Batman Begins represents the fifth installment in the Batman series and the first new film in the series in eight years. Director by Christopher Nolan (Memento) it also represents the best film in a series that had become stale and campy and also the first of the batman movies to do justice to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight vision of the caped crusader. Batman Begins by far is one of the best comic book movies in recent years and the best characterization of Batman that I never knew I wanted. This is a Batman a girl could lust after and any man could respect. He’s dark and brooding, human and awe inspiring and troubled enough to warrant running around the city dressed as an oversized bat and still mange not to seem like a man in serious need of counseling. This new installment of Batman follows its predecessors in that the why Bruce Wayne becomes Batman hasn’t changed: He sees his parents killed by a mugger as a kid and from then on is raised by his trusty butler Alfred (Micahel Caine) and once he becomes grown feels the need to save Gotham City from the same criminal element that killed his parents. What is different is that for the first time the transformation from traumatized, orphaned kid to avenging, vigilante is believable. The film spends a great deal of time, the first hour in fact, addressing how witnessing the murder of his parents has affected him, from the guilt he feels that he couldn’t save them, to the rage he feels for the man responsible for their deaths. We also finally get an explanation as to why he chooses a bat as his alter ego that is not only plausible but believable and compelling. Michael Goyer did an excellent job humanizing Batman with this script. Instead of seeming supernatural or extraordinary, he comes across as a man in need of redemption from a haunting and tragic past, one who pursues his version of justice for the purging of his own soul as much as it is for the purging of Gotham City’s. Christian Bale has found his calling as the young Bruce Wayne turned Batman. He is the perfect mix of self assurance and arrogance, vulnerability and insecurity. As the playboy Bruce Wayne he is sexy, alluring and charmingly irresponsible.