Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is considered (mostly outside the academic world) to be a masterpiece of franchise filmmaking, three films with a common story arc that takes place in the same universe with the same cast, yet three distinctly different films from a genre perspective. The first film, Batman Begins attempts to ground the trilogy in a common thread of realism, the entire first act of the film takes place outside of Gotham city for this exact purpose. The film is pitched at Batman fans as a Batman film, almost a genre all its own, however, its first hour is glaringly devoid of Batman. This is where Nolan plays with the genre, the film is an action, franchise movie riding (partially) on the success of previous Batman films but instead of delivering a Michael Bay action-franchise movie, its a subtle, considered, slow-paced build that develops the character of Bruce Wayne. Movie Pilot claims Nolan “let the audience know this was a real world Batman and the events in Gotham effected the entire world.” by spending the first hour in the mind of the character of Bruce Wayne. The character of Batman is in fact a completely different character in the original screenplay of the film and he doesn’t enter the film until the second act. Breaking genre conventions is one of Nolan’s strongpoints, one only has to look at the way he manipulates genre conventions in Inception to understand why many claim that he has his own genre. Inception’s arc is the antithesis of Begins, as it skilfully manipulates the audience into believing they are watching a quasi sci-fi heist film before revealing that the story is actually a broken love story and the protagonist’s need is to let go of his late wife in order to restore his relationship with his children. It’s only at the end of the film that you realise that you in fact care about Cobb as a character. In many ways Batman Begins does this for Batman, a character that has rarely been portrayed with substance or even remotely sympathetic but by tricking you into caring about Bruce Wayne, the stakes when the film actually reaches it’s action packed third act are dramatically raised.