The first installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy brings a welcome seriousness and intellectual heft to the superhero genre in general and the Caped Crusader in particular. The son of a murdered millionaire becomes a masked vigilante to fight the rampant crime that took his father’s life. As origin movies go, this one is quite good, pitting Batman against ancient enemy Ra’s al Ghul as excellently portrayed by Liam Neeson. A-plus direction, cinematography, writing and acting finally give Batman the appreciation that fans like myself had desired for so long. The movie’s main fault is that the action scenes are poorly orchestrated—the camera gets in too close and moves too much, making the action very hard to follow; and in a movie like this, it’s vital to get the fight scenes right. Not a great movie, but a very good one worthy of the Batman mythos.