More than just a superhero film.

Rating: 8/10 (19 July 2008)

Gotham is in turmoil. In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne created Batman as a symbol for justice and to put fear into the hearts of criminals. By the end of the film he had succeeded, but in The Dark Knight we see that his vision has turned Gotham into an even more chaotic world filled with more crime than ever and littered with pseudo-vigilantes dressing up as Batman and unsuccessfully attempting to fight crime. The story begins briefly after its predecessor ended, opening with a bank robbery constructed by the Joker and his thugs. We are immediately introduced to how this madman works, killing off his thugs as the robbery gets closer to completion. But he's not robbing the back for the money; he's sending a message to the mob that he can take as much as their money as he wants and they can't do anything to stop him. At first Batman tries to ignore the Joker and continue his attack on the mob, but he'll soon realize that nothing is more terrifying than this completely unhinged maniac, motivated only by the desire to spread destruction.
The key theme running throughout The Dark Knight is the idea of justice in a corrupt society. Wayne (Christian Bale) created Batman as a symbol of that justice, but he didn't plan on being Batman forever and he's looking for someone to replace his position as this symbol. Enter Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), the new District Attorney and Gotham's White Knight. The city sees him as a beacon of hope, and unlike Batman, this symbol is an elected official with a face everyone can look up to. He doesn't use theatrics to put fear into criminals, but he demonstrates that not everyone is corrupt and he's going to do whatever it takes to bring down those who are. Bruce sees him as the right man to bring decency to Gotham and allow him to quit being Batman and be with Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), his love who is currently dating Dent. So Batman and Dent team up, along with the morally upright Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) to put an end to corruption in Gotham and for a while it looks like they're going to succeed.
The Joker (Heath Ledger), however, refuses to let decency win out. He stands as an agent of absolute chaos and he wants to show the world that deep down, when you strip away all hope for justice, everyone is capable of destruction. To prove his point he spends the film testing these three men who show that they aren't going to back down easily. And so the battle for Gotham's should begins. The Joker constantly throws pain and aggression into the faces of this city and forces everyone to show that they are capable of unimaginable cruelty, just like he is. Batman and Gordon stand strong against this menacing psychopath no matter what the Joker throws at them, but he eventually finds the trigger in Harvey Dent that brings him down from his status as the White Knight into a frightening but incredibly sympathetic monster.
In creating Two-Face, Christopher Nolan does what I think is one of the smartest moves in the history of this genre. He doesn't just throw a villain at us and expect us to be afraid of them or to sympathize with them and he doesn't have fifteen minutes introducing the character and then show us a freak accident that turns them into the villain for the rest of the film. We meet this character as Harvey Dent, a symbol for decency and get invested in him as such. I personally almost forgot what his horrible fate was destined to be throughout a large portion of the film, through the shear fact that he was displayed as such a large icon for morality. Seeing him as this makes his complete decay into madness even more devastating to the point where it brought me to tears. Aaron Eckhart's performance is absolutely phenomenal. Yes, all of the talk is about Heath Ledger, yes he was a force to be reckoned with, and yes he gave easily the best performance in the film to say the least. But Eckhart is almost as magnificent. He is terrifying after his transformation into Two-Face, but we can still see the man we came to know him as throughout the film. There is one scene in particular, before he becomes Two-Face, where we can start to see the primal aggression that is going to take control of him boiling up inside and it terrified me and broke my heart all at once.
Of course with any talk about The Dark Knight, there must be a detailed discussion about Heath Ledger's performance. To say that he immersed himself into the role would be an insult to the genius that is portrayed here. His unfortunate passing isn't even a factor when saying that this performance is so far beyond flawless that it almost surpasses any expectation I could have had. His work in the interrogation scene is so real and terrifying that it would have been impossible to watch if he didn't suck the viewer in so perfectly. I mean, the Joker is nothing but pure chaos and Ledger flawlessly creates that. This masochistic, destructive force goes from being charismatically hilarious one second to immensely terrifying the next. It gets to the point where you have no idea what he's going to do next, but you know that it's going to be brilliant. That interrogation scene alone is enough to convince me that it's one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. Words can't even come close to doing justice to this man's genius.