If Warner Brothers hoped that Nolan (see interview) would reanimate the corpse of what should have been their most lucrative franchise, it has got its wish. Nolan’s approach is to overhaul, and the result is the most intelligent and rewarding Batman movie yet.

The film is a prequel that persuasively and logically navigates the psychological journey of Bruce Wayne, the angry, guilty orphan, into Batman, the icon of terror for the Gotham City underworld. Terror is a key theme in this instalment — Bruce Wayne’s metamorphosis can only be achieved once he has a working knowledge of the power of human fears, including his own.

His own phobia, it turns out, is of bats, black swarms of them that inhabit his nightmares. It’s fortunate that Wayne had such an iconic phobia to overcome. Imagine if the young Bruce had developed a dread of bacteria, say, or something random like combine harvesters.

Nolan warms to the film’s theme, and there are some genuinely frightening moments along the way. He’s aware of the horror maxim that the best way to chill people is to keep what scares them just out of sight — hence much of the film is cloaked in darkness, a starless sky offering no illumination in the city’s dark corners where terrors breed. The most effective action sequences are those where the bad guys can’t see the Bat that is about to mete out justice. In an ominous silence, only the rustle of wings gives him away.

Bale has bulked up impressively for this action role, but it says a lot about his acting — and the quality of writing — that the action sequences are probably the least interesting part of the film. It’s not that they are unimpressive, it’s just that I’d rather see loaded exchanges with the gentleman scientist Freeman or a firm ticking off from the Wayne family butler Caine. Having said that, the new Batmobile rocks.

Wendy Ide

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