of swirling bats, is to see the underground refuge for the first time. Likewise the Batmobile, which here resembles a Hummer that looks as if it had been gently flattened by a Bradley tank, then tricked out for some hard street racing with fat tires and gleaming black paint.
As is often the case with movies about toys and boys, Batman Begins drags on too long, but even the reflexively Bruckheimer-like finish can't diminish its charms. Nolan needs to work on his action: Fred Astaire made sure that he was filmed so that you could see the entirety of his body, advice this director should have heeded when shooting his superhero. Still, what makes Batman Begins the most successful comic-book adaptation alongside Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World isn't the noisy set pieces, the nods to Blade Runner or the way a child's keepsake, an Indian arrowhead, echoes the shape of a bat. It's the way Nolan invites us to watch Bruce Wayne quietly piecing together his Batman identity, to become a secret sharer to a legend, just as we did once upon a time when we read our first comic.
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