The Dark Knight (2008)

It doesn’t get much better than this. 9.5/10

NOTE: I’ve avoided spoilers in the review that follows.  Those wishing for a more in-depth and spoiler-filled look at the film, though not necessarily a review, can go here.

So this movie came out this weekend, maybe you’ve heard of it. I was worried it might get lost in the rush to see Space Chimps, but it seems like the low-key advertising and cult fan base managed to pull it off at the last minute.

That’s all nonsense, of course; The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to his well-received 2005 reimagining, Batman Begins, opened on a modest 4,366 screens (all-time record), generating $18.5 million from its midnight showings alone (all-time record), $67.85 million on its opening day (all-time record), and, it is projected, $155.3 million over the opening weekend (all-time record). These aren’t even the only records it broke (Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood tracks the others), but they’re the most significant.

Now, based on the fact that apparently everyone in the developed world saw this film over the weekend, I was going to lift my “no severe spoilers” policy for the duration of this review. However, it is very much the case that the high turn-out for The Dark Knight saw days’ worth of showings sold out in advance, the result being that many still haven’t had a chance to see it. I’ll keep it tight-lipped for the moment, but I will say this: if you worried that the film’s numerous trailers and promotional materials essentially gave away the whole thing, you couldn’t be more wrong. It’s over two-and-a-half hours long, for one, and incredibly rich, for another, and you will be surprised by much. The trailers might even be described as a touch misleading on some points, actually, so you can look forward to such reversals as well.

So: The Dark Knight picks up right where Batman Begins left off (whatever the animated “prequel,” Gotham Knight, might insist), with the hideous new criminal known only as the Joker (Heath Ledger) just hitting the scene. The first six minutes of the film, in which the Joker robs a bank, could have been released on their own – and in fact were, with IMAX showings of I Am Legend earlier this summer – and been an artistic triumph in their own right. It’s great stuff, and more than enough to justify the comparisons to Michael Mann’s Heat that are being thrown around. From these auspicious beginnings things get rolling at once; Batman (Christian Bale) has taken his fight to the mob with promising (if uneven) results, inspiring copycat vigilantes wearing uniforms similar to his own, while Gotham’s new District Attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), has taken the advantages Batman has provided and run with them, putting real pressure on organized crime in the city for the first time in decades. The ganglords, infuriated by this two-front assault on their supremacy, reluctantly turn to the Joker, a man they hate and fear, to fulfill a lofty promise of killing Batman and throwing the city back into the sort of chaos they can exploit.

Unfortunately for all involved, a dead Batman is the last thing the Joker wants. While he is right in insisting that Batman is the new and unstoppable factor in the city’s turn against the mob, Batman is too important to the Joker for him to kill. “You complete me,” he declares to the caped crusader during an intense interrogation; he is the order that makes the Joker’s particular brand of mayhem possible and, well, fun.

And so it all goes to hell. Although the Joker insists that his whole purpose in life is to disrupt the plans and schemes of others, showing their ultimate futility in the face of the higher chaos, his own plans and schemes are intricate beyond reckoning. He turns the city against Batman. He orchestrates the dramatic and shocking downfall of Harvey Dent (in a manner quite different from established canon, though possibly somewhat better for it). He ruins the lives of many, assassinates Gotham’s police commissioner (paving the way for the promotion of long-suffering James Gordon [Gary Oldman]), destroys a hospital, thwarts the mob, attempts to kill the mayor, and drives the whole city into a state of scrabbling, self-consuming panic. “All this,” he gloats, “with a handful of bullets and some barrels of gasoline.” Ra’s al-Ghul, with his elaborate plots involving ancient shadow organizations and microwave guns, should hang his head in shame.

It’s a long film, as I said before, and there’s lots more plot that could be discussed, but these are the basics and I wouldn’t want to spoil it too far. Just know that yes, there are a great many excellent car chases and fights and explosions and acts of both dire infamy and unspeakable courage – but those aren’t the things you’re going to be talking about once the credits start to roll.

You’ll instead be talking about the acting, probably, and any sane viewer would start with Heath Ledger. It’s incredible to me (and in any other review I’d probably complain) that, in considering the quality of performances to be found in a movie featuring the likes of Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman (as Bruce Wayne’s long-time gadget man, Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (loyal Wayne butler Alfred), I’m forced to push all three to the back burner in favour of an actor who wasn’t even alive when at least one of those three was in his prime. He’s not alive now either, of course; Ledger passed away quite unexpectedly in January of an accidental overdose of prescription medication. I firmly believe that his work for his role as the Joker contributed to his death (and certainly to his need for sleeping pills), and for that I am very sad indeed. But the show must go on, as they say, and this is the performance he chose to give.

And what a performance. There aren’t really words to describe it, actually; at no point does the viewer feel moved to observe, “my, but Mr. Ledger’s acting very well.” He’s too invisible for that. The character barely looks like him, for one, and so completely has he surrendered himself to the role that he more or less vanishes into it. He moves like a skeptical serpent, coiling around people as he threatens them, jerking his head and licking his lips far too often. His voice is a cross between Jimmy Cagney and Marlon Brando, with occasional shades of something not easily placed. Every line is delivered with a sort of unsettling calm, even when the stakes are high, but the one time the Joker loses his temper (you’ll know it when you hear it), the voice can only be described as that which Hell itself would use if it were given a throat and tongue. This was a legendary performance. If he’s not recognized with at least a nomination for “best supporting actor” at the upcoming Academy Awards, there is no justice at all in the halls of Hollywood.

Everyone else is great, too. Christian Bale’s Batman is appropriately terrifying (although his fake, growling baritone is sometimes not well-suited to the lines he has to deliver), but his Bruce Wayne is even better. Bruce has finally been able to master the rogueish playboy routine that is his first line of defence against discovery, and so what was at times awkward in Batman Begins is here delivered to unstinting and often hilarious effect. A newspaper’s smug declaration of “Drunken Billionaire Burns Down Mansion” in the previous film was great enough, but it’s outdone in this one by a headline involving ballet.

Aaron Eckhart gives what might be the best turn of his career as Harvey Dent/Two-Face, which is greatly pleasing to me because I’ve never really cared much for his work (having been poisoned against him by the miserable Suspect Zero, which also soured me on Ben Kingsley). Bruce Wayne’s old flame Rachel Dawes is this time around played by Maggie Gyllenhaal (replacing Katie Holmes), and she is used to far greater effect in this film than in the last. The hopeless love triangle that develops between her, Harvey and Bruce will have disastrous consequences for many, and Gyllenhaal carries her responsibilities well.

The production values are excellent all across the board. By grounding his vision of the Batman story in what could loosely be described as “the real world,” there is less need for recourse to extensive computer-generated imagery, although of course it is still used at numerous points. The point is that the action doesn’t rely on it, as would be the case in something like Spider-Man or Superman, and it’s used rather to accentuate things that are already there. A good deal of the film was also shot using special IMAX cameras, giving a great deal of depth and magnitude to certain scenes (you’ll notice it in some of the cityscape shots; particularly during a brief and breathtaking trip to Hong Kong). On a regular screen it’s amazing enough, but on a real IMAX screen it would be nothing short of appalling.

The only real complaint I can offer is the same as it was for Batman Begins: Christopher Nolan does not seem to be able to shoot fights worth a damn. The angles and focus are certainly improved in comparison to the last film, but there are still too many cuts and bad perspectives to really see everything that’s said to be going on. It’s by no means incomprehensible, but it could have been a bit better.

Before I wrap this up, there’s an important feature of the Joker’s character that needs to be discussed. In his review at InsideCatholic, Joseph Susanka declares himself highly impressed with the steady-handed way in which the Joker’s irrational evil is presented. I might take it even further. Films of this sort typically have villains in them, it’s true. Sometimes they’re even monstrously evil villains. But no superhero film I’ve ever seen before (and precious few films in general) have actually had Evil itself as a character. There have been evil characters before, naturally, but mere criminals – even arch-criminals – are still motivated by a desire for the good in one way or the other. They want prosperity, or security, or what they believe to be a sort of justice, but their brush with evil makes them pursue these things through illicit means like deception, theft or murder. They are certainly sinners, but they are not Sin.

For the Joker is not an evil man; he is Evil itself, illogical, unmotivated, unpredictable, and (seemingly) unstoppable. He cares nothing for his own safety or enrichment. All he wants, if he can be said to want anything, is to seek out goodness and order, no matter where they are, and destroy them completely. The spine-chilling soliloquies he delivers are quite masterfully wrought, in this regard. The whole interrogation scene around the middle of the film is great, but his entirely accurate taunt as Batman is beating him senseless has a sort of staggering depth to it: “You’ve got nothing – nothing – you can threaten me with. Nothing you can do with all of your strength!” This is what Despair and Futility say when they meet Hope and Purpose.

The Dark Knight captures all of this perfectly; whereas Batman Begins was about a man “becoming a concept” in the creation of the symbol that is Batman, in this case we have something more terrible still: a concept becoming a man. The Joker’s lack of origins (and his lies about same) make this quite compelling, and his constant, serpent-like contortions and rhetorical eloquence lend him a menace that hearkens back to a Being that our general parents once had the misfortune to meet face to face, however briefly. His clothes show no sign of having been made in a conventional way (“clothes are custom,” Lt. Gordon muses; “no tags, no labels”), for such would require far more organization and planning and general order than he would allow. The film’s marvelous score (by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) has no “Joker’s Theme” that plays when he’s around; it is instead just an awful, stomach-churning chord, drawn out uncomfortably long. Any actually melodic music would need too much co-operation and artistic sympathy, and the Joker can brook neither.

The Joker is the Abyss given a body and a tongue, and he is no longer content merely to stare back.

This isn’t all, of course; the whole film is something of a moral rollercoaster, and in the end I doubt if we’re given any easy answers. If I suspected for a moment that we are meant to feel that there simply are no answers I would be highly disappointed with Christopher Nolan and all involved, but, as it happens, I do not. It is rather an invitation to reflection and thought; an appeal to the intellect as well as to the moral senses. The most powerful manifestation of this is a “social experiment” perpetrated by the Joker on two crowded ferries trying to flee the city, the results of which are both unexpected and heartening. There’s a turn during that crisis involving a particularly menacing criminal on one of the ferries that manages to ratchet up the tension unbearably even while standing up to and more or less exposing the audience’s hypocrisies and assumptions. This is masterful craft.

There is so very much in The Dark Knight to make it unsuitable for family viewing, including gruesome and often realistic violence, the nightmare-inducing Joker, philosophical propositions that could lead to despair (though they are refuted), and all sorts of peril, tragedy and heartbreak. I didn’t count how many people die over the course of the film’s 152 minutes, but the number is quite high indeed. Oh, and Two-Face’s disfigurement is simply hideous. Nothing like Tommy Lee Jones in Batman Forever. Not even close. That said, for the adult viewer and his or her more robust children, this is as close to cinematic perfection as we’re likely to get this year without including clips from Hello Dolly!. Buy your ticket with confidence.

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Now, I had made several predictions about The Dark Knight‘s performance in a previous post, and I have not forgotten about them. I can’t say what the awards nominations will be like, nor what the film’s second weekend has in store at the box office, but for the moment the other two predictions are respectively “close” and “on track to be correct”: The Dark Knight‘s $155.3 million falls short of the $165 million I had predicted, but it is indeed sitting at 94% on the nose at Rotten Tomatoes. More than this, though (and something I had quite forgotten about), it has leapt to the very top of the Internet Movie Database’s Top 250, averaging a score among regular voters (first-timers and low-yielders are not counted) of 9.5 out of 10; with all voters counted, the score is actually 9.7/10. The next highest on the Top 250 list – The Godfather – only has 9.1, by comparison. Look out, world!

And two final notes for those who are interested:

- You should also read Steven D. Greydanus’ excellent review over at DecentFilms.

- I’ve given The Dark Knight the same score – 9.5/10 – as I gave to Wall-E. Which do I think is better? While accepting without contest that the films are dramatically different, and possibly not even fit to be compared, I’m still going to give the nod to Wall-E, which carries a message that is true and uplifting rather than complex and sobering, and does so in a manner that is accessible and appropriate for anyone at all. It will be a long time before I see a film as good as The Dark Knight again, make no mistake, but for the moment… the robot takes it.