Whereas Peter Jackson dumbed down Tolkien, Christopher Nolan made Batman high art.

I can’t let Batman Day pass without some kind of celebration. Here’s my take on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy–the greatest cinematic achievement of the last 20 years.

In crafting his Batman movies, Nolan pulled together his longtime core development team—his wife, Emma, and his brother, Jonathan—but he also turned to his troupe of actors from previous projects, including Christian Bale and Cillian Murphy. Nolan, though a longtime Batman fan, had never been a collector or reader of comic books, and he concluded that he needed an expert in the original comic book Batman. He wisely turned to David Goyer, an Ann Arbor native, and lifelong comic book fan and writer. Goyer not only had written for DC and Marvel (the two main comic book companies and friendly rivals) but also had written some extraordinary film scripts, such as the Gothic noir dystopia, Dark City (1998), arguably one of most imaginative science-fiction films ever made.