10 Things You Need To Know About Darren Aronofsky's Batman

7. It Was Way More Grounded (Even Than Nolan)

When Aronofsky said he wanted to throw away everything people thought they knew about Batman, he wasn't kidding. Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy has been praised for grounding the comic book hero in the real world more than usual, with the Caped Crusader facing enemies that were just regular people without superpowers, whilst clad in the sort of thing that the military would if they had more theatrical flair. Aronofsky and Miller's script for Year One went a fair ways further than that. They wanted to totally strip Batman of all the furnishings and privilege he has in the comics €“ in broad strokes his origin is pretty much the same (orphaned after his parents were killed in a botched mugging), but the wealth of resources he inherited from his entrepreneurial father? Non-existent in this version. This was a working class, street-level Batman who couldn't rely on a big back account for all of his wonderful toys. Which meant that the Batmobile was a tooled-up Lincoln Continental, he learns all of his martial arts and detective skills by reading books whilst homeless as opposed to travelling the globe and being taught by the masters, and instead of having all those grappling hooks, batarangs and the like? Yeah, no, he mostly just threw acid in people's faces and used smoke bombs and stuff.