Batman BeginsSave

The film opens with a deliberately disorienting flashback structure. A young Bruce Wayne is playing in the gardens of Wayne Manor with his childhood friend Rachel Dawes when he falls down an old well into a bat-infested cavern beneath the property. The trauma of the fall, combined with the swarm of disturbed bats, plants the lifelong fear that will eventually become his costume motif. Cut to the present day. Adult Bruce Wayne is incarcerated in a remote Bhutanese prison, having spent years traveling under false identities through criminal underworlds across Asia attempting to understand the mind of the men who killed his parents. He is approached in his cell by a calm older man named Henri Ducard, who offers him an alternative: training in a secret monastic order called the League of Shadows, located in the mountains above the prison.

Bruce accepts. He travels to the League's mountain training facility, where he learns combat, deception, and the philosophical principles of the order under Ducard's mentorship. The League's master is a man named Ra's al Ghul. The order's history is centuries old; Ra's claims that the League has been the secret hand correcting civilizations whose corruption became unsustainable, including the burning of London during the Great Fire and the fall of Rome. Their next target is Gotham City, which they have been monitoring for decades and have determined is irredeemable. Bruce's final test is to execute a captured criminal as initiation. He refuses. Ducard's actual identity is revealed: he is Ra's al Ghul himself, and the older figurehead Ra's was a decoy. Bruce destroys the League's mountain headquarters in his escape, saving Ducard from the wreckage as a moral counterpoint to his refusal to execute.

Bruce returns to Gotham seven years after his disappearance. He finds the city in worse condition than he left it. His childhood friend Rachel Dawes is now an Assistant District Attorney targeting organized crime; Wayne Enterprises has been corporatized under the executive Earle, who has shelved military-grade R&D; projects in basement archives Bruce can access. Bruce reconnects with Lucius Fox, the chief of the abandoned R&D; division, who provides him with prototype military gear: a black tactical body armor, a memory-cloth cape, and the experimental Tumbler tactical vehicle that will become the Batmobile. Bruce's butler Alfred Pennyworth provides domestic and emotional infrastructure. Bruce begins covert operations against Gotham's organized crime, branding criminals with a bat-symbol calling card.

Gotham's primary crime boss is Carmine Falcone, an old-school mob patriarch who has bought most of the city's political and police infrastructure. Falcone's organization is also distributing a strange new psychotropic drug developed by Dr. Jonathan Crane, the corrupt psychiatrist running Arkham Asylum. Crane, in his alter ego the Scarecrow, uses the drug to terrorize subjects with hallucinations of their deepest fears. He also recommends commitment to Arkham for any criminal who could otherwise testify against Falcone, removing the witnesses through medical-establishment corruption rather than direct violence. Bruce and Rachel separately investigate the drug's distribution.

Bruce, in his Batman costume for the first time, intervenes during a Falcone shipment of the Scarecrow drug at the Gotham docks. He defeats Falcone's enforcers, traps Falcone in a search-light spotlight as a public symbol of capture, and provides Rachel with the evidence she needs to indict the crime boss. Falcone is arrested. The investigation continues toward Crane and the unknown organization secretly funding the drug operation. Crane, attempting to have Rachel committed to Arkham as a witness, is intercepted by Batman, who exposes Crane to a high-concentration dose of his own fear toxin. Crane suffers a permanent psychological break and begins ranting about the larger plan in which he has been a small participant.

The plan is revealed: the League of Shadows has resurfaced. Ra's al Ghul, having survived the mountain headquarters' destruction, has been the secret financier behind the Scarecrow drug. The League has been releasing the drug into Gotham's water supply for months, slowly building a citywide concentration. Their plan is to deploy a stolen Wayne Enterprises microwave-vaporization weapon at Gotham's central train tunnel, instantly vaporizing the contaminated water across the city's plumbing system and turning the entire population into hallucinating, panic-stricken predators of each other. Gotham would tear itself apart from within within hours.

The League's deployment begins during Bruce's birthday party at Wayne Manor. Ra's al Ghul personally confronts Bruce at the manor, sets fire to the house in a deliberate echo of the Great Fire of London, and departs to complete the operation. Bruce escapes into the bat-infested cavern beneath the manor, the same childhood location now repurposed as his Batcave. He suits up and races to Gotham's downtown train system, where Ra's has hijacked the elevated Wayne train heading toward the central tunnel and the microwave weapon's deployment site. Sergeant James Gordon, the only honest officer Bruce has cultivated as a contact, drives the Batmobile in pursuit at street level.

The climactic train battle takes place across the elevated rail line and the Wayne Tower platform. Bruce and Ra's engage in single combat across the moving train. Gordon, in the Tumbler, destroys the rail support pillars to prevent the train from reaching the central tunnel. The train derails. Bruce escapes; Ra's, having refused to leap off as Bruce had urged him to, dies in the crash. The microwave weapon's deployment is interrupted before the citywide vaporization completes. Gotham is saved. The film closes on Sergeant Gordon, newly promoted to Lieutenant, on the rooftop of the Gotham Police Department, where he has installed a ceiling search-light projecting a bat-symbol against the clouds. He shows Bruce a card from a new criminal who has begun calling himself the Joker. Bruce promises to investigate.

Batman Begins grossed $373 million globally on a $150 million budget, a strong commercial performance that successfully relaunched the Batman franchise after the 1997 Batman & Robin disaster had left it dormant for eight years. The film's grounded, militaristically-realistic register established the visual and tonal language that the entire modern superhero blockbuster era would inherit. Christian Bale's commitment to the character (including the dramatic weight loss for The Machinist immediately preceding production and the matching weight gain for Batman) set a new standard for physical-transformation acting in the genre. Director Christopher Nolan, working with cinematographer Wally Pfister and composer Hans Zimmer in the first of their multi-film collaborations, created a Gotham that combined Chicago's corporate-grid downtown with deliberately exaggerated production design. The film's success directly enabled The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and its tonal influence on subsequent comic-book cinema has been extraordinary.