Dark Knight

Rating: 10/10 (4 November 2015)

I believe that the theme of the movie is that chaos eventually overcomes order and structure. Throughout the whole movie, whenever order was attempted to be implemented into the society, the attempt failed drastically. Batman had to execute justice with a little bit of an unusual heroic approach to be successful. Even when characters themselves begin the movie as a personification of order, over time, enough events happen to corrupt the character to become a representation of chaos. Lastly, even the thought and ideology of justice had to be chaotic. The attempts of regular justice also failed, so they had to adapt to chaotic justice to truly achieve success.
Let's start with The Dark Knight itself as a title. The title in itself embodies the meaning of the movie: darkness will overcome everyone. The name of the movie is a play on words, convey that everyone's chaotic personalities is brought out at night and the dark side of the character will come out. Now let us discuss the Dark Knight as the character, Batman. He is a good representation of justice for the movie. His main objective and his perceived purpose in life currently is to protect the city of Gotham. The interesting thing is he does his job in his own way and is not concerned with how other people view his acts. With some of his attempts of justice isn't exactly beloved by the community, they in a sense villainize him. With that being said, Bruce Waynes begins to accept this dark perception of him. Even his tone of voice was ominous and extremely dark. The way he even stands in scenes when he's interacting with Harvey, the Joker and other characters is in a very aggressive stance. He stands up very tall and looks down on his counterpart usually with his fists clinched, ready to attack. Even though he is a hero. Yes, the hero of the movie can be viewed as the aggressor as well. This just goes to show you how the darkness is overcoming him. The embodiment of justice is very aggressive and has a very dark side of him. Most of that could stem from his parents being murdered in front of his juvenile eyes, causing him to always possess the darkness deep down inside of him. However, the vindictive and aggressive hero is capable of using all of the darkness he carries with him to still be the hero at the end of the day. Nonetheless, this is a representation of how the status of justice is starting to deteriorate in Gotham.
Justice is the number one objective of Harvey Dent as the mayor of the city. At the beginning of the movie, Dent is the personification of hope and goodness. He is the sole hope for the city of Gotham he his belief is that purity and order will overcome all of the chaos and destruction that is within the city. However, there was an event where his face was partially blown off after Batman tried to save him, and that is the moment where nothing was the same. His love died because Batman chose to save him instead of the love of his life, Rachel Dawes. After that moment, his lived the alter ego of Two-Face. This is where the chaos takes over. Once he felt as though there was no more good left in the world, he began to live a life of evil as well. He would going around killing people and decided their fate by flipping a coin in the air. The flip of the coin symbolized how something as essential as hope can waver so quickly. The people hope the coin lands on the right side and if it doesn't, their hope obviously doesn't end in a positive result. He even attempted to kill Batman. This symbolism of this is that the purity was so overcome by darkness that it tried to eliminate justice when it felt all hope was lost. This conveys how the fine line between order and chaos can cause an undefined mindset to be persuaded either way with a little influence of darkness.
The Joker is my favorite character in the movie. The opening scene is iconic and truly characterizes how he is going to be throughout the movie. He is very quick with his thought processes, however, his actions are very spontaneous. In the opening scene, he is seen constantly movie and randomly murders one of the members in his gang. Why? Because he can. The Joker is the personification of anarchy. The only objective that the Joker has is to cause as much chaos and destruction as he can. He also murdered another man by simply bashing his head into a pencil propped vertically on a table. This action symbolized the demise of the city with something as miniscule as a pencil, which is a utensil designed to create order. The way he does what he does is extremely spontaneous, in the moment and without a clear objective. But that is exactly what anarchy is. Anarchy means the lack of structure and order. The Joker serves as a catalyst for the movie by causing the transformation of people to going to the dark side (Star Wars is coming to theaters soon). His lack of order disrupts all attempts at structure and forces people to adapt to a new way of trying to achieve and accomplish justice, but that is just his purpose. His is designed to show that chaos over time will always prevail over order.