Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), who after watching his parents get murdered moves from a Bhutan prison camp to being trained in the League of Shadows under the tutelage of a Zen-badass Liam Neeson to launching his own identity as an urban vigilante with a heart of darkness.
The film that launched the latter-day Nolan aesthetic: stylized yet grounded, gritty yet operatic in its imagery, alive with a menace that emerges from within and without. In one of the most elegant and dramatic of all superhero movies, Nolan tells the origin story of Batman, a.k.a. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), who after watching his parents get murdered moves from a Bhutan prison camp to being trained in the League of Shadows under the tutelage of a Zen-badass Liam Neeson to launching his own identity as an urban vigilante with a heart of darkness. Nolan doesn’t rewrite the comic-book playbook, yet the movie is charged with his filmmaking joy. After 15 years of mediocre “Batman” movies, “Batman Begins” came along at just the right moment to raise the bar not only for the Caped Crusader but for the entire superhero genre — i.e., Hollywood cinema as we now know it.