As The Odyssey continues to wow audiences on the big screen, many are revisiting director Christopher Nolan’s remarkable filmography. Of course, his 2008 Batman movie The Dark Knight is one of his most beloved films for how it elevated the comic book movie genre by placing Batman at the center of a gripping crime thriller. The Dark Knight, however, would not be what it is without a 1995 crime-thriller classic, which Nolan has repeatedly cited as a direct inspiration.

And now, in what seems like the intervention of the streaming gods, or perhaps even Athena herself, that classic film is now streaming for free on Pluto TV.

Michael Mann's Heat stars two of the greatest actors of the 20th century: Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. De Niro plays Neil McCauley, the leader of an elite band of bank thieves based in Los Angeles, while Pacino plays detective Vincent Hanna, who is determined to take McCauley down. Their rivalry begins at the start of the film, with an armored car robbery by McCauley and his crew, which results in the death of three guards. From there, the cat-and-mouse dynamic becomes more and more compelling as Hanna tries and fails to catch him while McCauley plans his biggest job ever.

Being a cops-and-robbers story, Heat has plenty of satisfying action movie staples like car chases and gunfire. Mann shoots it all with an impressive mix of grandeur and gritty realism. (One long shootout on the streets of Los Angeles is particularly big and exciting thanks to how public it feels, taking place on a busy LA street in broad daylight.) However, the most remarkable thing about the film is the dynamic between De Niro and Pacino, which evolves over a few conversations throughout the story. Especially beloved is the scene where the two meet in a diner and have a deeply personal conversation about their dedication to their jobs and how alone they both feel. What’s most impressive about the scene is the obvious personal respect the two have for each other despite the fact that they've become mortal enemies.

According to Mann, that mutual respect between Hanna and McCauley came from real life. While particular details were changed for the film, Heat was inspired by Mann’s real-life friend Chuck Adamson, a police officer who gunned down the real Neil McCauley in 1964. In a panel moderated by Christopher Nolan back in 2016, Mann explained that Adamson had a genuine appreciation for McCauley, and that the famous diner scene actually happened in real life.

That diner scene is heavily echoed in The Dark Knight in a scene between the Joker (Heath Ledger) and Batman (Christian Bale) in the Gotham City Police Department interrogation room. While Batman doesn’t quite have the same respect for the Joker that Hanna does for McCauley, the way the scene lays out their psychological differences and similarities is very evocative of the diner scene in Heat.

Even more similar are the big bank heist scenes in each film. Both take place in huge banks with wide angles and both scenes erupt into bursts of gunfire.

More than any one scenes, Nolan’s whole approach to The Dark Knight was shaped by his love for Heat. As he explained back in 2020, after Batman Begins told a global story, Nolan worried about setting The Dark Knight mostly in just one city, so he turned to Mann's film for inspiration.

“One of the biggest epic films I have ever seen is Michael Mann’s Heat,” Nolan told GQ. “That is a true Los Angeles story, just wall-to-wall within the city. Okay, we’ll make [The Dark Knight] a city story. We’re going to shoot in a real city, with real streets and real buildings, because the scale of that can be massive. We are going to use IMAX cameras so we can shoot the full height of the buildings and we’re going to give you an antagonist who’s interfering with the very fabric of the city. Just from the way we shoot it, the Joker walking down the street will be a huge image. Heat was very much an influence, because Mann is a fanatic for architecture, too; he understands the grandeur of a city and how it can become a kind of epic playground.”

Nolan succeeded, and Chicago, doubling for Gotham, became his own epic playground. While plenty of The Dark Knight came from Batman comics like The Long Halloween and The Killing Joke — as well as the minds of Nolan, his brother Jonathan and David S. Goyer, who wrote the film together — Michael Mann’s Heat also deserves some credit. And while there are countless cops and robbers films out there, Christopher Nolan is right to say that Heat is simply one of the best.

Heat is available to stream for free on Pluto TV.