Batman Begins (2005) 20th Anniversary Review

The Dark Knight is a better movie, but Batman Begins is a better Batman movie, perhaps the best Batman movie.

Jun 23, 2025

Batman Begins (2005)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Screenwriters: Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer

Starring: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy, Morgan Freeman, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer, Ken Watanabe

by Sam Sewell-Peterson

Twenty years ago, following on from his breakthrough headscratcher Memento, Christopher Nolan reinvented the superhero origin movie, taking the Dark Knight back to basics with Batman Begins. It gave die-hard fans of the Caped Crusader exactly what they wanted; treating the mythology seriously and providing a fairly grounded rationale for much of the character’s iconography, while it also welcomed newcomers by jettisoning many of the more outlandish comic book concepts and presenting a compelling and realistic take on a fascinating group of characters.

For the handful of you who don’t know Batman or what his deal is… After witnessing his parents’ death in a mugging, billionaire Bruce Wayne (a charismatic, nuanced Christian Bale) travels the world to understand the mind of a criminal, eventually being offered training and a path to fighting injustice by Ducard (Liam Neeson in tough mentor mode) and the League of Shadows. Returning to Gotham City, Wayne fights crime by night as Batman, while friend and assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes (an earnest Katie Holmes) attempts to prosecute the mob in the courts system. Both will soon be drawn into a sinister plot fuelled by Dr Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy, having the time of his life) that will throw the continued existence of Gotham itself into question.

The Dark Knight is a better movie, but Batman Begins is a better Batman movie, perhaps the best Batman movie. Much of it comes down to how seriously the comic book source material is treated in its adaptation, or how willing the filmmakers to embrace the heightened reality of these worlds of superheroes. People talk about Nolan's much darker Batman, but really it's not much darker than Tim Burton's vision from two decades before. What we're really seeing is the difference between styles of comic-to-film adaptations - contemporary and (relatively) realistic, or stylised and fantastical.

Nolan and David S. Goyer strip back the Batman mythos to its core elements, allowing for incisive character exploration and honest emotion in addition to all the high-concept heroics. This is a superhero origin story, but a Nolan superhero origin story; as such much of it is told in a non-linear fashion. After a childhood trauma-induced nightmare, we open with Bruce surviving in a brutal prison somewhere in Asia, before being freed to start on his quest to “become more than a man”. We then step back and forwards in time to the event that

Here, Bruce Wayne became more of a character outside of the cowl than ever before. Not only had we never spent as much time with him in his formative years, witnessing his misguided attempts at overcoming the horrific event that made him, but casting an actor as versatile and dedicated as Christian Bale also opened the door to him making Bruce Wayne’s true mask as important a part of his persona as the mythologised crime-fighter. Of course Bruce would lean into the shallow excesses that the public would expect of a billionaire playboy to avoid suspicion, and of course this would strain the few normal relationships he has with the likes of his comparatively well-adjusted childhood friend Rachel.

“And why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

If there’s one quote to sum up the thematic underpinning of Christopher Nolan’s three Batman movies, it’s the above from Thomas Wayne. Batman is fallible in this universe, and he has to go through many a trial and failure in his quest for justice. Each film of the trilogy is inextricably tied to its own prevailing theme as well. The Dark Knight is about “chaos”, The Dark Knight Rises is about “pain” and Batman Begins is about “fear”. As such, this film leans more heavily into the horror genre in its style, in an effort to evoke the abject terror of a criminal being stalked by Batman, or a victim of Scarecrow’s fear toxin suffering an instantaneous psychological break. Warner Bros. have been looking to have Scarecrow antagonise Batman on film since at least the mid-90s, but it’s probably for the best they ended up waiting for long enough for VFX to develop far enough to convincingly portray the waking nightmares he can conjure with his aerosol pharmaceuticals.

“So what do you think? / Does it come in black?”

Nolan’s commitment to practical, tactile action was in evidence from the start. A little more CG-extension is required here than in the sequels to give Gotham its scale, but massive sets and intensive location shooting are employed to portray Bruce’s globe-trotting journey of discovery and return to a sickly yellow-lit Gotham tearing itself apart. Choices like having this version of the Batmobile be a pre-existing military assault vehicle sprayed on-theme black and basing the rest of Batman’s gadgets on technology that would work in the real world also helps keep everything just-about feasible.

As well-executed as action scenes like the “Tumbler” chase and the elevated train finale are, it's the touching early scenes of young Bruce (Gus Lewis) coming to terms with his parents' deaths and his imposing family legacy that are the most vivid, buoyed by James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer's score (playfully, each track named after a species of bat) which segues from dramatic and booming to delicate and affecting.

The entire cast do their jobs admirably, but three of the cast ended up being the secret weapons of Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy; Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Gary Oldman. Caine’s Alfred is the film’s heart, being more paternal and openly affectionate towards Bruce than any other take on Bruce’s butler before or since, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, Bruce’s wry quartermaster and unquestionably the brains of their burgeoning crime-fighting operation, and Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon fighting a losing battle against corruption years before his promotion to Police Commissioner, operates as the unwavering moral compass of the film.

Admittedly, not everything works. Katie Holmes isn’t always given the most to do as Rachel and her inheritor of the role in The Dark Knight, Maggie Gyllenhall, would get to play much more interesting shades of the character; equally Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow has a great villain setup only to be unceremoniously discarded in the final act (though he would return for entertaining cameos in the sequels. Though 2 hours 20 was on the long side for superhero movies in the mid-2000s, it still doesn’t feel like enough time was dedicated to really fleshing out some subplots like the moral decline of Wayne Enterprises or the day-to-day experiences of impoverished Gothamites.

Despite a couple of minor issues, the two decades since its release has demonstrated the lasting influence of Christopher Nolan’s take on the superhero blockbuster. Batman Begins was familiar and satisfying in all the ways comic fans were hoping for, but quite daring and mould-breaking in others. As well as diving much deeper on character psychology and motivation and playing with linear narrative technique, it simultaneously set the stage for what is still the DC film to beat with one of the all-time great sequel teases.

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