5 gibbles out of 5

Director: Christopher Nolan

Though still featuring some of the rough edges of the series previous installment, The Dark Knight moves past the openness of the first film to create a much more committed, darker version of Batman, true to the modern comic conception of the hero and uniquely filmic at the same time.

Following some unspecified time after the events of film one, The Batman is kicking ass in the city and inspiring followers, local “Batmen” who dress up in baseball uniform padding and dark masks and use guns, a note certainly taken (as are other aspects of the film) from Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns”.  This isn’t the only thing escalating – there’s a new villain out and about, the Joker, played, unforgettably (for various reasons), by Heath Ledger.  The Joker seems to be a step up from the average criminal because his motives aren’t clear – it’s not money, or power.  Nolan has proven wonderfully smooth at weaving themes into the core of his films and Dark Knight is such a massive viewing because of how tightly tied the chosen themes are to every moment: the need for purpose; the need for identity.  That latter concept was what allowed Batman Begins to come across as a heroic origin story, but here the juxtaposition of the two makes the tale pretty tragic, pushing everything to the limit of what makes a hero a hero or a villain a villain.  It’s pretty heady stuff, and taken out of the moment the batsuit still seems like an odd choice for a man to dress up in and go prancing and glooming about, and the Joker’s tattered suit and smeared and crackled facepaint is so perfectly-garishly-applied to make one wonder how long this man takes to look like a mess, but whereas film one stood a little outside of the itself to make it open enough to be kid-friendly, Nolan just goes fully in for Dark Knight.  It’s cast in shadows and insanity.  Nothing is clean, the brown palette of “Begins” tossed aside for a cold blueish-black.  The brooding and facepaint seem like natural choices for facing the Gotham City portrayed, the city more fully coming to life than film one, matching Tim Burton’s original two movies in their sense of super-reality.

(Burton’s two films are uneven in their own ways, but Burton is obviously skilled at creating whole environments, and it was great to see this put to more serious use in his Batman films.)

While “Dark Knight”‘s script may play around with comic continuity, one thing it scored on was the general presentation of The Joker.  The clown has jumped around from criminal genius to insane mischief maker, but over the years, the thing that’s made him Batman’s #1 adversary is that he’s essentially Bruce Wayne’s opposite.  The Joker is not an alter-ego, he is who he is, bright colors and insanity, a lack of reason for every over-contemplated movement of The Bat.  Heath Ledger’s dedication to bringing this focused instability to the screen is appreciated from his first appearance, prancing into a room full of mob bosses, whipping them into a frenzy that will eventually bring them into line with his overall schemes.

What else?  The action is here in spades, but it’s all in service of something.  The previous and following film seemed to have a bit of spectacle for spectacle’s sake, but in Dark Knight all feels so deathly practical.  The wow moments are splashed around, but we’re just throttling forward and forward toward one goal – to understand and stop The Joker and the ripple effect his actions cause.  Once those pieces are in place, we understand the drive (on bike, in tumbler), to stop this man, whatever the cost.

Batman Begins and Iron Man and Sin City opened up an awesome trend of the big budget, serious comic action film.  Though Batman is certainly fiction, he’s still a man, and that’s the route Christopher Nolan’s films have really tried to drive home, making these acceptable concepts because we know who Batman is, but the end presentation is something brand new.  It’s not a film version of Batman, it’s its own entity, as any medium should be, and Dark Knight brings all of the character’s and Nolan’s themes to an amazing crescendo.