The Dark Knight

Peter C wrote:

"It's all part of the plan," says the Joker. Coming from a homicidal maniac purporting to be "an engine of chaos," it's an ironic turn of phrase. So too is the Joker's assertion "I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are." Though psychotic and instinctive, this criminal genius does think ahead, scheming about how to prolong his dance of death with the Batman, Gotham's inspiring vigilante. In this manner, the Joker resembles his puppet-master, director Christopher Nolan. With The Dark Knight, a sequel to 2005's impressive Batman Begins, Nolan is again every inch the schemer, and he's thought through everything necessary to deliver on the promise of a summer blockbuster while elevating the form.   [ show more ]

Batman Begins established the series' large-scale action, fascinating themes, and contemporary relevance, with a useful plot twist to keep even fanboys on their toes. But The Dark Knight deepens the experience in every way, abandoning most of the assumptions of comic-book escapism in favor of making a serious crime film with the ultimate in civil and personal high stakes. Nolan and co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan (The Prestige), with David S. Goyer sharing story credit, have constructed the film and its publicity to keep even spoiler-hungry fans from the assurance that they know the story's parameters, particulars, and pacing.

Gotham in the wake of Batman (rock-strong Christian Bale) has new hope as well as a new set of problems, prefigured in the final moments of Batman Begins. Aside from the costumed criminal antics of the Joker (Heath Ledger, in his last completed performance), Batman copycats with inferior equipment and training are trying to help the genuine article to take back the night. In the bright light of day stands "Gotham's white knight," crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, excellent in the film's pivotal role). Determined to take down Gotham's mob bosses, Dent recruits Lt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman, better than ever) and then Batman himself to do what needs to be done and watch Dent's back.

Bruce Wayne (Batman's alter ego) paraphrases a lesson taught to him in Batman Begins: "Criminals aren't complicated." But the wild card is the Joker, a terrorist (complete with threatening videos) playing a citywide game with Batman. Demanding that Batman unmask and promising death-dealing if he doesn't, the Joker targets Gotham's best and brightest. His diabolical plans are rigged to test not only Batman's ideology, but the greater ethic of Gotham. True to his terrorist style, the Joker hopes the people will take him up on his invitation to self-destruct in the face of incomprehensible evil. Speaking as the voice of anarchy, the Joker articulates how his role dovetails with the central theme of Batman Begins: "You know, the thing about chaos--it's fear." The question the film poses repeatedly: how far is it permissible to go in fighting terrorism? The Dark Knight stares into that abyss, and says only, "I've seen now what I'd have to become to fight men like him."

Dent's reaction to the mob (personified by Eric Roberts' Sal Maroni and Ritchie Coster's The Chechen) is fearless application of justice. Though he's forced to play the mob's dirty game, he'll bend the rules to deliver a key witness. But having, like Batman, hit hard against the criminals, Dent should prepare for the blowback. It's unclear that he can protect himself, much less his girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, ably assuming Katie Holmes' role), from criminal retribution. As an assistant district attorney, she incurs her own share of ire. As the lifelong friend and ex of Wayne, she also knows much more than most that Wayne can be trusted when times get rough.

For Batman, necessary transgressions are a walk in the park. He even employs a wireless "wire-tapping" method to listen in to all of Gotham, a cagily distressing evocation of the FISA debate branded "unethical and dangerous" by tech support Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman). "This is too much power for one person," Fox adds. (As Kristine Kathryn Rusch argues in her essay "Batman in the Real World," "President George Walker Bush is the closest thing we've had to Batman in a long time...fortunately, Batman is always right.") Trusty butler Alfred (Michael Caine) warns Wayne, "Know your limits." Answer: "Batman has no limits." The film eventually confirms that comment to be delusional, though the moral and ethical tangles created by the Nolans don't always have easy answers (even Fox agrees to go against his ethics "just this once"). Certainly, though, being a masked vigilante has its costs, from the scars covering the Dark Knight's torso to the place he finds himself by story's end.

Batman has one hard, fast rule that he refuses to break: he will not kill (or take up a gun). Rooted in the gun slaying of Bruce Wayne's parents, this rule is sorely tested by the Joker, who makes it his mission in life to prove that anyone--even the ones in whom we put our trust--is capable of snapping and becoming a homicidal maniac. Whatever gave the Joker the scars that form a mocking smile on his face (and the details, Nolan and the Joker concur, are irrelevant), we can infer that he was once as sane as those upon whom he systematically preys. In messily applied clown makeup (referred to as "war paint"), Ledger makes a mesmerizing mad dog, his tongue flicking and smacking his lips with demented abandon and his raccoon eyes boring into his victims. It's a fearless, full-bodied incarnation of madness, one that achieves the actor's ultimate goal of spontaneity.

The greatest impression of The Dark Knight is its considerable intellectual interest. As the comic-book movie has evolved, it has teased themes and emotional depth to attain a pop-operatic quality. But if Batman Begins was among the very best of comic-book movies, The Dark Knight succeeds it in its darkness of tone and resistance to easy plot fixes. The comic book The Dark Knight most closely resembles is Batman: The Long Halloween (written by Jeph Loeb), but the Nolans take from it the Untouchables-like mob conflict (the good guys go after the mob's life savings) and the wary heroic triptych of Dent-Gordon-Batman. A lover of thematic symmetry, Nolan also draws a love triangle connecting Dent, Dawes, and Wayne and, in the film's very fabric, a subtextual comparison of the relative madnesses afflicting and fatalistically connecting Batman, the Joker, and another great villain from the Batman Rogue's Gallery: Two-Face.

The Dark Knight also contains echoes of the classic comic Batman: The Killing Joke, written by Alan Moore. If The Long Halloween evoked The Untouchables (and The Godfather), The Killing Joke sends Nolan the territory of Heat and The Departed, but with an arguably greater level of thematic sophistication than either of those highly regarded films. One of The Dark Knight's best scenes pits Bale's Batman against Ledger's Joker in a philosophical battle of wills depicting "what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object." "I don't want to kill you. What would I do without you?" the Joker asks. "You complete me." Jack Nicholson delivered a powerhouse star performance and a legitimate interpretation of the Joker in Tim Burton's Batman. While taking nothing away from Nicholson, Ledger's work is of a piece with Nolan's reconception of the material. Ledger slips into the purple suit as if it were an animal skin for a primal, archetypal dance.

Whether or not one finds The Dark Knight a great film is obviously a matter of taste. It's pitch-black in themes and somber in tone (though not without flashes of humor), and its complicated plot demands a structure some will find unwieldy and overlong (though Batman fans will be in hog heaven). As smart as he is, Nolan isn't as masterful with emotion and action as Steven Spielberg (cross-breeding the two would make the ultimate blockbuster film director). And taken in real-world terms, upon which Nolan insists, Batman is not a simple hero but an anti-hero disenchanted with a corrupt system and therefore living out on its edge; though he attempts an experiment in working with trusted authority figures, he'll never be Gotham's top cop, but always its lone wolf.

Despite its potentially polarizing qualities, I think most audiences will have to agree that The Dark Knight is among the smartest and most thought-provoking popcorn movies ever made. As cultural critics decry the dumbing down of popular culture, it's an achievement not to be sneezed upon. It's also a film filled with robust performances by many of the best film actors alive and unfortunately, in the case of Ledger, dead. To balance the film's intellectual musings, Nolan delivers epic helicopter shots of urban landscapes and action sequences that are often astonishing but crafted to be as horrifyingly plausible as they are explosive.

In a country on the brink of a major change, The Dark Knight thoroughly entertains even as it usefully asks us to consider our need to believe in an unimpeachable public "hero with a face" (Dent's white knight) and our own responsibility anonymously to better the world with what Dent calls "public service," as unconventionally symbolized by the Dark Knight. Batman concludes, "Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded," and Nolan's richly realized adaptation of a modern American mythology fulfills our faith in the material and its interpreters.

[Note: The Dark Knight will play in ordinary 35mm projection format as well as in IMAX format (only in IMAX theaters, of course). Upping the ante from the IMAX presentation of Batman Begins, Nolan shot 28 minutes of The Dark Knight with IMAX cameras: several complete sequences as well as a number of establishing shots and other fragments based on artistic whim and as time and practical production concerns allowed. The IMAX prints cut more than a dozen times between the film's primary 2.40:1 ratio and the IMAX ratio of 1.33:1, though seamlessly enough that one colleague with whom I saw the film was never conscious of the shifting ratios. The IMAX version is stunning and comes highly recommended; it literally and figuratively makes the experience larger than life.] [ show less ]

Bowen J wrote:

Mesmerizing performance by Heath Ledger provides insight into a man's psych.

Stephen T wrote:

I jizzed in my pants after I saw this movie. This is a DC comic fans orgyfest for the eyes. Heath Ledger steals the show with his particularly dark, psychotic Joker role. Hell its the highest rated movie on rottontomatoes right now, overtaking the godfather. If you watch and do not like this movie, you can suck it.

William C wrote:

The Joker was the most interesting character I've seen in a long time.

Nghia L wrote:

People are like metal. No, not the music--the nonrenewable resource! You see, metals bend when pressure is applied to them. They are malleable, and they are variable in how much they can be shaped. While some metals crumple like foil, others can take numerous artillery shots before they're dented.

This means, depending on what is causing all of that bending, metals can range from being rather benign, or they can be twisted into something really pointy and fucking scary! How much bending can a person take before they're twisted into something only bad dreams are made of? As the Joker says, it could be constant, applied pressure, "like gravity. All it takes is a little...push!"

Anyway. Then that means, just like metal, anybody can be bent and corrupted by the bending hands of circumstance. For some, those hands are blamed on fate; for others, it's the epic mistake they made. Everybody's potentially a monster, but nobody wants to believe that. Yet deep in their hearts, they know it's true. Evil is everywhere, and it seems to spawn from within us as though it were human nature itself.   [ show more ]

Hell, even Batman said it himself: "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

How the hell do you find hope in such a bleak message? Well, for starters, you could kill yourself, but that's the easy way out (and it also spoils the fun of life, imo).

How about fighting the good fight? By believing there is hope. At least the belief that while black, dreadful things seem to emanate from out of our collected subconsciousness, there is always something good in there which manages to linger on for those that choose to persevere.

But perseverance comes at a price. You can't fight a crusade without spilling some blood on your sword. Nobody's perfect, but they can keep moving on...even in a world where a hero is seemingly nothing more than a myth.

Every few years, there comes a morality play which comes along and floors me, renewing my excitement in films once again while inspiring me to greater heights. To me, The Dark Knight, with its brilliantly-written story, is that kind of movie. This is the best movie I have seen in a long time. R.I.P. Heath Ledger. [ show less ]