Gotham City

Gotham City has been Batman's designated hangout for his entire career, and Nolan wasn't looking to change that in this go 'round. But he didn't want it to be some outlandish comic-book city like, say, Tim Burton's Gothic-noir space. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not the vibe for this movie.) Like the rest of the movie, it had to feel real, and while its status as a crime-ridden hellhole needed to remain intact (without crime, wouldn't need a Batman, and Bruce Wayne could just run through the halls of his mansion in his cape and cowl making whooshing noises), he still wanted it to be a real place instead of some Expressionistic wasteland.

Accordingly, he picked an actual city for his shooting locations, and indeed made sure we could recognize it from the attractive landmarks on display. Enter Chicago, a city that both Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan grew up around, and which has a deep history of organized crime to help give the film that gangster's vibe. The Dark Knight makes it look plenty grimy, but also somewhere that we might actually visit someday.

In fact, Nolan's Gotham actually sports a number of prominent landmarks people associate with Chicago. Consider that big car chase in the middle, where the Joker goes after Harvey Dent and which bears a suspicious resemblance to Chicago's famous Lower Wacker Drive. That's because it was actually filmed on Lower Wacker Drive, which also witnessed another big chase scene in the original Batman Begins.

Want more? Towards the end, when the Joker's blown up a hospital and the people of Gotham are putting on their boogie shoes to split, we get a shot of panicky crowds moving along the shores of a river, complete with the famous bridges crossing the Chicago River. It's clearly the same body of water, and while Nolan uses some digital tricks to give Gotham its own skyline, he's not fooling anyone about which real city his fake city is supposed to be standing in for.

Heck, we even have license plates on all the cars that look exactly like Illinois's plates; only the name "Gotham" instead of "Illinois" separates them. Considering that it's written in that same cursive font that Illinois uses in its real license plates, you'd be hard-pressed to spot the difference.

The only departure from Gotham is a brief stop in Hong Kong, where Batman picks up Mr. Lau and thinks he has the underworld totally tied up. Other than that, we spend the whole time in Gotham/Chicago, and that sojourn makes a great reminder that this fictional city exists in a world that is otherwise indistinguishable from our own.

And there's something important to that connection, something that makes the Hong Kong scenes more than just an excuse to take the film crew to the Pacific Rim. It ensures that we understand that Gotham is close to our world. In fact, Gotham becomes a stand-in for our world here. The fears of its citizens and everyone's fears: the good and the bad decisions they make represent the same decisions we all do in the face of scary things like terrorists and exploding buildings and officials who can't seem to do anything about it. It may be one city, but it's kind of every city, and because we recognize so much of it in the real universe, we can perhaps take the lessons its people learn a little closer to heart.