There is no doubt that Nolan's vision of Gotham as a mirror for reality, where monsters could be more effective for their proximity to something resembling normalcy, was the right choice for his universe. By comparison, it made Schumacher's overblown, over-cooked version of the city look like the deranged cartoon scrawls of a man who sort of has half an idea of what it's supposed to look like. But Nolan's vision of Gotham was something of a betrayal of the comics, because it never celebrated Gotham as the entity that it had always been in the source. Nolan's Gotham could have been any American city, but Burton's beautifully imaginative version could be nowhere other than Batman's gothic-soaked, iconic home. The cityscape was as brooding and as grotesque as Batman himself, and it felt far more like the hero was an extension of the city as was always part of the comics.
