Batman Begins. The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight Rises. Between his trilogy, Christopher Nolan's movies made just shy of $2.5 billion at the box office, and untold billions more from DVD and Blu-Ray rentals and sales. It received eight Academy Award nominations, and won two of them. Audiences and critics alike gushed over the movies, but looking back, it's not difficult to see that Nolan has lead Batman down a dead end.
Cast your mind back to 1997, when Batman & Robin had just come out. Before the massively negative critical reaction, Warner Brothers had director Joel Schumacher already lined up to return for Batman Triumphant, which would've seen Clooney face off against Nicolas Cage / Jeff Goldblum (depending on which sources you believe) as The Scarecrow, who used his fear toxin to resurrect The Joker in Batman's mind, who would've been played by Jack Nicholson again. But once the reviews came out, and the box office results came in - it made $238 million worldwide, which is not to be sniffed at, but it's also not exactly "Batman money" - all these plans were scrapped.
Schumacher's gaudy, neon visions and over-the-top theatrics were blamed, and Warners decided to go in a different, more grounded direction. Initially they hired Darren Aronofsky (Requiem For A Dream, Black Swan) to adapt Frank Miller's origin story Batman: Year One, but when that fell through, along came Christopher Nolan - hot off the back of psychological thrillers like Memento and Insomnia - to tell a more realistic, tortured tale of The Dark Knight. And so the modern classic superhero trilogy was born.
Except it shouldn't have been. Batman has always been the darkest, most "human" superhero of the DC bunch. He's surrounded by the super-powered likes of Superman, Wonder Woman and The Green Lantern. His equivalent in the Marvel universe would be The Black Widow (seriously, think about it). But while Bruce Wayne has been anything but abnormal, the world he inhabits is anything but normal. Gotham City is filled with a rogue's gallery of super-powered freaks and geeks, and while some of them may seem a bit ridiculous, they've been handled with subtlety and aplomb in the comic books and the animated series.
Villains such as Clayface, Killer Croc, Man-Bat, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy and Solomon Grundy have huge cinematic potential in the right hands, but they don't belong in the "real world", and they certainly didn't belong in Nolan's Batman universe. Nolan knew this all too well, which is why he stuck to the psychological bad guys instead of any with physical abnormalities. He even completely switched up the backstories of some of the best known and loved villains; in his movies Ra's Al Guhl is the leader of a group of assassins looking to, in their eyes, restore world order. In the comic books, Ra's Al Guhl is an eco-terrorist who just happens to be thousands of years old, thanks to magic. But try dropping that into the plot of Batman Begins with its sub-textual plot of terrorism and modern economics and see how well it does.
Even as Nolan introduced slightly more hyper-realistic bad guys and storylines, that's when audiences began to react negatively. The muscle-bound Bane holds an entire city to ransom, which is a good deal more "comic-booky" than The Joker merely setting off bombs around the city. But when you've established the real world tone, and then insert comic book elements, things begin to fall apart; Why would you send every last police officer into the sewers at the same time? Why was Wayne's broken back by hanging him from a rope? How did he break back into a shut-down Gotham with no money and no way in? Why did Batman take the time to paint a fiery mural on that bridge in the middle of a terrorist takeover? These are just a small fraction of the dozens of questions that audiences wouldn't have asked of a less serious movie.
Batman, with his awesome futuristic gadgets and super-powered bad guys, doesn't belong in the real world. He also doesn't belong in a camptastic glitter-world like Schumacher's. Batman belongs in a sci-fi world. Not anything too crazy, but something akin to Blade Runner or District 9 or The Matrix, a type of reality similar to ours, but one where you wouldn't blink an eye at the sight of a man made out of clay or a woman who can control plants with her mind.
What Nolan has done is fantastic, but it's also put Warner Brothers into a creative cul de sac. With Nolan producing this summer's Man Of Steel, with the idea to eventually get round to making Justice League - DC's answer to The Avengers - with Superman, Wonder Woman, The Green Lantern and, yes, Batman fighting injustice. But if we couldn't deal with little questions about Wayne's back problems in The Dark Knight Rises, how is Nolan's Gotham going to deal with the arrival of super-powered aliens?
My guess is that Warner is probably going to have to reboot Batman again to get him in line with this new Justice League universe. But after all those billions and Oscars and fan loyalty, who would want to step up to that mantel? Whoever it is, we wish you luck. You're going to need it.
