The Den Of Geek Hall Of Fame, over the coming months, is set to play host to our most highly regarded films, comics, TV shows, games and books. Anything we put into our Hall Of Fame comes with a five star backing from the site, and gets saluted as something that no self-respecting geeky person would want to be without.

And we’re starting with Batman Begins.

Walking out of a cinema in the summer of 1997, my interest in the cinematic Batman franchise was over. To be fair, it was all-but-stubbed out with Batman Forever, which I thought was a huge step backwards from Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (a film I really, really like) and all but killed everything I’d enjoyed about the films thus far. Batman & Robin was, for my money, just about the equal of Batman Forever, and the pair of them are, in hindsight, remarkably similar.

Batman Begins, then, was the film that shouldn’t have happened. Batman & Robin scraped its way over $100m at the US box office, but was by some distance the lowest grossing live action Batman movie. No non-franchise film made by Arnie, Uma Thurman, Joel Schumacher, Chris O’Donnell or Alicia Silverstone has ever made that much money since, and I like to think that audiences hold them responsible in some way for taking the cheque and failing to deliver with Batman 4.

We had several false starts with the promised Batman 5, although early on it was revealed that The Scarecrow was the planned villain. Then, Darren Aronofsky, he of Pi and The Fountain fame, was attached to a Batman: Year One project. Yet this too proved to be a false dawn, and the project petered out. At least, though, the thinking showed more signs of promise for the film series.

Enter Christopher Nolan. Off the back of films such as Memento and the Insomnia remake, he wasn’t the logical choice to ‘reboot’ the Batman franchise, but – in conjunction with screenwriter David Goyer – that’s just what he did. The pair mapped out a staggeringly strong genesis story for the character, one that wouldn’t even see Batman hit the screen until around half of the film’s running time had gone. And when we did meet him it was no glossy movie star behind the mask. Instead, Christian Bale was about as edgy a male lead as they could have gone for, not least off the back of his startling turn in American Psycho.

Yet the cast was a crucial part of the jigsaw where Batman Begins was concerned. Nolan was oh-so-aware that the original Superman benefited from having a strong ensemble cast behind Christopher Reeve, and he set about bringing Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy, Rutger Hauer, Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Tom Wilkinson and Ken Wanatabe together, in surely the best acting line up ever seen in a comic book movie. Even the supposed weak link, Katie Holmes, was fine in retrospect, albeit bumbling one line where everyone else was pitch perfect.

But the crucial difference here was tone. Nolan knew what he wanted from his Batman, and it was a darker tale than even Tim Burton had dared to tell. Nolan’s Gotham City was a real rival for Anton Furst’s stunning creation for the 1989 Batman movie, a warts and all superhero city with some very real problems. And it was as dark and unpleasant as the comic books portray it. This was a living city that you truly believed was full of unsavoury characters, and the stunning shot of Batman crouched on a skyscraper while the camera pans around was enough to have you looking up the location of your nearest IMAX screen.

The tone continued with the character, though. Bruce Wayne/Batman was as flawed a man as you’d expect, with a real feeling of a haunted person building up as the film progressed. Christian Bale proved to be an inspired choice, too, proving that casting an actor over a movie star works pretty much every time.

But for this writer at least, the moment that nailed it, and consigned Joel Schumacher’s Bat-efforts to the history books, was when Batman eschewed the wise-cracking antics of old and pretty much dragged his target by the feet up in the answer. “I swear to God”, bumbled the villain. “Swear to me”, growled the Bat. It was played straight, it was played with menace, and it was flat out brilliant.

As, it has to be said, were the villains. While Batman Begins was the first Batman movie primarily about the main character, Nolan found a way to write three villains into a superhero movie without crowding anyone out. The trick was the lack of showboating. Cillian Murphy needed just a few deadly scenes to put across the menace of his Dr Crane/Scarecrow character, while Tom Wilkinson’s mob boss shouldn’t be dismissed either. But the twist of bringing Liam Neeson back at the end was a real jolt, whether you saw it coming or not. And you felt at that moment that somebody had bothered, that someone cared enough about Batman as you did, and wanted the film to be right.

The last 15 minutes, when Batman Begins has to conform to more familiar blockbuster conventions, is perhaps the weakest part, but the nigh on two hours leading up to that point is comfortably five star cinema. And with an ending that left you feeling like rounding up Nolan and his team and sending them back out to shoot The Dark Knight right away, it felt a pretty much complete package, the kind we'd never dreamed we'd get back in '97.

Whether this summer’s The Dark Knight will match Batman Begins remains to be seen. But the fact is that rebooting a franchise is no easy task (just ask Bryan Singer right now), and Batman Begins is the most successful job that anyone’s done to date. We’re proud to induct it as the very first entrant into the Den Of Geek Hall Of Fame. And we're now off to watch it again...

The Details:
Batman Begins (2005)
Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Rutger Hauer, Katie Holmes, Tom Wilkinson, Ken Wanatabe

Available on DVD and HD DVD. Available on Blu-ray in July.