It is still the movie we both need and deserve

Rating: 10/10 (17 July 2019)

It was a welcome surprise for some that there was even ever a sequel to Batman Begins. Nolan's first outing into Gotham, while well reviewed, had a modest opening weekend. Not even clearing $50 million for its three day total, box office predictors immediately wrote off the dark crusader's reboot as one and done. But then a miraculous thing happened. It turns out that if you make a good movie, audiences will show up. Begins had small drops for the rest of summer 2005 and eventually earned over $200 million domestically. It went on to make a killing on DVD and Warner Bros. was off to the races.
The ending of the original left little question of who the villain in a Batman sequel would be. During its final seconds, a newly promoted Lt. Jim Gordon is meeting the Batman atop a precinct roof and hands the masked man a playing card from a crime scene. When Batman turns it over, it is an ominously foreboding Joker. Batman promises to look into it, as did Nolan and screenwriter David S. Goyer. The two correctly sensed there was a way to do the villain more menacingly than anything that had come before. Nolan did not just want to make another vigilante and clown actioner like the 1989 film. He wanted to open it up in an epic way and turn Gotham into more than a setting. He wanted his visualization of this age-old comic battle to be an ideological fight for the soul of Gotham and all those who reside therein. In short, he wanted to make a movie that had no rules, superhero or otherwise.
The most unlikely thing ever is occurring in Gotham....Things are getting better. Since Batman (Christian Bale) took out Carmine Falcone, the multiple factions of the mob are running scared. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) is heading his own task force that is taking it to organized crime and new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) is a voice of hope and change for the city as he puts away criminals just as effectively as the Batman. Everyone from Crime Boss Salvatore Maroni (Eric Roberts) to the lowliest of drug dealers is thinking twice before they go out at night. It is in this moment of urban optimism that all Hell breaks loose. And the face of that Hell is a Joker.
A methodical psychopath, the Joker (Heath Ledger) has big plans for Gotham City. He will systematically break every institution in the city until there is only chaos. The city's political leadership, law enforcement, media and organized crime are all in need of being taken down a peg. Their only hopes are crusading DA Harvey Dent and the Dark Knight. But how can Batman stop the Joker, when his mere existence may be a response to Batman's presence?
Okay, let's get it out of the way. Heath Ledger's stunning performance as the Joker in this film is insanely iconic. It holds the distinction of being the first time an actor's work in a superhero movie was recognized by the Academy Awards when he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Yet sadly, it will also be forever remembered as the actor's final complete role. Shortly after production wrapped on The Dark Knight, the troubled star died from an accidental sleeping pill overdose. The hype for the movie became nearly hysterical after the idiotic myth that the character drove Ledger to his grave went viral. Cynics write off his posthumous awards and perhaps the whole movie as nothing more than a fatalistic culture obsessing over trite...and they are incredibly wrong. Anyone with common sense can see that there is much more to his last performance and the movie as a whole than this tragedy.
Ledger succeeded at creating a new type of monster that struck a chord with audiences in 2008 and is just as potent now. If Nolan and Goyer wet their ankles in the idea of post-9/11 terrorism with begin, they loudly screamed, "CANNONBALL!" when they dove into it with The Dark Knight. In the first film, Ra's Al Ghul is a bearded religious zealot hiding in distant mountains with dreams of laying waste to American cities. Liam Neeson was as much Osama bin Laden as he was the Denny O'Neal character in that movie. Still, his plan was very comic book friendly and felt safely impossible.
The Joker is something else. In the years following 2001, the horror of foreign non-state actors gripped the minds of many Americans, including Hollywood filmmakers, but there is a much older and more insidious fear; the fear of pure anarchy. All societies are bound by a sense of order. Whether these social constructs are a natural extension of the human condition or an artifice constructed by people to protect (or control) one another is irrelevant to this movie. The point is society works because there are rules and there are those who enforce the rules. The poster boy for enforced order and harmony is the Batman. Then there are those who do not like following rules or being ruled. As Michael Caine's Alfred says in the movie, "There are those who just want to watch the world burn." Nolan and Ledger's Joker is the marriage of the greatest terrors for Westerners in the early 21st century. He is a man who wants to inflict chaos, death and wanton suffering on an entire culture for no other reason than he can and he will do so using the tactics of a terrorist. The Joker has no ideological cause for his madness, other than the belief in an absence of ideology and does not behave like a normal criminal or enemy. He is both everywhere and nowhere and he is causing a society to turn on its own self-righteous principals just to stop the lone gunman from killing again.
That is the real strength of the movie. It is more than just the Joker. It is a movie about how Gotham, a parallel for American culture, reacts to an existential threat. Early in the film, the triumvirate of Batman, Gordon and Dent deliver a series of crippling blows to the mafia. Gotham's salvation seems within grasp, but a few political assassinations later, the media is calling for Dent and Batman's heads. Harvey is supposed to be the city's White Knight who does things by the book and upholds their ideals. But when the Joker threatens his lover, Rachel Dawes (now Maggie Gyllenhaal), Harvey shows signs of sliding into the muck to protect her. Meanwhile, Batman's methods, often used in the comics without much thought, are given real world context. His interrogations of mobsters and eventually the Joker himself seem less like grisly crime procedure and are instead ethically blurry scenes of torture. What does it say of "the one good cop," Gordon, when he allows a masked vigilante to beat his prisoners? Batman even wiretaps every Gothamite's cell phone in the film's Third Act to find the clown terrorist.
As we watch the city begin to tear itself apart when the Joker morbidly threatens to blow up a hospital unless an accountant is murdered by fellow citizens or see him force young families to play an explosive game of prisoner's dilemma with a boatful of convicts, we are more disturbed than amused. This is not a traditional superhero movie about stopping a villain. This is an ensemble piece about how far a society will bend its own rules to stop someone who only wants to break them. It is clearly influenced by several comic stories. The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, is about Batman, Gordon and Dent taking down the mob and how it tragically cost the DA his soul. Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's The Killing Joke is a character study of the green haired supervillain and his desire to mentally break Jim Gordon, thereby proving that everyone is as nutty and cruel as he is. Nolan and his scribe brother Jonathan Nolan seamlessly weave these concepts into the final film. However, this Gotham does not feel like the noir-ish nightmare of the page. It looks like our world being set on fire.
If this picture were an overblown popcorn movie, as its critics still insist, it would have ended during a confrontation between Batman and Joker with the hero being victorious. Indeed, that scene is in the movie...only it is a fleeting victory. The Joker laughs in an exhausted and pained Batman's face, "Do you really think I would risk the battle for Gotham's soul on a fist fight with you?" His real goal was to break the system. The true climax is Batman being faced with saving a friend's child by breaking his one rule (THOU SHALT NOT KILL) or letting another lost friend take the boy's life. The second villain of the film isn't even a villain, but a tragic hero who could not handle the moral ambiguity of modern society. He lost everything and forces our remaining heroes into a conspiracy and a political cover-up. Hardly the stuff of reassuring popcorn.
The Dark Knight is a stunning achievement of taking old comic book tropes and reinventing them in a terrifying way for today. It is both the most comic-faithful Batman movie to date and also the most removed from that world. Batman, Joker and everything in between is still absurdly impossible, but this movie made it feel all too real. It is that rare blockbuster movie that transcends its genre and commercial interests to become something more. To call it the best superhero movie ever made is an understatement. It struck the cultural zeitgeist in 2008 like lightning and is still the movie we both need and deserve.