"In Nolan’s world, Batman isn’t so much a character as an idea. He is a construct that Bruce Wayne creates to galvanize the people of Gotham to improve their rotten lives. His goal isn’t an eternal war on evil, but a targeted campaign against corruption and crime. Most of Batman’s toys were created by Fox for military application. The only thing Bruce adds are black paint jobs. Gordon isn’t so much a piece of expositional furniture as in the previous series, but a partner and confidant for the winged avenger. Only together can they wage war on the mob and clean up the police force. In this Gotham, it takes a village to make a Batman. And that all feeds into the underlying draw of this Gotham. Events and characters have repercussions, because this time the city isn’t a fantasy island. In the previous four Batman pictures, Gotham always went through a subtle or massive reworking. The only major consistency for the urban environment is it was always created on back lots and sound stages. In Nolan’s iteration, Gotham is the scariest thing of all…an American city. Shot primarily in Chicago, Batman inhabits a living and breathing urban jungle. The film still pulls from Batman’s pulpy roots for its backdrop to a point. The initial threat is super-sized organized crime, reminiscent of 1930s gangland. However, Wilkinson’s deliciously broad mobster is soon suppressed by what the filmmakers know really scares us today. The villains are more than just criminals or the madmen of the comics. Scarecrow isn’t a demented gangster like Jack Nicholson’s Joker. No, these are terrorists. The League of Shadows is an ideologically driven organization of non-state actors who want to make a statement by destroying a major American city. You can find that just as easily in a newspaper as a comic book these days. What is Scarecrow’s master plan? It’s to infect the city with a toxin that would literally cause citizens to destroy each other out of fear. In a post-9/11 world, that isn’t exactly a subtle metaphor. Nolan may have originally pitched this as a Batman origin story, but what he made was an unbridled epic reflecting its time. He and Goyer pulled from several comic book sources, most notably “Batman: Year One” and Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s “The Long Halloween” and created a protagonist who more closely resembled his modern comic book likeness. This Batman would not kill, was not created by his villains and he was a worldly super-ninja detective. However, even if it still features a guy jumping off rooftops and gliding to our rescue, he now fights bearded fanatics bent solely on our destruction. It is a theme that would only become better articulated in its sequels, but it works just fine in BATMAN BEGINS. This is the movie that brought Batman back from the dead and reintroduced him as the king of superheroes for a whole new generation. It gave depth to Bruce’s problems while also telling a rip-roaring adventure. Even if it suffers from a far too conventional third act, BATMAN BEGINS’ overall approach was anything but that in 2005. It took the franchise and genr to new heights. And it did come in black."