Dark, grim, and magnificent

Rating: 10/10 (27 July 2008)

Superhero movies have become about as ubiquitous now as disaster movies were about a decade ago. Similarly, there's been something of a followed formula with these said films. Spiderman was exciting. X-men brought us a certain human element. Then there will subsequent sequels, filled with CGI and piling on more and more faces. As the screen got more cluttered, we cared less and less about the characters.
Enter the "Dark Knight," the literate sequel to to "Batman Begins." This is unlike any superhero movie that has been put on the screen. The color and the humor of Batman's theatrical past have vanished,no one has any superpowers, and the conflicts presented to Batman reach far beyond a painted up madman.
Christopher Nolan's take on Batman injects a pulse in the comic book to film genre by reminding us how Batman is different from all those other superheroes. He is human. The script, penned with Nolan's brother, forces Bruce Wayne/Batman to deal with the moral complications of his character. For the first time on screen, we really feel how a "superhero's" actions may have dire consequences.
But the Dark Knight is a carefully paced story that doesn't provide simple answers. Heath Ledger's manic Joker, who sounds like Tom Waits when he's doing poetry or on stage banter, is the most vile of villains captured on screen. Rather than making him a simple evil doer, Nolan crafts the character as a foil for the very existence of Batman. Ledger's performance drives the character into unchartered territory.
But beyond the fight between the Joker and Batman are a well casted group of characters that Nolan chooses to not simply introduce and waste, as in other superhero films, but to makes us actually care about. Fans of Batman may have an idea about Harvey Dent's character, but this portrayal might be the best of both comic and film. The likable Aaron Eeckhart portrays him as a character we root for and he is constructed so well that his final act in the film never seems superfluous, as his character has been treated in other versions of Batman.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this film is that it inadvertently poses the question, 'What if Batman was Real?' It might look like the Dark Night, where the line between good and evil and right and wrong looks grayer and grayer. It's appropriately titled, as this is an extremely dark film with no clear cut answers. The words, images, and pictures play like poetry, as "The Dark Knight" raises the bar for superhero films.