This article originally appeared onDen of Geek UK.
Christopher Nolan stands in front of a chalkboard, carefully scratching out a internet of lines and arrows.
Thats one of the reasons we go to the movies.
He favors the use of celluloid and practical, in-camera effects.
Like Stanley Kubrick before him, Nolan grounds his stories in logic and rationalism.
Its as though the young Master Bruce has accidentally stumbled on a portal into the underworld of Greek legend.
Bane makes the allusion himself when he utters the famous line:
You merely adopted the dark.
I was born in it, moulded by it.
We discover that Bane was raised in The Pit a subterranean prison located somewhere in the ancient world.
And like shipwrecked men turning to sea water from uncontrollable thirst, many have died trying.
I learned that there can be no true despair without hope…
Defeated by Bane in a bone-shuddering fist-fight, Batman is left abandoned in The Pit.
[You] set yourself a puzzle you wont ever solve, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) tells Leonard.
You know how many towns, how many guys called James G?
Al Pacino plays Will Dormer, a cop who falsified evidence to make it put a criminal behind bars.
A place of chilly air, thick fog, and permanent daylight, the town is purgatory for Dormer.
The hero ofInception(2010) has a similarly troubled past.
Drilling too deeply into the dream realm leads characters to a place called Limbo an expanse of infinite subconscious.
What follows is a twist on the Orpheus myth.
What Nolan does is find a means of moulding these myths and archetypes after his own rationalist philosophy.
