Perhaps it’s something to do with Interstellar’s failure to light up the awards season, as one might have expected from a Kubrickian space adventure arriving just a year after the multiple Oscar-winning Gravity. Or maybe the current fondness for brash and boisterous Marvel superhero movies has simply persuaded film fans that a new dawn is in sight for comic book fare. Either way, just about everyone seems to have it in for Christopher Nolan and his once vaunted Dark Knight trilogy right now.

First there was the revelation that Michael Keaton, the star of the Tim Burton-era Batman films, had never bothered to watch the later movies. Then the novelist Christopher Priest, whose book The Prestige formed the basis of a very fine magician-themed Nolan thriller in 2006, described the Dark Knight films as “boring and pretentious”, expressing incredulity at the film-maker’s decision to “add” psychological realism to the superhero genre. He told Skript.fr: “I don’t like his other work, I think it’s shallow and badly written … It’s a wrong move to take a superhero and give it psychological realism. There is no psychological realism. He’s a bodybuilder who jumps off buildings.”

Now Matthew Vaughn, the British director of Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class, has waded into the debate. In the latest issue of SFX magazine he argues that audiences are fast turning their backs on darker superhero fare in favour of more light-hearted material.

“People want fun and escapism at the moment,” said Vaughn. “Look at the success of Guardians of the Galaxy. I think Nolan kick-started a very dark, bleak style of superhero escapism, and I think people have had enough of it.”

Guy Ritchie’s erstwhile producer might be right in terms of highlighting a shift in the cultural zeitgeist. Man of Steel, Zack Snyder’s somewhat sombre Superman reboot, might have benefited from a little more cheer and all-American bombast, while you have to wonder if the stark and atmospheric Dredd (which I loved, by the way) might have connected better with US audiences had Alex Garland not chosen to delve into deliciously dark and visceral territory when adapting the iconic 2000 AD antihero.



But none of this is Nolan’s fault, and suggesting that there is something wrong with the British director’s excellent trilogy of films just because Hollywood has shifted towards a rather more throwaway style of superhero rather misses the point.

Nolan chose to make movies about Batman because he felt the dark knight was by far the most fascinating comic-book hero out there, a superhero whose only real power is extreme wealth – and who would be a psychologist’s dream if he were real. The film-maker has not expressed any particular interest in shooting further superhero movies, and it seems highly unlikely he will do so in the foreseeable future.

Batman also suited Nolan’s taste for spiky, cerebral thrillers that balance on the borderline between the real and the imagined. To suggest his comic-book films were somehow an attempt to make cinematic superheroes darker is myopic in the extreme: the director was simply indulging his own tastes as an auteur with an unusual willingness to delve into mainstream and genre territory.

For those of us who happen to enjoy these types of movies, the departure of Nolan for more obviously cerebral territory – where Priest hints he belongs – is dismaying. Moreover, Vaughn should bear in mind that his own Kick-Ass movies might easily have tanked had Nolan’s pioneering work not proved that there is a place for big-screen superhero fare not aimed at kids.

It’s true that comic-book films took a turn away from primary-coloured silliness towards a starker, furrow-browed aesthetic bedded closer to reality. (This partly explains why we got a bizarrely moody Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie last year, when viewers might have been expecting another fun-time romp in the company of everyone’s favourite wisecracking, pizza-munching reptilian crime fighters.) But that doesn’t mean that the success of Guardians of the Galaxy, The Avengers et al means every superhero movie from hereon in is going to riff off self-referential banter and 70s pop razzle-dazzle. Guardians of the Galaxy’s ingenious use of Blue Swede would not have worked on, say, the forthcoming remake of The Crow, the gothic supernatural themes of which are probably more suited to a bit of Marilyn Manson.

The comic-book world is a vast and mercurial one, and we can only hope that film-makers will continue to produce movies that reflect this. Guardians of the Galaxy and The Dark Knight are both excellent in their own way precisely because each has the confidence in its tone to take it into fresh, uncharted territory.

Nolan’s Batman movies will remain thrilling totems of the genre for decades to come. They will perhaps take the same blunt and brutal place in the comic-book milieu as Sam Peckinpah’s down and dirty early 70s films do in the western pantheon – even if they are not flavour of the month at present.