I was hoping for the best with an excellent looking cast and a talented director like Christopher Nolan at the helm. Thankfully, I got it. This is easily my favorite of the Batman films. It get almost everything right, and vastly improves on the failures of the other four films. Ironically, the one thing that all four of the other films got right is the one main thing I think this one fell short with – the music score. Danny Elfman and Elliot Goldenthal both turned in two outstanding scores each for the previous entries. On this one, we have two A-list composers (Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard) who drop the ball. This isn’t a terrible score, but it isn’t particularly good either. It has a couple moments that work, but overall the score is flat and unimaginative. Probably my least favorite score from the superhero genre since Michael Kamen’s awful score from the first X-Men film. At any rate, with that complaint out of the way, I have basically no other complaints. Seriously, nothing else jumps to mind of things I didn’t like. One of the most amazing things is that they removed all the camp elements for this version, but still managed to have a good amount of humor. Frankly, I think the humor in this film is done better than all the other four combined, all while managing to stay darker and more character driven than them as well. The well written dialog and plot structure makes me think that Dark City might not have been a complete fluke from writer David S. Goyer. Dark City was brilliant, but pretty much everything else Goyer has done has been complete crap. Who knows, perhaps he does have some talent. Directing for the film is solid and very well done. Nolan is clearly a talent to keep an eye on. This is the first Batman movie to be shot in scope, which is a huge improvement as well. Then we come to the amazing cast. There are some of my favorites in this one. The brilliant Michael Caine is his usual brilliant self. Morgan Freeman gets another perfectly Morgan Freeman role this year (and they are in fairly unlikely films like this and the excellent Unleashed). Bale is excellent in the lead. Gary Oldman, another of my favorite actors, plays a somewhat unusual character for him – a normal, good guy. Katie Holmes is good as the downplayed romantic angle (I like that they didn’t overplay the romance angle and tended to keep her as more of a motivational factor and example for his character than anything else). I also liked the way the slowly brought in the different tradition elements of the story – like the moment I sat there watching and realizing that where he was standing was going to be the “bat cave”. They don’t hit you over the head with the introcution of elements. Rather, they sneak them onscreen and let the audience pick up on them. I mean, the story is well enough known that they don’t have to. They don’t even use the name “bat cave”, but it’s clearly implied what it is to become (and cleverly referenced at the end). The movie manages to accomplish something that none of the entries in the franchise have pulled off before – which is believably portraying the history and motivation of the character. It all works swimmingly.