The Dark Knight Rises has proved to be one of the biggest hits this summer, and has maintained Christopher Nolan’s reputation as Hollywood’s premier buster of blocks. Nolan’s revitalisation of the Batman franchise began in 2005 with Batman Begins, and only a year later Martin Campbell and Daniel Craig rebooted the moribund James Bond series with Casino Royale.

With the very tasty looking Skyfall due to arrive in October, Bond remains iconic as ever. From the set pieces of Inception and The Dark Knight Trilogy, you don’t have to look very far to see Nolan’s various nods and homages to the classic spy series. Here are six of the best…

6. Lucius Fox and Q

This is perhaps the most obvious allusion to Bond in the Batman series, with Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox providing Batman with all the gadgets he needs to fight crime. Sure, Fox is a regular fixture in the comics, but in Nolan’s hands he becomes an essential component of the Batman universe.

Just like Bond and Q, Nolan’s Batman simply couldn’t function without the help of Lucius Fox. Moreover, the playful banter between Bruce and Lucius owes more than a little to Q’s fatherly chiding of Bond, even if Bond never does ask if his various cars come in black.

5. Batman’s motivation

Everyone knows the reason that Bruce Wayne chose to don the cape and cowl was that as a child his parents were gunned down in Crime Alley, and in Batman Begins Nolan was careful to stay true to those origins. But in The Dark Knight, and even more so in The Dark Knight Rises, Batman’s crime-fighting motives seemed to shift more towards his doomed relationship with Rachel Dawes.

Although when we think of Bond we tend not to imagine someone who would get unduly emotional over a lost love, a key moment in his character’s development comes in 1969’s underrated On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where for once our hero marries the Bond girl, here played by the alluring Diana Rigg. However, when villain Blofeld returns at the end to kill 007, his new wife is killed in the crossfire, and the film ends as he cradles her lifeless body.

The ending is unique in the Bond canon, and presents a fascinating analysis of why Bond is the way he is. Nolan’s Batman is almost identical to fellow orphan Bond on an emotional level. They are both distant, traumatised loners, emotionally crippled by the romantic losses they have suffered, dealing with their pain in the only way they know how: by being the best at what they do.

4. The snow fortress in Inception

Nolan pulled out all the stops for his climactic, multi-level, dream-hopping heist in 2010’s Inception. The snow fortress sequence was particularly exhilarating, and offered audiences an affectionate tribute to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

The sixth mission for MI6’s top agent is often the most maligned of the series, mainly because of George Lazenby’s performance in his only outing as the eponymous spy. However, OHMSS has much to offer, not least of which is the terrific climactic storming of Blofeld’s mountain fortress, led by 007 and a squadron of special forces troops.

Visually, the snow fortress in Inception is reminiscent of the one in OHMSS, and the homage neatly underscores the fact that at its heart, Inception is an action film about action films. The relationship that Nolan draws between dreams and cinema is never more overt than here, and what better way to evoke this than with a dream sequence inspired by one of cinema’s most iconic series?

3. The globetrotting

An essential part of Bond is his ability to blend in and adapt to any location, and their exotic locales are part of what makes the Bond films such great escapist cinema: Dr. No had the Caribbean, You Only Live Twice had Japan and Moonraker had, well, outer space.

Similarly, Inception sees the American Dom Cobb exiled in France, meeting contacts in Mombasa and assembling an international team of inceptors. Meanwhile, Batman skulks around in Tibet in Batman Begins, kidnaps a businessman in Hong Kong in The Dark Knight, and finds himself imprisoned in ‘one of the more ancient parts of the world’ in The Dark Knight Rises.

In contrast to Bond, however, Nolan’s protagonists often find themselves in struggling to cope in unfamiliar surroundings. Insomnia’s Will Dormer, for example, is fatally unaccustomed to the perpetual sunlight of the Alaskan summer , and in Memento, Leonard Shelby spends his life travelling through strange towns in search of his wife’s killer.

With a director as clearly steeped in Bond lore as Nolan, it’s hard to ignore the similarities between Nolan’s international sensibilities and use of location, and the globetrotting nature of James Bond.

2. The Joker’s shoe-knife

One of the Joker’s most vicious devices in The Dark Knight is the blade concealed in his shoe that he uses in the skirmish with Batman at Bruce Wayne’s penthouse. It’s unclear, however, whether the Joker knew that Rosa Klebb had unsuccessfully tried the same tactics against 007 in From Russia With Love, though Klebb did think ahead with a poison-tipped blade.

Sadly for Rosa and the Joker, neither hero could ever be truly threatened by something as trifling as a pair of Doc Martens, and so both Bond and Bats neutralise the threats with relative ease. The Joker’s shoe is a delightful, throwaway reference to the second Bond flick, and another indication of how far that film has influenced Nolan in creating inventive ways of keeping his heroes on their toes.

1. The opening to The Dark Knight Rises

After the masterful bank robbery sequence in The Dark Knight, how could the opening of the third Batman film possibly hope to offer something half as exhilarating? How about a mid-air plane hijacking in which the plane itself is hijacked by another, larger aircraft, dragged along through the sky and rent apart before our very eyes?

Part of what makes this scene so astonishing is that they actually towed a plane through the air for real, with no CGI. But perhaps more surprising still is that this stunt has already been done on film, albeit with a helicopter towing a plane, in 1989’s Licence to Kill.

In that film, it’s actually Bond doing the hijacking, tying drug lord Franz Sanchez’s plane to his helicopter and dragging him into custody. Nolan’s allusion in TDKR is a nice inversion, with the baddie (in many ways retooled by Nolan as a Bond-esque villain) getting to be the coolest guy on screen. Not only does it set up the incredible, bombastic spectacle that defines TDKR, but also announces very clearly just how influential cinema’s favourite spy has been on Hollywood’s favourite director.

> Order the 50th Anniversary Blu-ray boxset on Amazon, containing all 22 James Bond films.

> Buy the Batman Begins and The Dark Knight boxset on Amazon.

Watch the 50th anniversary trailer…