The universes those movies inhabit are polar opposites it feels impossible they could be contained in the same spectrum of human existence. Why was it a big deal at the time? Here’s a fun factoid: The time span between now and when The Dark Knight Rises came out is longer (nine years) than it was between Batman Begins and Joel Schumacher's infamous disaster Batman & Robin (eight years).
BATMAN THE BEGINNING MOVIE
It’s an origin movie that doesn’t feel like an origin movie: It just feels like a movie. It just turns out that at the end of this particular movie, the main character turns into Batman. Christopher Nolan often is criticized for making the whole superhero genre too “gritty” or “realistic,” but all that was born out of a very basic decision with Batman Begins: This is going to be a real movie, about real people, that works as a thriller and an action film and a character study. The superhero makes the movie: Without the superhero, the movie evaporates.Īmong the many brilliant aspects of Batman Begins - a film, for all its power and influence still today, 16 years after it came out, that still feels somewhat underappreciated - one of the most lasting ones is how it absolutely works as a movie even if it’s not about Batman. Whether it’s Iron Man or Superman or Venom, the whole superhero-ness dominates the enterprise from the jump. You know what you can’t say about most superhero movies, even the good ones? That they would work if people didn’t walk into the theater knowing they were, well, superhero movies. Welcome to This Week in Genre History, where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world’s greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.