Christopher Nolan's first Batman film. The origin story told seriously, and the foundational text of the modern serious-cinema superhero film.
The film opens on Bruce Wayne in a Bhutanese prison, having travelled the world for seven years studying criminal psychology and martial arts. He is recruited by Henri Ducard of the League of Shadows for training. The film cuts between his training and his Gotham childhood — the murder of his parents by a mugger outside an opera house, his guardian Alfred, his early adult attempt to confront his parents' killer at a parole hearing.
Bruce returns to Gotham. He develops the Batman identity to attack the criminal infrastructure that has corrupted the city. The film tracks his first months as Batman, his uncovering of a League of Shadows plot to destroy Gotham using fear-inducing chemicals delivered through the water supply, and the eventual confrontation with Ra's al Ghul (revealed to be Ducard himself). The film closes with Gotham saved, the League defeated, and Sergeant Gordon mentioning that a new criminal — one calling himself the Joker, leaving playing cards at crime scenes — has emerged.
Batman Begins is, in retrospect, the foundational text of the contemporary serious-cinema superhero film. The previous decade of Batman cinema had progressively degenerated from Tim Burton's stylised 1989 film through Joel Schumacher's commercially-disastrous mid-1990s entries. Warner Bros. had nearly given up on the property. Nolan's pitch — a Batman film made in the visual and narrative register of Michael Mann's Heat rather than as comic-book fantasy — was structurally radical at the time.
What the film established was that the comic-book IP could carry serious dramatic weight if treated seriously. Almost every subsequent superhero film of the past twenty years operates downstream of this insight. The Dark Knight (2008), Joker (2019), Logan (2017), the Daniel Craig Bond films, the early Marvel Cinematic Universe — all derive their visual register and tonal seriousness from the template Nolan established here.
Christian Bale lost approximately 60 pounds for The Machinist (2004), shot immediately before Batman Begins. He then gained 100 pounds to play Bruce Wayne. The transformation is, in some sense, an extension of the Method-acting tradition discussed in our essay on Method acting. Bale's commitment to physical transformation has been a recurring feature of his subsequent career.
The performance itself is unusually disciplined for a superhero film. Bale plays three registers within the film: Bruce Wayne the public socialite playboy (a deliberate performance), Bruce Wayne the private man (genuine, vulnerable), and Batman (a constructed third identity that uses a vocally-distorted voice the actor has explicitly described as a performance choice). The three registers do not collapse into each other. The trilogy's foundational dramatic decision is that Bruce Wayne is the constructed identity and Batman is, in some sense, the truer self.
The film's third-act reveal — that Henri Ducard, Bruce's apparent mentor, is in fact Ra's al Ghul, the leader of the League of Shadows — is foreshadowed throughout the film with sufficient subtlety that first-time viewers usually do not see it coming. The reveal also establishes the trilogy's structural argument: that Batman's enemies are not, primarily, costume-driven freelance criminals but ideologically-motivated organisations with coherent moral frameworks Bruce has to reckon with.
Each of the trilogy's villains operates within this framework. Ra's al Ghul represents an ideological position (the world is irredeemable; destroying corrupt cities is morally justified). The Joker represents another (the social order is itself the corruption; chaos is morally clarifying). Bane represents a third (class-based revolutionary violence). The trilogy is, in some sense, three films about three coherent challenges to Batman's vigilante framework. Batman wins each, but the trilogy never fully resolves whether his framework is morally complete.