The Dark Knight

• Rajeev
• July 18, 2008
• movies
• reviews
• 3 comments
• ★★★★

Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is unlike most super-hero sequels. Not just more, it is calculated destruction and restructuring. Mr. Nolan's movie is the sequel to his lauded Batman Begins, a movie that found praise among both critics and geeks. Stepping far away from previous iterations of Batman, he fused the hero with reality. In this second installment, Batman is fused with the darkness and eventually engulfed by it. However, if the first movie was the creation of Batman then this movie is the creation of his dichotomy, the scales balance. Transformed from a man to a vigilante in the first, the vigilante now becomes the Batman, a character who is nothing without his villains.

The Dark Knight picks up one year after the first movie. Now Batman is a staple of the Gotham night sky and his goal to strike terror has indeed succeeded in large parts. Christian Bale's character is quickly joined by a surrounding cast of political and police luminaries with re-invigorated backbones to take on the underbelly of Gotham. Crime and its lords still stays however and a villain or two from the last movie are still around and causing trouble. Batman is now no longer alone in his quest and his ally from the previous film, James Gordon (Gary Oldman), is joined on the rooftop by the new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). On a personal level, Bruce still has his confidants, both Alfred (Michael Caine) and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman). The established family still remains, with one extra addition (Dent). However, things are not all the same in Gotham.

As the first scene establishes, there is a new force in Gotham. The opening scene's bank heist is reminiscent of Michael Mann's Heat. Here the Joker, our chief villain of the film, establishes himself as a nihilistic individual. The goal maybe the money, but there is considerably more under that mask (or paint if you will). A second scene manifests the character as a constant and impending threat, one that does not abate for the rest of the film. After inflicting visceral violence, the Joker slips into a perverse comic relief that induces a laugh that sticks in one's throat. Of course, much of the credit needs to be placed at the feet of Heath Ledger, who masterfully steals the show and easily upstages Jack Nicholson's previous iteration of the character. Mr. Ledger did have some help from the script (written by the Directory and his brother), which places much attention upon the Joker as an agent of pure chaos. Unlike the villains of the previous film, this is not a man striving for an ideal or money. As the Joker states, he gets his joy from his work. It is the simple pleasures, like the wind in his hair as he leans out a police car window, for him.

To counter the Joker is the light of Harvey Dent, Gotham's proclaimed "White Knight." Dent, an addition to Batman's confidants, is a highly volatile character played charmingly by Aaron Eckhart. There is both a naivete and an aggressiveness to him that is constantly on display by Mr. Eckhart. His foil seems to be Rachel Dawes, who has moved out from under Bruce's shadow. Bruce Wayne on the other hand seems to have grown considerably over the year, or regressed as it were. The fury that Bruce displayed in the previous movie is now entirely channeled through his alter-ego. Instead, Bruce Wayne is now purely a socialite shell. Bale plays both the shell and the Bat to perfection, using the growl in his voice and the slightly more flexible costume to emote as much as he can. Bale established Batman in the previous movie and he effortlessly slips back again into the titular role. His Batman stands out of the shadows at the start of the movie, but retreats back again as the film draws to a close. At first it seems like Nolan is more concerned with establishing the villains than moving Batman forward, but a deeper understanding brings the realization that the demons from within have moved outside his mind and outside his control. The supporting cast does a fine job, much like the first movie, and they play a crucial role in helping establish this movie as continuation.

The movie may have picked up chronologically a year after the first, but visually nothing has really changed. The director keeps the cinematography, the editing and much of the mechanics of the film similar. This sets a tone that allows the audience to easily slip into this Gotham City. The towers still shine and gleam and the streets are still lined with dirt, the gulf easily visible between the two worlds. The movie inherits a more operatic feel in its cinematography, maybe the only relation to Tim Burton's previous Batman endeavors. The color palette as well is largely unchanged even with the varied locales and both New York and Chicago are compacted into one sprawling metropolis. This continuation extends to the music as well, as the familiar score is added to and the uptempo music swells with the same notes when Batman rises resplendent. All of these are used as elements of continuation establishing both movies as back-to-back.

Thematically, the film makers heed canon more closely this time and take their cues from the crème de la crème of Batman auteurs. The Killing Joke by Alan Moore plays prominently here and much of the Joker's lines and motivations arise out of it. Nolan continues a vein of though from the previous film, that is Batman as implicit in the creation of his devils. Bruce Wayne after all is not Batman without his villains and this movie provides the yang to that ying. Of course, common themes like individual over the symbol and the duty of an individual above the cause mirrors itself from within society and without by Dent and Batman, respectively. Naturally, chaos is an obvious and predominant theme through the movie, though its nature of control is ambiguous at best. For his psychological planning there is a duplicity in the Joker's statements of creating unbridled chaos. In fact, controlled chaos is his game, of course controlled by him. In sharp contrast is Bruce, who struggles constantly with keeping in control, through plans, all the various elements around him after that one moment of chaos robbed him of his family. The theme is brought into fruition in a splendidly done interrogation scene that displays the nuances of this dance. Stylistically, the movie does not abandon its Blade Runner roots and it slips anywhere from Michael Mann action to a David Fincher thriller. Nolan utilizes all of these varying techniques to infuse his movie with the best possible combination.

The director, Mr. Nolan, is a man who knows when to stay the course and moreover when a shift is necessary. He realized before others that the essence of a good super-hero movie was the casting and in his new choices for The Dark Knight he did not disappoint. It is frustrating to think that this absolutely spectacular performance by Ledger will be his last and one salivates at the thought of how he could have taken the character even further. The movie is densely packed in its one hundred and fifty-two minute running time, though certain sequences, like a trip to Hong Kong, could have been easily cut. At times too does the movie feel like an extended climax and it is easy to come away exhausted from the showing. Mostly however, it is heartening to see a sequel, super-hero or otherwise, opt for daring avenues, and realize that it can aspire to so very much more.