When Batman Begins swooshed into theaters 20 years ago today, Christopher Nolan‘s 2005 reboot redefined the Dark Knight on the big screen. In the way that the Tim Burton-directed Batman and its brooding Michael Keaton was a recalibration from Adam West’s campy caped crusader of the 1960s television series, Nolan’s serious reimagining was an answer to Joel Schumacher’s silly and toyetic take on the Dynamic Duo in 1997’s Batman & Robin. Unlike previous cinematic iterations, Nolan’s Batman would delve deeper into the mythology of the comic books and the psychology of Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne with a grounded origin story that birthed Batman and, arguably, the greatest superhero trilogy of all time.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Nolan and co-writer David S. Goyer “drew very heavily on the history of the mythology of Batman,” the Memento filmmaker says in the behind-the-scenes featurette Genesis of the Bat. “I felt that everything we were going to do in terms of translating the character’s story onto film was going to have to be extremely reverent to the history of the character and the mythology of Batman. The origin story had never been addressed on film, or really in the comics — that is to say, there isn’t really a single definitive account of the journey of Bruce Wayne into Batman, so there are fascinating gaps in mythology there to be played with.”
While Batman’s origin story is so well known today that subsequent filmmakers like Matt Reeves skipped it entirely in his own franchise reboot, 2022’s The Batman, it wasn’t until 1939’s Detective Comics #33 — six issues after the caped crusader’s debut appearance in Detective Comics #27 — that readers first learned the legend of “The Batman and How He Came to Be.”
In the two-page story from Batman co-creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger, a young Bruce Wayne watches as his parents are killed in a stickup by a gun-wielding robber. Swearing to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of his life waging war on all criminals, Bruce uses his inherited wealth to transform his mind and body before deciding on a disguise.
“Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot, so my disguise must be terrible to strike terror into their hearts,” socialite Bruce Wayne declares. “I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible…” And as a winged creature of the night flies into the open window of his study, he takes it as an omen. “I shall become a bat.”
An uncredited Finger fleshed out Batman’s origin in flashbacks interspersed throughout 1948’s Batman #47, in which the Dark Knight detective confronted the cowardly criminal responsible for the deaths of his parents: Joe Chill. The issue was the first to name the killer of Thomas and Martha Wayne and ended with Chill being shot dead by gangsters.
In Batman Begins, a young Bruce (Gus Lewis) watches his parents, Martha (Sara Stewart) and Thomas Wayne (Linus Roache), suffer the fate of their comic counterparts. But before a vengeful Bruce can bring his parents’ killer to justice, Joe Chill (Richard Brake) is gunned down before he can testify against his former cellmate, crime lord Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson).
The mafioso made his debut in the pages of 1987’s Batman #405, part of the four-issue origin story Batman: Year One by writer Frank Miller and artist David Mazzuchelli. After 18 years of training, planning, and waiting, Bruce Wayne declares his war on the rampant crime and corruption in Gotham City as a masked vigilante, targeting Carmine “The Roman” Falcone. The Batman finds an ally in Jim Gordon, a clean cop in a dirty city of corrupt cops like his partner, Detective Flass (played by Mark Boone Junior in Batman Begins).
“A piece of work that influenced us was Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, because that did deal with the first year of Batman being Batman,” Goyer says, noting that Year One is also “the beginnings of Batman and Gordon, who is not yet Commissioner Gordon.”
Sergeant Gordon (Gary Oldman) is as incorruptible as the symbol that Bruce needs to be, one he determines must be elemental — something terrifying. “Bats frighten me,” Bruce tells his unwavering confidant, Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine). “It’s time my enemies shared my dread.”
For Bruce’s backstory, Nolan’s jumping-off point was “The Man Who Falls” from writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Dick Giordano. Chronicling Batman’s beginnings in the pages of 1989’s Secret Origins of the World’s Greatest Super-Heroes, “The Man Who Falls” would inspire a motif that not only defined Bruce’s arc in Begins, but Nolan’s 2012 trilogy ender The Dark Knight Rises: “Why do we fall?” Bruce’s father asks after the boy falls into a well swarming with bats. “So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
“It suggests various points along the development of Bruce Wayne into Batman,” Nolan says of “The Man Who Falls.” “This idea that he travels the world and is mentored and tutored into different disciplines by various individuals and then returns to Gotham. For me, it was a fascinating story, and a fascinating connection between Bruce’s childhood trauma — falling down this well and being attacked by these bats — and the persona that he then develops in order to use people’s fear against them.”
“The Man Who Falls” begins with a young Bruce Wayne falling into a cave teeming with the leather-winged nightmares. It ends with Batman, a watchful protector perched atop a gargoyle, leaping into the night, falling “as he fell as a child, and as he will fall for the rest of his life.”
“You’re walking along and you fall through a hole. You never stop falling. You fall and, what’s worse, you watch others fall,” reads O’Neil’s narration over Giordano’s panels depicting the murder of the Waynes. “They fell, his mother and father did, and they never got up again. Neither did he. Because when young Bruce Wayne, age eight, rose from that sidewalk, he was already becoming what he would eventually be.”
“The Man Who Falls” incorporates elements from O’Neil’s Batman: Shaman and the 1989 Detective Comics storyline “Blind Justice” (penned by Batman screenwriter Sam Hamm). It recounts how Bruce began a global quest, honing his mind and body as he trained with Master Kirigi in Korea and then learned the skills of deception and cunning from another mentor, the Frenchman Henri Ducard.
“I seek the means to fight injustice. To turn fear against those who prey on the fearful,” Bale’s Bruce tells the mysterious Ducard (Liam Neeson) in Batman Begins. Claiming to speak for a man greatly feared by the criminal underworld, Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Watanabe), Ducard offers to teach Bruce the ways of the League of Shadows, training him to master the mind, theatricality, and deception. But the final lesson is that Ducard is really Ra’s al Ghul, who is working with corrupt Arkham Asylum psychopharmacologist Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy) — the fear-inducing Scarecrow — to have Gotham tear itseIf apart through fear.
In bringing Batman villains Ra’s al Ghul and Scarecrow to the screen, Nolan turned to such stories as 1971’s “Daughter of the Demon” (the first appearance of Ra’s in Batman #232 by O’Neil and Neal Adams) and 2001’s Batman: Terror (a Scarecrow-centric storyline in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #137-141).
Nolan and Goyer also pulled from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s seminal Batman: The Long Halloween, which involved both Falcone and Scarecrow, as well as 1993’s “Fears” from Loeb and Sale’s Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Special #1. The writers also cited the definitive ’70s Batman comics run by O’Neil and Adams as inspiration for their “very sober, serious approach” to the Batman reboot.
“Batman’s world is recognizably ours, but it’s a tweaking of reality, it’s a heightening,” O’Neil says of Nolan’s Batman in Genesis of the Bat. “That’s, I think, exactly what this movie does, and what the best Batman stuff has always done.”
Most Viewed
-
20th Television Animation
