The movie Christopher Nolan called a “mad studio film”
Adapting or reinventing any well-known property requires walking the delicate tightrope between appealing to existing fans and drawing in new ones, all while ensuring the new vision doesn’t hew too close to what came before. Fortunately for Christopher Nolan, the Batman franchise was in tatters when he came aboard.
Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin had earned the least money and scored the worst reviews of the original quartet, with the neon-and-nipples catastrophe sacrificing the dark and gothic trappings of Tim Burton’s first two instalments in favour of a toyetic mess that even the stars of the movie were happy to trash anytime the opportunity presented itself.
Suffice to say, Nolan was leaning more towards Burton than Schumacher when he began crafting Batman Begins, even if he put his own grounded and more realistic twist on the Caped Crusader’s mythos. Given that Bruce Wayne’s alter ego has appeared in 11 live-action features since 1989’s Batman, it’s very easy to forget that the project was viewed as a risky gamble on the studio’s part.
Not only was Burton relatively unproven in the blockbuster arena, but fans actively rebelled against Michael Keaton’s casting as the title hero, while the gloomy aesthetic was a million miles away from the costumed crimefighter’s most recent stint in the live-action limelight in Adam West’s kitsch classic TV series.
With that in mind, it’s entirely apt that Nolan referred to Burton’s Batman as “kind of a mad studio film” in an interview with Ain’t It Cool News, where he praised the filmmaker for his “absolutely extraordinary” approach to the source material, which he also described as “very idiosyncratic”. When the time came to mount his own spin on the lore, it was pivotal that he set out his own stall.
Explaining the differences between their respective visions to Verbicide, Nolan explained that Burton’s films were “specifically about a world that was created that Batman fits into,” an approach that yielded a “great Gothic vision that’s very consistent, and consistent with the character of Batman.”
When it came to his own Batman Begins, though, he opted for a ground-level approach: “What I felt I hadn’t seen, especially in comics, was an ordinary world in which we could be living in Gotham,” he continued. “When a Gothamite sees Batman, he’s as extraordinary as he would be in our world.”
A vigilante clad head-to-toe in an armoured suit designed to look like a flying mammal is most definitely out of the ordinary, something that informed the Dark Knight trilogy on its way to being designated as arguably the finest string of comic book movies to emerge during this century’s boom period. Burton may have laid the groundwork, then, but Nolan tore down the architecture and rebuilt it in his own image.
