GOTHAM CITY IN THE SHADOW OF SEPTEMBER 11 A four-page special looks

GOD, we're sophisticated. The first Batman flick I ever saw featured Adam West, Burt Ward and a rubber shark. But that was enough. I was hooked. Now we're so sussed, media-literate and clever that we just wouldn't tolerate a film about a man in silk tights and pointy ears unless it had a post-9/11 subtext and a complex exploration of said crime-fighter's vigilante psychosis. Welcome to the 21st century, where the buzzword for summer blockbusters is verisimilitude.

Verisimilitude, or keeping it real, was also the buzzword for the first Superman movie, starring Christopher Reeve, back in 1978.

Director Richard Donner was so fond of this difficult, multi- syllable noun that he had it painted on a huge sign and kept it on the sound stage to remind the actors and cinematographer that even the most fantastic ideas need to be played straight or else you're insulting both your source material and your paying public.

American cinema has been littered with the corpses of comic-book movies played for laughs: camp, four-colour travesties like Dick Tracy, The Phantom, The Shadow and, most famously, Joel Schumacher's abysmal Batman flick back in 1997. Batman and Robin, starring George Clooney and the current Reich Chancellor of California, was so dire, so greedy, so insulting to the dignity of human beings everywhere and such woeful bloody bollocks, it actually managed to do the one thing that neither Joker nor Penguin could do after five decades of trying: it put Batman on the critical list for eight entire years.

It's hard to believe now, when every A-list star is lining up to try on a pair of hot-pants for size, but back in 1997 Batman And Robin seemed to drive a stake through the very heart of superhero cinema. The comicbook industry had been devastated by venture capitalists and editorial mismanagement and the movies just seemed to be one super-turkey after another. Thus, as you can imagine, a low-budget picture called Blade, based on a Marvel Comics character nobody had ever heard of, hardly generated much advance heat. And yet David Goyer and Stephen Norrington's little vampire superhero flick, starring action-hero Wesley Snipes, made over dollars-150 million dollars at the domestic box office and paved the way for two successful sequels, an upcoming television series . . . and the resurgence of superheroes on the big screen. The buzzword, again, was verisimilitude.

A smart writer and a smart director took the crazy source material very, very seriously and the audience did the same. After looking at the numbers, Hollywood quickly realised they'd found the magic formula and employed another clever young writer and director to translate the X-Men to the big screen following similar, real world sensibilities. After Blade's box-office surprise, the opening words at every script meeting began in the same way: what if these super-guys existed in the real world?

The success of Blade, X-Men, Spider-Man and Hulk is down to the fact they took the most outrageous concepts from our childhoods and made them palatable for modern audiences. These recent takes on superheroes are just one DNA strand away from the world outside your window: comic-book ideas transported into real world settings.

Batman Begins, released this week, is a complete reinvention of the Batman legend with touchstones ranging from urban decay and gang violence to chemical attacks on American cities and Osama bin Laden himself.

Created in 1939 by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, Batman tells the story of billionaire Bruce Wayne, who, after seeing his parents gunned down, embarks on a quest for justice. Although this formative aspect of Batman's biography has been curiously underexplored from his numerous silver and small-screen outings, Batman Begins takes all the interesting background details that were glossed over in earlier incarn-ations and expands them with relish. Wisely ditching the cheesy one-liners and cheapo directors, Warner Brothers have opted instead for the same magic formula that made other recent superhero flicks such a success, right down to hiring Blade scriptwriter Goyer to handle the screenplay.

With a cast including Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, plus one of the most interesting directors of the last decade - Memento and Insomnia's Christopher Nolan - it's clear Warners and DC Comics are out to kick Spider- Man's webby ass.

As ever, it all comes down to the tone and the story - which is precisely where I think Batman Begins will raise the superhero genre to a new level. This isn't Adam West, Burt Ward and a rubber shark. It isn't even Tim Burton's oddly dated 1989 outing with Jack Nicholson ad-libbing his way through a two hour music video for middle-aged Prince fans. Advance word is that Batman Begins is the Godfather 2 of superhero action cinema.

One Los Angeles Times critic told me he thinks it's one of the greatest films ever made.

In order to be clocking up this level of boxoffice success, these movies must be tapping into something in the American zeitgeist.

And the obvious cultural reference is the notion of the individual's moral responsibility in society. The most famous line in Spider-Man comes when our hero's dear old uncle tells him that with great power comes great responsibility, echoing Winston Churchill's comments on America's new super-power status at the end of the second world war. The overriding message from Spider-Man 2 was that even though the right thing to do might make you unpopular and cause you personal physical harm, your moral responsibilities are just too awesome to ignore: an idea that encapsulates Bush's America more than any art-house movie I've seen since George W snatched the White House. America looks at superhero movies and they see themselves: spandex-clad updates of the noble cowboys who can always be relied upon to do the right thing.

Batman wears this notion more comfortably than any character before or since: a spoiled little rich kid who, after his childhood trauma, dedicates his life to rooting out the same evil that snatched his innocence.

Substitute Mom and Dad for the World Trade Centre and Batman for the neo-cons, and you'll understand why I'd bet the farm that this picture will resonate with Americans like no other.

We all live in the post-9/11 world now, particularly those of us who work in the American entertainment industry. The first thing I did when I was asked to revamp Captain America and the Hulk for Marvel Comics was to have them recruited by Homeland Security and shipped to the Gulf to defend American oil interests. Even poor old George Lucas has peppered his illadvised Star Wars prequels with revolts in the Senate, dark forces taking over the old republic and an endless war being conjured up by a malevolent, all-powerful empire.

It's no surprise then that the main villains in Batman Begins are The Scarecrow, a rogue academic who generates artificial fear in the people of Gotham as much as Fox News and their terror alerts do in the real world, and Ra's Al-Ghul, an impossibly rich, international terrorist who declares war upon America from his secret cave on the other side of the world. These myths are at their most potent when set against a familiar backdrop and what could be more familiar than our own world? Even Batman himself, as Nolan and Goyer stress at every opportunity, isn't doing anything a developed human body couldn't accomplish. Everything from the bullet-proof costume to the amazing fight-scenes to the contents of his utility belt have been worked out by experts and grounded in realism to the point where even the Batmobile was designed and built by a real-world military vehicle manufacturer as a functioning piece of hardware.

The resurgence in superhero cinema that coincided with the greatest act of terrorism America has ever known is no coincidence.

Its true escapist fantasy always thrives in terrifying times, but something more subtle has been going on too: the artificial recreation of a world that's very real, but with the safety catch of a controlled environment, a happy ending and good triumphing over evil.

That, to me, is what makes this movie so enduring and powerful. Contemporary tastes are so sophisticated, even our children won't accept Batman's pointy ears and tights without an explanation as to why he's wearing kinky clothes. Batman Begins gets under the cape and cowl and rationalises a septuagenarian concept for a discerning audience and this, for me at least, is incredibly positive.

In an age dominated by talk of dumbing down and imbecile attention spans, here's a movie with an IQ and a subtext that's almost as big as its budget. When I consider the calibre of people being hired for what have always been considered popcorn flicks, I realise we're not dumbing down any more, we're dumbing up. And as someone who makes his living by appealing to the masses, that's the most exciting thing I can imagine.

To paraphrase a famous oil-man, the former director of a major baseball team and the current commanderin-chief of America's army, navy and air-force: bring it on.

Mark Millar writes Wolverine, Fantastic Four and The Ultimates for Marvel Entertainment in New York and Los Angeles www. millarworld. biz

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