4. He's Empowered And Saved By Old Men
As we've already said, Batman doesn't invent anything himself in Nolan's world, despite very obviously having enough technical skill and knowledge to fix the Autopilot on the Bat, and make some personalising touches to the tech he appropriates from his own company, but what makes that worse is that it comes from Lucius Fox. Fox is far from the stereotype of the mad inventor - he is wholly stable, to the point of actually being bland, and though he has a magisterial aura about him, he is curiously a-cool, and he is never really presented as anything other than a special colleague who helps Bruce out. At least Q enjoyed enough banter with 007 that we believed the dynamic, and accepted that the empowerment was justified by Q's superiority - in Nolan's trilogy, Lucius feels a little like he's shoe-horned in to accommodate Morgan Freeman. The result is that it feels like Batman is basically empowered entirely by an old man with a box of tricks who represents no physical threat, even in terms of his charm. And he's not just empowered by Lucius' trinkets: if it wasn't for another old man, Batman wouldn't have made it beyond his formative stages in Batman Begins, because his life is literally saved by his butler/mother/boyfriend Alfred, who manages to get a snarky comment in about how much of a pussy his young charge actually is... "What is the point of all those push-ups, if you can't even lift a bloody log?"