The Dark Knight

I’m a huge basketball fan. And I spent much of late April to early June glued to the television watching the NBA playoffs (not even a movie could pull me away). Unfortunately, marketers found basketball fans as the perfect demographic to start an extreme campaign–meaning having to sit through seemingly constant Dark Knight previews for a movie in May that won’t come out till mid-July. On top of that, Christopher Nolan’s predecessor Batman Begins, I found, was nothing more than a shallow attempt to rebuild a franchise ruined by Batman and Robin. So I went into the must-see film of the summer with lots of reservation, and fully prepared to put a needle to the balloon of rave reviews it had already received.

Fortunately for everyone, there is no way that I can do that. What Nolan has done with The Dark Knight goes beyond comic book films or summer blockbusters. He has created a wonderfully orchestrated character study which probes that natural battle of good and evil, and the misconstrued ideas of justice we have in today’s world. He uses the notorious Gothom City as his canvas to execute his summation of what it truly means to be a hero, and what mankind will do when they come face-to-face with pure evil.

It wasn’t until I watched the film that I realized the significance of the film’s title “The Dark Knight”. What’s a Batman movie without the name “Batman” on the marquee? But than I saw what Nolan was trying to pull off, a film about a multitude of characters, none of which rule the film for themselves, not even the Dark Knight, himself. Let’s start with Bruce Wayne. Played again by Christian Bale, Wayne has never been more self-indulgent or flaunting. He plays him like a mix of Donald Trump and Hank Steinbrenner. All a facade to throw people off of his other identity as the caped crusader.

Then we have Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), somewhat of a crusader himself. He is Gotham City’s District Attorney, and he has struck out on crime with a vengeance. He has single-handedly put hundreds of crooks in jail, but has made twice as many enemies. Dent is on Bruce Wayne’s mind, because Dent’s arm candy is fellow crime fighter Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal–replacing Katie Holmes), Wayne’s former squeeze. Then we also have Lt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman in a wonderfully subdued performance), whom has been helped by Dent quite a bit, but helped even more by Batman.

This group of stock characters are wonderful, but it’s the one guy who brings them together that makes the film go. In a flash, the crime scene is taken over by the demonic Joker (Heath Ledger), who goes to mob leaders themselves to convince them that the way to defeat Harvey Dent and the police is to take care of “the Batman”. We find out relatively quickly that the Joker’s plan to adopt the gangs is just one of many rouses to put Gothom City in complete chaos.

All of the performances are great, but Ledger is a revelation. In his last full performance before his tragic death in January, Ledger shows why he was such a coveted performer: an utter fearlessness to get the character right. It’s hard not to let Ledger’s death effect the already grim portrayal he has in the film. The smeared cake make-up along with the smile-making scars on his cheeks (he has many stories of how they got there) are all peripheral–though still frightening. It’s the volume of which this new Joker pulls off his masterpieces of destruction that makes him so compelling. He is not influenced by money or greed, but an unquenchable thirst for violence and anarchy.

This is much more a Batman film than Batman Begins, despite the fact that so little of the film has to do with Batman himself. The few scenes we spend with Bruce Wayne are usually sucked up by the charisma of his butler Alfred (classic Michael Caine), and the wit of his very own gadget-maker Lucious Fox (Morgan Freeman). If anything, the film attempts to do what Tim Burton was trying to do with the franchise before he was booted off to make room for Jerry Bruckheimer’s money-making machine: it attempts to take the already dark character and story of Batman and make it even darker.

This film does not spout off cynicism as much as it declares doom. The Joker is more evil than any mobster or gang, he puts people in situations where they have to make the violent choices, like a somewhat more plausible and animated version of the character Jigsaw in the Saw series. It’s this kind of unstoppable evil that Batman must fight against–particularly when Dent becomes a victim to the fate that he put so much stock in. The film doesn’t end the way most in the superhero genre are. Nothing is definitively brought down. Instead, we are introduced to the fact that evil can only be warded off, not destroyed.

At two-and-a-half hours, the film takes on epic status. Using Chicago exteriors, the film’s grandeur cannot be overstated. I’m still not sure if I’m sold on the film’s resolution, and moments in the beginning of the movie taste of Hollywood intervention, but as the film continues to build, we are given a story of true pathos, and with the excellent work of Oldman, Eckhart, Bale, and of coarse Ledger, The Dark Knight may be the best film of this decade’s comic book movie craze. If only because it rises above it, and is simply a great film.

 

Directed by Christopher Nolan