After the excitement of The Dark Knight Rises, I decided to revisit what I have considered in the past to be a pretty weak origins tale.

What I dislike about BB is still there: the pseudo-philosophical dialogue which weighs down the first half, the dull-as-dishwater love interest and the damp squib ending. All of Liam Neeson's dialogue sounds like it was pieced together from fortune cookie papers and it still amazes me that The Scarecrow, who could have been a pretty badass villain, doesn't appear until a good hour into the film.

This is my first viewing after completing the trilogy, and now I feel like there is a lot of good stuff there which I haven't appreciated. The Dark Knight fixed a lot of problems (villain introduced in the first scene, for example), but Batman Begins established a lot of what makes this trilogy great. The whole Nolan aesthetic is there, it just didn't seem that special to me until it was applied to the much improved stories of TDK and TDKR.

Gritty, humourless misery-fests they may be, but the Nolan Batman films make for thrilling cinema, Begins included.