Super-hero stories are praised when they are dark, loved when their characters are troubled, lauded when those characters are sometimes allowed to die. We demand the infringement of reality on these fantasies, because without a recognizable and relatable context, the concept of a super-hero itself is pointless. It's a bit easier to pull off in comic books, where the form allows for a higher suspension of disbelief; when those books are adapted to film, a great deal of care must be taken in making what is essentially a very silly concept not only believable but often deadly serious on a dramatic level. One way this can be done is to elevate (or perhaps deconstruct) the heroes to primal archetypes, the story to the realm of myth; another method, and the one that is inevitably more popular and thus far more successful, is to focus more intensely on the heroes, deconstructing them again but this time in an attempt to make plain their psychoses, their nervous tics, their inner emo kid; to make them look more like the rest of us.

It is for this reason that the best recent comic book films - Bryan Singer's X-Men pictures, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films, even Ang Lee's faulty but fascinating Hulk - have been helmed by directors whose interest in action and explosions is merely incidental to the material. They've brought the necessary weight of consequence to their adaptations, and in the case of the latter X-Men and Spider-Man films, made some truly great pieces of entertainment, equally thrilling and thoughtful. Compare these to Daredevil or the upcoming Fantastic Four, and consider what a difference a filmmaker makes.

Almost paradoxically, an equal respect for the history of the characters is also demanded of these filmmakers; the characters need to be living, breathing people who also happen to live up to their status as pop culture icons; while Spider-Man needs to be taken seriously, he also needs to be a lot of fun. The best adaptors know that while certain changes need to be made to fit their medium, fifty or sixty years of development goes a long way towards establishing a recognized tone. Again, Singer and Raimi, by their second films in their respective series, mastered the fine art of pleasing the fanboy alongside the film critic, not to mention the less discriminating audiences that lie between those two extremes.

So now director Christopher Nolan, famed for his indie crime mysteries Following and Memento, does his best to follow suit on both levels with this reinvention of Batman - who, alongside Spider-Man and Superman fulfills the troika of the most renowned super-heroes. This most tortured of heroes was certainly in need of some newfound gravitas: Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film created the franchise, and was an excellent bit of comic book fantasy that benefited from Burton's inimitable vision and personal neuroses, but his sequel, Batman Returns, although technically a better film, was far more a gothic fairy tale than a Batman story. And then when Burton left the series...well, if you don't know what happened next, you're probably better off.

In Batman Begins, all gothic elements have been rescinded. Gotham City is not a twisted mass of German Expressionism but a vaguely futuristic metropolis that suggest a Manhattan whose burroughs have extended well past the Hudson River. It's quickly painted as a city rife with organized crime and corruption of the corporate and political sort, with clearly delineated social classes. It's an environment that, in short, seems mostly real, and one in which a man dressed as a giant bat wouldn't necessarily fit in with the architecture. This cuts down on just about every opportunity for grandiose posing on its hero's part, which, considering the film's intentions, is mostly a good thing. To wit: the name 'Batman' is only uttered in the film once or twice.

Nolan succeeds in removing all traces of the super from the super-hero; his Batman is simply vigilante with a scary suit. And his film is at it's best when it's not about that vigilante at all, but about the steps the young Bruce Wayne took prior to donning that famous cowl. Well-known origin stories are tricky to refresh, but Nolan and screenwriter David S. Goyer follow Bruce Wayne through the gray area unexplored by the prior movies and the majority of comics, between the point when the young heir saw his parents gunned down in an alley and the advent of the Dark Knight's first prowl. Much of the movie is based on Frank Miller's landmark graphic novel 'Batman: Year One,' but even there Miller merely alluded to twelve sketchy years Wayne spent abroad, ostensibly gaining the skills he'd put to use on the criminals of Gotham City.

So here we first find a bearded, muddy Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in a Japanese prison, suffering from nightmares and attacks by fellow inmates. His presence there is explained in flashbacks, prior to his exoneration at the hands of a mysterious Englishman named Ducard (Liam Neeson) who knows Wayne's troubled history and wants to help him utilize his anger and fear. He works for a mysterious organization headed by a man named Ras Al Ghul, and he promises Bruce that he'll give him training that will allow him to make a radical difference in the world.

Ras Al Ghul was, I believe, a Middle Eastern wizard in the comic books, but here he is a Japanese overlord, played in what is little more than a cameo by Ken Wantanabe of The Last Samurai. He and Ducard preside over a legion of vigilante ninja warriors. Given what's physically required of Wayne once he assumes his alter ago, it makes sense that he'd have ninja training; the whole secret organization aspect seems to have more specifics than necessary, but soon enough Ghul is dead and Wayne has returned to his manor and faithful butler Alfred (Michael Caine) in Gotham City, ready to put his new skills to use. The film really hits its stride as he develops his new persona (from his own fears) and acquires his equipment (from his father's company's failed military division). An extension of the Alfred character is the one played by Morgan Freeman, an employee of Wayne Corporation (itself headed by Rutger Hauer - Nolan's assembled himself quite a cast) who helps Bruce build his armoir, and Nolan even goes so far as to explain how Wayne manages to have his batsuits manufactured without attracting suspicion. The practicalty of costumed vigilante-ism is, it turns out, the subject for a lot of logical humor.

Prior to working on this film, Nolan was developing a biopic of Howard Hughes that was eventually overtaken by Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. Essentially, he's jumped from analyzing the state of mind of one eccentric billionaire to another, and he and Goyer have done careful work developing the character of Bruce Wayne; they don't take him for granted, and they're careful to provide honest motivation for his grief and fear and hate, and the extreme choices they catalyze. Christian Bale delivers a finely graduated performance, navigating deftly across the wide range of moods, personas and physicalality required of the role. While I still prefer Michael Keaton in the suit, Bale actually makes Bruce Wayne far more interesting than any incarnation of his alter ego. Another result of hiring these talented directors is that they generally choose strong acting over starpower in the casting process, a decision which generally pays off handsomely.

The result of all this development is that, by the time Batman first appears in costume, the movie is halfway over; and even then, he doesn't really appear, but darts around in the shadows, taking down organized crime bosses and corrupt cops, and building a working relationhship with the not-yet-Commisioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman, who in a rare non-villainous role, very nearly steals the film). This is all mostly terrific, and it strongly harkens back not only to Miller's origin story but to the title of the very first magazine the character ever appeared in: Detective Comics. But then a weapon of mass destruction turns up missing, and various overwrought plot devices start turning, and finally, far too late to carry any weight in the plot, Ras Al Ghul shows up again, and we remember that, oh yes, this is based on a comic book.

It's a bit of a disappointment that the movie falls prey to weak villain syndrome and that it ends in a climax that seems stolen from a different, lesser film. Nolan and Goyer do such a good job up to that point charting the growth of Batman, and developing the city of Gotham itself as his adversary, that an evil figurehead is entirely unnecessary. What was at first wonderfully subtle eventually becomes rather underwhelming. On the other hand, this is the first movie of a resurrected franchise, and we can take solace in past examples - Singer's films, and Raimi's - and assume that Nolan, having established the character and the city so fully, will be able to give them both an adversary very much their equal. If Nolan looks to Alan Moore's acclaimed graphic novel 'The Killing Joke' as much as he did to Miller's 'Year One,' then one can expect in the next Batman film a rather disturbing portrait of criminal insanity - with, of course, a few explosions to balance out the psychology. In the meantime, the coming year will bring with it a long awaited version of Superman, helmed by Singer; so too will come discussions of the ramifications of immortality, the plea for normality, the core of morality, the trouble with duality, good and evil's dichotomy, adherence to iconography, and all the other issues one might realistically expect when dealing with an invincible alien in red and blue tights.