Release Date: July 18, 2008
Starring: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
People want to see it!"
That was Stan Lee's ebullient response when I had the chance to ask him, at a comic book convention in 2007, about the modern rush of superhero victories at the box office. It's a sentiment uniformly applicable to Spider-Man and Ghost Rider alike, but Batman creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger would surely disagree. The late Kane described the original vision for Gotham City's hooded guarded as "dark," "brooding," and "Dracula-like," not the terms generally applicable to jubilant spectacles like Superman. With Batman Begins and now The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's tightly assembled Batman dramas apply that initial outlook to correct the wrongs of Joel Schumacher's dopey bat-nipple revelries from the late '90s.
To that end, Nolan's productions work in much the same way that Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns created a metropolitan horror show, although The Dark Knight puts more concerted effort into grounding the character in reality. Nolan's strong suits are maniacal schemers and moody character-driven intrigue, both of which make The Dark Knight a sleek (if, at close to three hours, somewhat distended) detective story. The action, however, mostly fails to attain the same caliber of engagement. One more flipped car or exploding building, and Nolan could cut together another sequel. Fortunately, there's IMAX, the ideal format for The Dark Knight — some scenes were filmed with the medium in mind.
The gargantuan IMAX screen might appear to contradict Batman's intentionally murky presence, but at times it heightens the subtleties of the menacing atmosphere. Basic aerial shots swooping through the skyscrapers create the invigorating sensation of falling through urban landscapes. That visceral appeal fits the setting: The city itself is an uncontainable monster, where gangsters dictate the law and only Batman dares to rebuff their pervasive corruption.
Starring: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
People want to see it!"
That was Stan Lee's ebullient response when I had the chance to ask him, at a comic book convention in 2007, about the modern rush of superhero victories at the box office. It's a sentiment uniformly applicable to Spider-Man and Ghost Rider alike, but Batman creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger would surely disagree. The late Kane described the original vision for Gotham City's hooded guarded as "dark," "brooding," and "Dracula-like," not the terms generally applicable to jubilant spectacles like Superman. With Batman Begins and now The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's tightly assembled Batman dramas apply that initial outlook to correct the wrongs of Joel Schumacher's dopey bat-nipple revelries from the late '90s.
To that end, Nolan's productions work in much the same way that Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns created a metropolitan horror show, although The Dark Knight puts more concerted effort into grounding the character in reality. Nolan's strong suits are maniacal schemers and moody character-driven intrigue, both of which make The Dark Knight a sleek (if, at close to three hours, somewhat distended) detective story. The action, however, mostly fails to attain the same caliber of engagement. One more flipped car or exploding building, and Nolan could cut together another sequel. Fortunately, there's IMAX, the ideal format for The Dark Knight — some scenes were filmed with the medium in mind.
The gargantuan IMAX screen might appear to contradict Batman's intentionally murky presence, but at times it heightens the subtleties of the menacing atmosphere. Basic aerial shots swooping through the skyscrapers create the invigorating sensation of falling through urban landscapes. That visceral appeal fits the setting: The city itself is an uncontainable monster, where gangsters dictate the law and only Batman dares to rebuff their pervasive corruption.
In Batman Begins, he found his only accomplice in the company of timid Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman). The community grows in The Dark Knight, with the arrival of Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Gotham's newly minted district attorney and one of the first truly sincere guys Batman has met; the town gets an emboldened (but short-lived) Holy Trinity of protectors. As Batman alter-ego Bruce Wayne, Christian Bale delivers passionate monologues about fixing the broken judicial system, and the script (co-written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan) lets Wayne see promise in Dent's upright activism — enough to believe that Batman might have a shot at early retirement. Fancy chance at that, of course, but Eckhart's golden boy performance makes you believe in his ill-fated ambition, even though the character's predetermined fate of morphing into the conniving Two-Face means tragedy lurks in the shadows along with the rest of the plot. (Two-Face is a delectably gross miracle of make-up and CGI, but how does he talk so clearly with half his head burnt off?)
These actors bring more realism to The Dark Knight than any other element, especially the most obvious one. Much has been made about the late Heath Ledger's frightening turn as the mysterious Joker, and it is truly impressive to watch this scar-faced psychopath with the knife-chiseled grin face down conventional criminals and hardened cops alike with cackling glee. But Bale and Eckhart centralize the movie's thematic concerns, causing the Joker's outrageousness to stand out. The rest of the cast just hit their marks: Michael Caine, as devout butler Alfred, inspires Wayne with incessant nuggets of wisdom; weapons designer Fox (Morgan Freeman) helps the hero with a handy bit of high-falutin wiretapping technology; Maggie Gyllenhaal (replacing the apparently detained Katie Holmes) portrays Wayne's former flame Rachel by grinning and grimacing on cue. She's the sole female presence in a movie that doesn't know what to do with her until it puts her in distress.
Nolan has crafted a conventional caper, but an elusive one. Whispery understatement allows The Dark Knight to seem like the landmark achievement it never becomes. This explains Warner Bros.' ingenious viral marketing scheme and the subsequent viewer frenzy. Spider-Man was huge, too, but still simply showcased a geeky guy in latex. By contrast, The Dark Knight is big, but it also feels important. An overextended climax prevents me from validating that feeling, but there's no denying the bold intellectualism of the script. "I don't get political points for being an idealist," complains Gordon, whose jaded conclusion isn't all that different from a know-nothing bad guy witnessing the Joker's queer antics and sighing, "Criminals in this town used to believe in things."
Ledger does indeed deserve posthumous kudos, but the decision to make Dent's transformation into Two-Face part of the Joker's grand scheme denigrates the terrifying potential of Eckhart's disfigured malefactor. In Jeph Loeb's The Long Halloween series from the Batman comic books (an aesthetic inspiration for the film), Two-Face leads the evil "freaks" of the city, including the Joker, to take down the regular mob sorts. Here, he's just a pathetic evildoer driven by revenge in the final act. The Joker, on the hand, behaves with precisely the calculated anarchy of the comics. He emerged there as the only dynamic villain to truly enjoy grappling with Batman while conveying an eerie understanding of him.
Peter Travers' overly ecstatic review of the movie in Rolling Stone quotes the fake-serious "You complete me" line the Joker drops as demonstrative of the pair's unlikely kinship, but that's just a throwaway gag. It's the Joker's apparent disdain for the establishment that the madman sees echoed in Batman's harsh brand of vigilance. "Don't talk like one of them; you're not!" he yelps when the caped do-gooder decries the Joker's misconduct. He sees cops as "schemers trying to control their little world," and holds fast to the conviction that no rules are the only rules worth following.
The Joker's ultimate evil comes from his ability to make others function on his level of insanity. The climax of the film nearly gets that right, but it halts with a weirdly cheery climax, a spirited "kumbaya" moment that implies the Joker could be foiled by objective morality. No way. In The Killing Joke, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's concise 1988 comic that has been reported as the inspiration for Ledger's wild-eyed interpretation of the character, the Joker essentially demonstrates how he remains innately undefeated even in captivity. In the final frames, he forces us to see an aspect of Batman that no fancy camera tricks could possibly convey, and Nolan lacks the audacity to probe: The Joker tells a joke, and Batman can't stop laughing.
— Eric Kohn
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