“Why bats, Master Wayne?”

“Bats frighten me. It’s time my enemies shared my dread.”

And so begins my preparation for The Odyssey. I truly believe that Batman Begins is one of those rare movies that only gets better every time you rewatch it. It was Christopher Nolan’s first “big” movie, at least in the sense of something blockbuster caliber, and it’s extremely impressive for being that. Marvel was definitely on a roll at the time of its release, with the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies and the X-Men universe, but I think that this often gets undermined by just how important it was for DC movies. Just to give a recap, here is a list of all the major superhero movies under the DC umbrella that were released in the ten years prior to Batman Begins: Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, and Catwoman (not exactly the best movies you’ll see). And even though the Marvel movies being released at the time were good, Batman Begins was the first big one that showed that comic book movies not only could be fun popcorn flicks, but also high-class cinema at the same time.

We all know and love Bruce Wayne’s origin story, but this film retells it in a bit of a different way, while keeping all of the same big plot beats that you’d want intact. After the death of his parents, he sort of loses himself to hatred and bitterness, where the story surprisingly goes to some pretty dark places with him that are very different from what I have seen from him before, but work so well once he finally becomes the hero. He eventually meets Henri Ducard, a man with associations to a group called the League of Shadows, an almost cult-like group that is said to be dedicated to fighting injustice. There, he learns all of the skills necessary to become Gotham’s crime-fighting vigilante.

What I like so much about the rest of the way that he becomes Batman is that it is very much done in a more grounded and realistic way, at least as grounded as it could be. The reason for Bruce donning the symbol of a bat has much more reason to it than it did in say, Batman (1989), where the implied reason was just that it was scary. On top of that, even though this was the fifth big live-action adaptation of the character, it was the first that showed the logic and development behind all of his tools and gadgets, which automatically makes you take this version more seriously. The film completely separates itself from any previous one.

When it comes to Christian Bale’s performance as Batman, I think I still feel very confident in saying that he is the best live-action version we have gotten yet, though I can definitely see Robert Pattinson giving him a run for his money once that version starts taking on the persona of Bruce Wayne a little bit more. What makes Christian Bale’s version so great is that he is both a fantastic Batman and Bruce Wayne. This film very much embraces one of my favorite aspects of the character, that being that Batman is his true identity, and Bruce Wayne is almost quite literally his secret one, or maybe better put, untrue version of himself. A major piece of his arc is that he has completely abandoned his family’s image, putting his focus entirely on becoming, even though he obviously doesn’t know it at the beginning, Batman. His arc is probably the most satisfying part of the movie.

I really like Katie Holmes’s character as well, Rachel Dawes, eventually played by Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Dark Knight. I love what she brings to Bruce’s character, where she really homes in on him getting a hold of himself at the beginning, as well as later on, even when she doesn’t know he’s been the vigilante going across Gotham and stopping all these big criminals. She isn’t necessarily super compelling on her own, but is far from a bad character because of how much she elevates Bruce to being a great one. Rachel Dawes, more specifically, Katie Holmes’s performance, has always been a major critique of the film, where many, if not most, believe her performance to be the weakest aspect, but I have to be honest, I’ve never seen anything wrong or lackluster about it at all.

And harkening back to what I said about Batman Begins being “high-class cinema,” the biggest thing that makes this film so thematically rich is its main theme: fear. Fear is what drives Bruce’s main fear: bats, which is why he becomes the symbol of one, so that all the criminals of Gotham City have the same thing to fear as him (hence the quote I used at the very beginning of the review). I’m all down for fantastical comic book adaptations, actually, I prefer them, but there is something so cool about having a Batman trilogy so grounded in both its world rules and themes. I know that Matt Reeves’s The Batman series is doing a very similar thing, but tonally, they couldn’t be more different.

The element of fear also applies to the villains’ motives as well, which is where I will get into the negative a little bit. Scarecrow is one of the many, many awesome villains from the Batman rogues’ gallery, and I have always found both him and his allegiances to be the most uninteresting part of Batman Begins. The villains certainly aren’t bad, but they lack any sort of interesting motive, and certainly lack the screen presence of Heath Ledger’s Joker, so they just end up being kind of bland. Their main motive is just to stop the corruption of Gotham City by essentially killing it off, which could have been somewhat interesting, but the way they go about doing it definitely wasn’t. Their motive specifically against Batman is even less interesting, centering around revenge for something that doesn’t honestly make a whole lot of sense.

The last negative I will talk about would seem like a very minor one to most movie fans who aren’t die-hard fans of Batman, but for me, it is something that has always rubbed me the wrong way, though less over time. In the third act, specifically the climax, Batman makes two very weird character decisions that I’ve definitely seen people debate on the internet, and I unfortunately stand on the side that feels it was pretty out of character. I obviously have to be very careful with my words here, but both of the odd decisions he makes feel against some of the major things the character has stood for a lot of the time that he’s been a part of our culture. The first one has to do with his main love interest, Rachel Dawes, and the second part, the more significant one, tries to avoid what it essentially does, but comes off, at least to me, like Batman coming up with a clever excuse instead that’s, well, really not all that clever. You can tell it’s supposed to be an “Aha!” moment, but I’ve never found it to work.

While the villains and Batman making out-of-character decisions very likely sound like major things that bring this movie down, they surprisingly aren’t, or at least not to a huge degree. What makes this a great movie is how strong Bruce’s origin story is, and how strong he is as a character here.