The Dark Knight Delivers!

Rating: 10/10 (23 July 2008)

With the immense hype surrounding the film primarily due to the pre-mature death of Heath Ledger (playing Joker), the (critical) success of Batman: The Beginning and also the extravagant amount of money spent on effective marketing, the movie The Dark Knight had become one of the most anticipated movies ever to hit the big screen. The last movie to garner such hoopla before its release was SpiderMan -3 and that movie proved to be a disappointment. With higher expectations, I went to watch the Dark Knight and was still totally bowled over by the sheer magnificence of this Chris Nolan Flick.
First Day First Show, the Midnight show it was. Due to a technical glitch in the AMC theatres that we went to, the movie did not commence until about 15 minutes past the scheduled start. And when it finally did, there was a huge roar from an obvious houseful crowd that showed up.
This is not your typical superhero movie loaded with a great deal of sci-fi action scenes packaged with an abnormal amount of cheesy comedic moments but rather an intense crime thriller that keeps you seat bound for its entire length of over two and a half hours. The film starts a fast pace with the Joker's character introduced in the first couple of scenes itself and maintains that tempo throughout the movie. The basic story line is very simple as it goes like this  An initially successful effort by District Attorney Harvey Dent, Lieutenant Gordon and Batman to fight crime in Gotham city is thwarted by mastermind psychotic criminal The Joker, as he goes on spreading chaos in utter rampancy. Now it is up to the BatMan, who is himself accused by the mass and the media of being a crooked vigilante, to rescue Gotham city from The Joker's menace.
The movie is Super-made in most aspects. Most of the primary characters are very well developed, specially the characters of Batman, the Joker and Harvey Dent. Forget Bruce Wayne, even Batman is seen to be not perfect and his inconsistent set of emotions are aptly visualized by the film-maker. I have not seen the old ones but Christian Bale certainly performs his role as the Batman light years better than predecessors George Clooney and Van Kilmer. However, they could have done better with his voice which although intentionally deep and hoarse made me laugh at times (which the filmmaker probably did not intend to). Aaron Eckhart enacts his role as Harvey Dent exquisitely in the first half of the movie as he is tagged as the "Real hero of Gotham City". He takes complete advantage of the huge screen time that he gets. He does not have much to offer as 2Face though. Gary Oldman, Maggie, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman all do justice to their characters as Lt. Gordon, Rachael, Alfred and Lucius.
Well, we could go on and on about the other things in the movie like great action, special effects, immaculate dialogues and the breath-taking chase scene but the real show stealer is the character of Joker. Heath Ledger's enacting the Joker is probably and arguably one of most (if not THE most) splendid performance in big Screen. He deserves an Oscar for this role and does more than just justice to a role that the Nolan's might have only envisioned. Heath Ledger's untimely death might have (probably is) been the prime reason that brought people in flocks into the theaters allover US in its opening weekend but it is the Joker (Ledger's performance) that will see through and place "The Dark Knight" alongside Shrek 2 and Titanic as one of the Highest Grossing movies of All-time.