Along with being a dark and gritty reboot of the franchise, Batman Begins also featured a gritty, gothic version of Gotham, but the city has a drastically different look in The Dark Knight. Batman Begins depicted Gotham as being totally rundown and crime-ridden, and the city had a color palette of exclusively different shades of brown. It was always raining in the city, and the townhouses looked almost wartorn. The city got a lot worse when Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows freed all the inmates at Arkham Asylum, leading to absolute terror on Gotham’s streets. This version of Gotham is how its best known and is the most comic-accurate.
However, Christopher Nolan’s Gotham has become divisive because of how it’s depicted in the Batman Begins follow-up, The Dark Knight. The Gotham in the beloved sequel doesn’t have anything unique about it and doesn’t look different from any other major U.S. city with a skyline full of skyscrapers. It looks completely different from Gotham in Batman Begins and nobody would ever believe they’re the same place. However, there are several reasons for that, and it wasn’t just because Nolan wanted to take advantage of Chicago’s architecture. Though it might be lacking in some areas, The Dark Knight’s Gotham is very much a result of the events in Batman Begins.
Much Of Gotham Was Destroyed In Batman Begins
One of the most drastic and glaring changes between the two movies was Wayne Tower, which was a very gothic-looking 19th-century building in Batman Begins. But in The Dark Knight, it’s an enormous, modern skyscraper instead. Bruce spent years training to be Batman with the League of Shadows, but he abandoned the team after he learned about their plans to burn Gotham to the ground. And in the final act of Batman Begins, that’s exactly what the league does. While it wasn’t outright mentioned that Wayne Tower was destroyed, it’s safe to assume it was one of the many buildings that had to be rebuilt.
The Dark Knight Is Set In Different Gotham Locations
The Dark Knight takes place in Gotham locations that are a lot different from the ones in Batman Begins. As some of The Dark Knight’s villains are corrupt businesspeople, most of the sequel is set in and around the metropolitan area and the business district of Gotham. These are obviously more affluent districts than the locations in the first movie. Just like real cities, Gotham has many locations that drastically vary between being impoverished and opulent. Batman Begins mostly takes place in the Narrows, the Docks, and Arkham Asylum, which are generally dirty and rundown places, so it only makes sense that The Dark Knight looks a lot more pristine.
Batman Helped Cleaned Up Gotham City
In the time between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Batman rose to prominence to the point where he became truly feared by criminals and at least partly revered by Gotham City Police Department. He cleaned up the city by catching criminals and handing them over to James Gordon, and the cleaner look of Gotham in The Dark Knight reflects exactly that. And a lot of The Dark Knight is set during the day because mobsters are too afraid to operate at night out of fear of running into The Bat. So the difference between the movies’ different versions of Gotham is literally night and day.
