Batman

Rating: 8/10 (23 February 2016)

Sometimes folks look for trouble. And sometimes trouble comes a calling all on its own.
For a while, it seemed as though life in Gotham City was looking up. Gotham's finest, led by straight-arrow Lt. Gordon, was squeezing the city's crime syndicates. Harvey Dent, a new and fearless district attorney, stalked the courtrooms. Batman prowled the city's darkest alleys. Mob bosses stopped meeting at night, afraid they'd be pinched.
Thenlike the flu, like a hailstorm, like a crowbar to the side of the head—comes the Joker. No baggage. No backstair. No greedy motive. Just a leering, cackling demon of chaos. He crashes a high-level mob meeting and offers his services as the city's very own bat exterminator. What does he want? Nothing. Everything. What does he ask for? Half the mob's money.
So begins perhaps the deepest, bleakest summer blockbuster ever, an explosion-riddled saga about order and anarchy, about good and evil, and about the line we draw between the two.
The Dark Knight is a complex film with a myriad of messages. But at its most basic, the question it poses is this: To what lengths do good people go in order to conquer the worst sort of evil? Must they become a little evil themselves along the way?
"You got rules!" a broken mob boss tells Batman. "The Joker—he's got no rules. It's a pesky truism our heroes struggle with from the get-go. None of them escape unsullied. "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain," says Dent. But it's when they refuse to compromise that the movie soars.
Dent starts as a bright knight—a blond, bold DA who aims to clean up Gotham's streets for good. Though there are ever-so-slight indications that he's not altogether wonderful (the boys at the station call him "Two Face"), he's sincere about his crime-fighting calling—a sincerity that wins over even billionaire-celebrant Bruce Wayne. "Gotham needs a hero with a face," Wayne says. One might say Dent and Batman are two sides of the same coin, Dent the unsullied face of incorruptibility and Batman the black-caped heavy. Dent even sacrifices his career and good name at one point to keep Batman out on the streets—a favor Batman returns.
Lt. Gordon, once Gotham's only honest police officer, has a wee bit of company nowadays, but he's still arguably the film's finest, prepared to sacrifice his own life for both his city and family.
Lucius Fox, head honcho at Wayne Enterprises, continues to play Q to Batman's Bond, keeping him supplied with a host of critical Cozmo's and gadgets. But while he's willing to cook the books to keep Batman's identity a secret, there are ethical places he won't go—at least not for very long. When the Dark Knight creates a gigantic sonar net by tapping into all of Gotham's cell phones (a hefty invasion of privacy), Fox tells him that either the machine goes or he does. "Spying on 30 million people isn't in my job description," he says—though he acquiesces to use it for one specialized mission.
The most heroic guy of the bunch (go figure) is Batman himself, willing to sacrifice everything that's precious to him for the sake of the city. He never, ever kills, and he rigidly keeps this special vow even when the Joker more than deserves death.
The citizens of Gotham also show a bit of gumption. When the Joker pits average Joes and Janes against convicted killers and thieves in a death match of sorts, they manage to resist their selfish urges and risk everything to do the right thing. Humanity and its higher conscience survives even as the world burns down around it—much to the Joker's dismay.