STRICTLY 'BATMAN'.

Byline: - Bob Strauss

As its title indicates, ``Batman Begins'' represents a new start for the comic-book movie franchise. It's also the origin tale of how millionaire Bruce Wayne, traumatized by his parents' murder, disciplined himself to become Gotham City's caped vigilante.

But director Christopher Nolan (``Memento,'' ``Insomnia'') and star Christian Bale strived to get the 66-year-old property back to the basics in more ways than that. For a franchise with a sad history of degenerating into camp - whether due to the clueless 1960s TV series or the increasingly goofy movies Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher made in the '90s - this meant maintaining strong psychological underpinnings and avoiding everything that smacked of cartoonishness.

``A lot of things have been tried out with Batman over the years, and the great things - they stick,'' says Nolan, who cites Bob Kane's original, noirish, World War II-era comics, Neal Adams' baroque, globe-trotting Batman of the 1970s and Frank Miller's Dark Knight of the '90s as the major influences on the film. ``The key elements of the mythology keep coming back, and those were the things we were looking for.''

Filmed in England, Iceland (standing in for the Himalayas) and on the underground streets of downtown Chicago (which four fully operational, specially built Batmobiles tear up during a ``French Connection''-style chase), the movie went for big scale and big stars.

Assorted neighborhoods of Gotham City were built in an old zeppelin hangar that measured 400 feet wide by 800 feet long by 10 stories high. The supporting cast included Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Ken Watanabe and Katie Holmes.

As for his fellow Brit, whom Nolan says evokes the focused determination it would take for Bruce Wayne to become Batman, Bale was more than up for taking the serious route.

``I'd never seen Batman looked at in the way that he truly should be, and that's what we've hopefully managed to do here,'' Bale says. ``We're doing something different enough in the fact that it is a prequel, that we are able to re-create, and we don't have to adhere to anything that's been laid down in the movies.''

``This film doesn't have anything to do with any of the other films, full-stop,'' Nolan states flatly. ``I got involved because I heard the studio was looking for a fresh approach to the character of Batman. I wanted to see this epic origin story.''

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

(color) CHRISTIAN BALE and KATIE HOLMES