Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy was really overrated

Let be start by saying Christopher Nolan is one of the finest directors working today. I call him the thinking man’s Michael Bay, and I mean that as a compliment. Both are master craftsmen when it comes to constructing movies that look beautiful.

In my opinion, film is primarily a visual medium. Yes, as time has gone on, well written dialogue has become increasingly more important. We have to remember though the roots of all film come from the silent film era. Even Batman’s most nefarious foe, the Joker, was based on a silent film called The Man Who Laughs, and the visage of this demented clown is a major piece of the enduring legacy of one of comic and film’s most iconic villains.

Nolan understands this. It is why he places such a premium on picture quality and insists on shooting with expensive IMAX cameras, sometimes at a level of definition that most movie theaters and televisions are not capable of displaying. Nolan also uses mostly practical effects because he understands the importance of an object actually being in camera. The truck flip from The Dark Knight is real. I dare say most directors would just render that with CGI. Not Christopher Nolan.

Christopher Nolan is also very intelligent. Whereas Michael Bay goes for shots of boobs and butts, Nolan favors sweeping landscapes and beautiful city skylines. He’s not a cynic, like Michael Bay. He respects the intelligence of his audience and rewards them for it.

He just doesn’t know a damn thing about Batman.

There’s a part of me that thinks Christopher Nolan, the genius that he is, probably picked up a Batman comic before filming Batman Begins, flipped through the pages, and chuckled “this is stupid, I can do better”. I kind of know this is the case because when it came to choosing stories to adapt he basically chose the most critically well received Batman stories. What’s wrong with that you might ask? One problem is many of those stories are deconstruction narratives meant to highlight all the problems with Batman. All the things that are problematic about him. Stories like The Dark Knight Returns. In addition, many of them are not official canon, meaning the writers didn’t really have to adhere to the way Batman is usually written. They are the stories you are told to read if you walk into a comic store and say “I’ve never read a comic before”. They are not necessarily the best Batman stories, just the most accessible for readers who don’t want to be bogged down in decades of continuity.

The ABCs of Batman. His name is Bruce Wayne. He inherited a mega-corporation from his slain parents. They were traumatically gunned down in front of him in an alleyway. He fights clowns sometimes.

I think it’s also important to understand why Christopher Nolan was even given the opportunity to make Batman in the first place.

Oh, right.

There had already been four movies, and two of them were directed by Joel Schumacher, and to put it mildly, they were pretty bad. But why were they made? Weren’t the first two, by Tim Burton, another great director, actually pretty good? They were, but parents thought they were a bit too dark, what with all the murder in them. Batman was supposed to be a kid’s property, and when parents took their kids to see Batman Returns, they were treated to this:

Oh, that’s nice, he’s bleeding black blood from his mouth.

Burton, however, got a lot right. Batman is dark. His villains are kind of like demented carnival freaks. The carnival was a big influence not just on Batman, but on superheroes in general. Batman’s exterior tidy-blackies are a reference to the external underwear worn by carnival strongmen. His ward, Dick Grayson, aka Robin, was a carnival performer. Batman and Robin were both depicted as acrobats.

He also understood that Gotham was a character. Gotham, although in the real world it is code for New York City, is a fictional place. The name “Goth”am is a reference to its “gothic” appearance. The comic would frequently depict the city awash with gargoyles, gothic architecture, spooky alleyways, and colorful hideouts. It is a place trapped somewhere between the 1800s and the 2000s.

In this sense, the choice of Nolan as director clashed with the comic book. Nolan favors those realistic skylines. So he chose Chicago and Pittsburgh, to very real, and very beautiful American cities as the setting. They look great, but they lack the character and appeal on how we would see Gotham depicted in the Burton films or even the Arkham game series.

Finally, while Batman is a tech-based hero like Iron Man, he retains a mystical quality. We know why he can do what he does — he’s rich and has an endless array of “wonderful toys”, but we don’t know how. That is part of the mystique. True to his performative nature his gadgets are a trick he uses to convince criminals he isn’t truly human. This is why Burton started off his first movie with one criminal expressing fear to another that a giant bat would come get them for their transgressions. This also links to the fact that the Batman of the comics was inspired by Dracula, a scary mythical creature of the night.

Now, what did he get wrong?

He made some odd casting choices. Michael Keaton acted his butt off in the role, and in my opinion, his portrayal from an acting standpoint is the best to date. Burton and Sam Hamm wrote him well. All three seemed to understand the personas, public Bruce Wayne, the real Bruce Wayne, and Batman. Michael Keaton played each role in subtly different ways. In his public life, he was an upstanding businessman, who shrewd operators like Max Schreck dismissed as naive. Of course, he knew this, he unknowingly played them like a fiddle. Then there is real Bruce who would brood in his cave, and who was only really capable of maintaining one relationship, the father-son relationship he had with Alfred Pennyworth. Finally, there was Batman, which was closest to the real Bruce Wayne, but more performative in nature.

He was also quite brilliant and resourceful. In Batman (1989) he successfully cracks the code on Joker’s toxin giving Vicki Vale the secret to how they were combined and distributed. However, there was one glaring problem: Batman is an imposing 6'4". Keaton is a diminutive 5'9" and looks it. They would give his suits massive shoulder pads to try and give him a larger presence, but it looked ridiculous. He also couldn’t fight in the rubberized suit that restricted his movement. Batman is a seasoned fighter and ninja, and this one could barely kick.

It’s been said that Keaton couldn’t even turn his neck. Luckily, he had a cool car.

The first two films were (and in many ways still are) the best entries in the Bat-franchise. But while they felt like the comics, and the setting and environment were amazing, the characters all felt off. Even though Keaton would do some of the best acting of his entire career, this 5'9" man looked like a guy who went to a costume party dressed as Batman.

When Nolan was brought onboard to revive the franchise one of the first images they released was this:

Partly this was to assuage concerns that Bale was no longer the emaciated size he was in The Machinist, and the other was to send a clear message: this Batman can kick your ass. The movie even went out of its way to devote the entire first act to watching him train. It wasn’t just the actor they chose, but the story they chose to tell — this is the story of why Batman is such a badass.

The fight scenes were also upgraded. Instead of a well-placed kick into a carnival performer, this Batman knew martial arts, was trained by a mysterious clan of ninjas known as The League of Shadows, but then it kept going. The movie provided explanations for how he got his car, his infamous spiked gloves, his cape, his cowl, his Bat-ears, his friendship with James Gordon, his company…back. Nolan, a super-smart guy, wanted super-smart explanations for how the man who can do it all could do it…all. Then the mystery was gone.

Batman couldn’t be smart enough to build his own technology because that is not realistic. Instead, he hired Lucius Fox (played by Morgan Freeman) to do all that for him. He never was a police officer, so it wouldn’t make sense for him to be a detective. Instead, he got Rachel Dawes and James Gordon to do that for him. He didn’t even really want to be Batman because that wasn’t realistic either. Instead, he just wanted to inspire Gotham and then retire so he could be with his unrequited crush, Rachel Dawes. He should’ve changed his name from Batman to Middle-man.

In the comics none of this is true. The night Bruce Wayne’s parents died he became obsessive. In this he became a burnout, wandering around until a botched assassination attempt on his parents’ murderer sent him into a quarter-life crisis, and he ran away like a pouting teenager. More realistic? Maybe. Batman? Nope.

In the comics that sojourn abroad was deliberate. He created a cover story for it. Bruce Wayne wasn’t some irresponsible brat who abandoned the only father he had left in Alfred Pennyworth. He would never be that callous to the one person he genuinely loved and cared for. He really did train himself in everything from hunting and tracking to detective work, to martial arts. Ducard, the character played by Liam Nesson, was only one of many teachers he sought out. The movie streamlined all this to make it more “realistic”, and in doing so neutered the story. At the end of the day, maybe Burton isn’t quite the genius Nolan is, but like many geniuses, Nolan missed one major point: Batman isn’t real.

Burton (and Schumacher if we’re being serious) understood Batman, at his core, was a cartoon created for children. You can elevate it to something more, much more, but you can’t ignore the roots. It is a bit over the top. Somethings Batman does, in fact, most things Batman does, defy explanation. It wouldn’t be interesting to read superhero comics if they were restricted to what is real or even what seems believable.

I totally believe Nolan’s Batman — mostly because he takes so much care in explaining it all — and if I’m being honest, it made him a tad boring.

Nolan even neutered Batman’s fractured psyche. He even makes a very meta-comment about it when Alfred Pennyworth exclaims “when I heard your grand plan for saving Gotham I thought about calling the men in white coats”. This both damages the portrayal of Bruce Wayne, and Alfred. Alfred in the comics would never do that because he absolutely loves Bruce Wayne like a son. It’s why Michael Gough’s line in Batman (1989) “I have no wish to fill my few remaining years grieving for the loss of old friends. Or their sons” is so powerful. We know that deep down inside Alfred Pennyworth loves Bruce so much he will support him in anything he does, even if it’s some damn fool’s crusade. He would never call “the men and white coats” because it would hurt him to watch the only family he has left rot away in some padded cell. In this, though the addiction to making Batman real meant this very real-world possibility, of a man crazy enough to fight crime dressed as a bat, would likely end up as the basis for a psychologist's Ph.D. thesis.

If I could make a core point about why Nolan failed to truly grasp the Dark Knight, it is that Nolan struggles with human emotions. You can see this in his scripts. Nolan scripts are usually filled with exposition, something many other screenwriters shy away from. He frequently makes it work in his very high concept Sci-Fi, like Interstellar and Inception, but here it just bogs the story down. Batman, at its core, is an emotional, not a rational story. His origin, written back in 1939, was revolutionary because he was a hero who’s catalyst is something we got to empathize with. Bob Kane and Bill Finger brainstormed on what kind of trauma would be so terrible as to motivate someone to throw their entire life away to become a winged vigilante of the night. What they came up with was horrifying.

Nolan didn’t even truly understand that. In his version, they leave the opera Die Fledermaus because Bruce gets scared (of bats). Nolan (and David S. Goyer) effectively make him partly responsible for his parents’ death. In the comic it is random. Bruce Wayne is leaving The Mark of Zorro, a film about a masked avenger while miming the film’s action as they slip down an alleyway. The death is completely random, not necessarily the fault of any of them. It shatters Bruce’s sense of reality, and he clings to the last happy memory he has. The emotional pieces are all there. In Nolan’s version, it feels like someone trying to rationalize every action, so while it’s made to seem more real, it feels a lot less real, a lot less visceral than the comic version. Even though Burton changed the killer to be the future Joker, Batman doesn’t find that out until far later. The move is simply made to make the villain and hero feel more connected (“I created you, you created me, how childish is that?”) — a move Batman writer Bob Kane praised. It may seem more contrived, but it still packs the same emotional weight of the comic.

I enjoy the Nolan movies for what they are. Well made movies by a director at the height of his talents. As they age, however, I realize they just don’t understand their own protagonist. The cast might be better, the special effects might be more believable, and they may feel more like movies that deserve to be nominated once award season comes around, but something about them still feels off.

Maybe Matt Reeves and Robert Pattison will find the right balance, but until that day comes, I guess we still have the comics.