2005 was when a mediocre franchise became one of Hollywood’s most exciting and a good director became a great one. And now, with the Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan has turned in a masterpiece: if the man never made another film outside the Batman franchise he would still go down in film history as one of its treasures.
Batman Begins
If Batman Begins was the first film to take the Batman myth seriously, the Dark Knight is the first to really get inside the ethos of Batman. With the Dark Knight, Batman no longer belongs to the universe of the comic book film. It instead jumps fearlessly into the realms of a powerful psychological drama; a film of remarkable depth and intelligence. There won’t be a better entertainment this year. There may not be a better film at all this year.
The Plot
The plot unfolds so smoothly, so logically, and so ingeniously, with each new turn revealing a startling revelation, that half the fun is in simply getting lost within the complex web it weaves. The film may run for two and a half hours, but every moment is constructed with so much excitement that it sails by effortlessly.
With a lack of crime in Gotham City due to the emergence of the vigilant superhero Batman, the mob is having a hard time trying to keep their affairs in order. With police chief Gordon hot on their case and the new DA Harvey Dent being hailed as Gotham’s new White Knight for his dedication to cleaning up the streets once and for all, the criminals must do the only thing they can to save themselves: kill Batman.
The Joker
In order to do this, they enlist the help of Gotham’s most malicious criminal, The Joker, who is the only man smart enough, and evil enough, to match the seemingly impenetrable Batman. The Joker, It is certain, will go down in history as one of the greatest screen villains, not because he is made of evil, but because he is intelligent and stands for something..
The Joker cares about no one and fears nothing: not pain, death, or imprisonment, because he embodies a purpose greater than himself. He doesn’t even fancy himself a villain, but rather an anomaly within the system. If he throws chaos into social order, it disrupts the entire balance of society. The Joker is so sinister because of how human his concept of the way society functions actually is. He is labeled evil because he fancies there to be no clear distinctions between good and bad. He’s a Freudian case study in the uncanny waiting to happen.
The Performance
Now here is Heath Ledger’s Joker. That’s a weird sentence because you won’t see Ledger giving a performance in the Dark Knight, because he never steps on screen. Ledger disappears so deeply inside the character that he ceases to exist.
The Rest of the Cast
Their curtain call reads like a list of the very best actors around. Christian Bale brings layers of brooding and conscience to Batman that has never been seen before. Michael Caine as Alfred brings comedy and good-spirits, while Morgan Freeman as Batman’s weapons designer Lucius Fox is cool and collected.
Then there’s Gary Oldman as Gordon who is one of the few decent cops on the force and believes in Batman when the residents of Gotham can’t decide if he’s a hero or a vigilant. Rachel Dawes is taken over by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Harvey Dent, the film’s emotional center, is played by Aaron Eckhart who manages to show the slow descent from being a public hero into a lowly criminal as he transforms into Two-Face.
The Rest
It’s so easy for big budget Hollywood films to become consumed by their spectacles. But the Dark Knight succeeds where few films ever can. Nolan directs the film, not as a comic book movie, but as a straight psychological drama, as if his characters are individuals who inhabit a world that could very well exist.
The Dark Knight occupies a fictional universe, but Nolan populates it with characters who act, think, feel, and reason, not a lot differently than us, allowing the audience to relate to it, first on the human level, and then the spectacular one.
Nolan also never takes the audience for granted. This is a big, complex, tricky, highly symbolic film, and Nolan never reduces himself to being consumed with mindless action. Instead his focus lies on a more complex emotional level. He asks hard questions about the nature of these characters and the society they inhabit, and never shortchanges himself on the avenues to exploring the answers.
At the heart of the film lies a fascinating meditation on the nature of good and evil, what its parameters are and whether or not that can so easily be categorized into black and white definitions. How much difference is there, after all, between men like Batman, Dent and the Joker? How daring of Nolan to take one of the biggest summer franchises and inject it with such emotion and intelligence, such deep and penetrating questions about the nature of humanity, such insightful observations on the nature of law and order within society.
Overview
The Dark Knight runs the entire gamete of cinematic possibilities. It is exhilarating, exciting, funny, disturbing, intelligent, and emotional. It’s a comic book movie, an action flick, a character study, a psychological meditation, a social commentary, an allegory. It’s a film, an event, an experience, an encapsulation of everything that makes the movies so magical in the first place. There is no simple syntax to describe its greatness. How about we just call it a day and settle for masterpiece? Yeah, it’s that good.
