Batman Begins and The Dark Knight

Revitalizing a dead franchise can be a tough job especially when the franchise in question had ended on a down note and over time had become the butt of jokes. Without question that is what happened to the Batman franchise that had such a strong beginning. The amazing approach that was used to invigorate this storyline was to re-imagine the entire story from its very origin so that there would be no connection to the earlier films. The way that the director, Christopher Nolan, attacked the iconic character was to take the audience on the journey of his creation, that up until this point in time had only been discussed in the vaguest of terms.
Batman Begins - After traveling the world following his parents murder' and learns to fight from a mysterious ninja society, Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham City and creates the vigilante Batman to save the city. As origin stories go this is not that bad even with the alterations that were made from the original story. Christian Bale is perfect in the role as Bruce Wayne/Batman, he brings just the right amount of brooding and playfulness that the character needs. Every role throughout the story is hit on the mark by the actors involved, from Michael Caine as Alfred to Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon they are all faithful to the original characters and wonderful to watch.
The Dark Knight - With the emergence of the psychotic killer only known as The Joker, Batman must reexamine how he is to protect his city and stop The Joker. The most talked about role in recent film history has been for the performance of Heath Ledger as the Joker. His portrayal is over powering that there are times you lose sight that the story also includes Batman. There is one fault that this film has and that's the introduction of Harvey Dent and the creation of Two-Face. This slows the story down and does not keep pace with the Joker segments.
After coming out of the gate with two successes you have to wonder just what is going to be done in the third installment. With a vast back log of history that the Batman universe contains there are just to many directions that it could possibly go in. If you haven't seen these films your truly missing out on performances that have set new bench marks for these actors to strive for. Hopefully the powers that be will be able to gather up all of the pertinent actors to fill their roles once again, and we'll all be privileged with another chapter in the limitless realm of Batman.