6. Batman Begins (2005)
Choosing Batman Begins as second best was a tough decision to make. Maybe the realism of The Dark Knight was what secured it as number one. However when I say Batman Begins is marginally second best, you can barely see the margin. While Nolan's first installment was not exactly marketed or surrounded with the severe amounts of hype to the extents of his later Batman movies, his first installment completely reignited the Batman franchise in the ways fans were crying out for nearly ten to fifteen years previous. Jonathan Nolan's writing deeply explored the origins of Bruce Wayne, the city's infrastructures and the birth of Batman - the "symbol of fear against those who prey on the fearful". All you have to do right now is look around and ask yourself what other films have taken such tangents towards telling a story. The Amazing Spider-Man starring Andrew Garfield and again Skyfall are just two I can think of. If you notice in both of those films, it takes nearly an hour of running time for our protagonists to become the heroes we are all their to witness. That is confident film-making. However, Batman Begins was really the first to take the origin tangent to the time, depths and lengths that it aspired to do. What Batman Begins also did well was highlight the possibilities of independent film-making becoming blurred with Hollywood blockbuster status, primarily due to Christopher Nolan's involvement mixed with the cast of Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Liam Neeson. Before Begins, Nolan had made a couple of movies, one being critically acclaimed with Memento (2000), a small, arthouse crossover flick which went on to gain a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Batman Begins, when compared to the previous Burton and Schumacher films, was a small but promising reboot, which fans would more than likely walk away from at the end feeling satisfied Batman had come out from the shadows again. Fans were wrong, they got more than they were expecting. How? Because Batman Begins took itself that seriously and just that confidently in its story arc from the graphic novel of Frank Millar's Batman: Year One.