Somewhat Underwhelming

Rating: 6/10 (22 July 2008)

I think the problem is that the movie tried to provide a more realistic and less comic-book rendering of its characters, but couldn't escape the fact that it was still a summer popcorn comic-book blockbuster. Batman Begins did an excellent job of "humanizing" the Batman, IMO. In this movie, Batman was about as human as cardboard and all the efforts at humanizing the characters apparently went into the villains.
Ledger's Joker had his moments although for what it may be worth I didn't feel it was the Oscar material the newsfeeds are buzzing about. It seems to me that his Joker- or at least, the movie's Joker, since I do not know how much of this is Nolan's conception- tries to both personify the "wild card" symbol of his name while humanizing that symbol. As someone with a high tolerance for abstraction in the cinema (and comicbooks), this dual-effort seemed to me to contradict itself at times, supplying an implicitly mundane human backstory to the villain while explicitly "telling" (rather than showing) the audience that this is "The Joker" - The Wildcard, The Reasonless Criminal, etc. While this type of juxtaposition might work, in this particular instance it seemed as though the very elements Nolan chose to de-emphasize as unnecessary backstory were the same sorts of elements which worked so well at humanizing (and making more realistic) the Batman in Batman Begins. Perhaps Ledger's genius lay in doing such a good job at intimating the Joker's "humanity" in spite of this.
With Harvey Dent, we are presumably supposed to be disturbed by his moral decline, but this seemed rendered moot by the apparent moral superiority displayed by Gotham's citizenry at the end of the movie in itself deserving of a WTF? The people clearly don't need Dent as a shining beacon and Batman and Gordon may as well pack up and go home in this new City of Light that is Gotham. In Burton's Gotham the citizens scrambled over each other to pick up the Joker's dollar bills. In the Dark Knight, the Joker doesn't need dollar bills (as he makes abundantly clear) and they probably wouldn't do him any good anyhow. Instead of a criminal mastermind, the Clown Prince of Crime, he is the next step in the evolution of Gotham's criminal psyche, a surfer on a wave, his henchmen motivated not by money or fear or greed but by a primal awe and respect. Yet his progression is not linear, he is not merely the most evolved of the criminals, nor merely a psychopath, but a psychopath and criminal, combining to form something new to both these classes, presumably, in Gotham. Which sort of negates the premise of a city which required a Dark Knight to begin with, one which prior to the Joker contained moral citizens and orderly, predictable criminals.
Nolan seems to have separated Gotham from context in his Batman universe, to the point where, in the Dark Knight, Gotham itself is thrown away, ignored like a piece of ligament cut from meat. And yet, the context which creates the Batman, the Joker, Two-Face, and all Gotham's denizens is elevated to a position of primacy at odds with this slight. This is a character-driven Batman world with no room, it seems, for the atmosphere so richly captured by previous incarnations. The main characters arise in a generic every-city which provides nothing unavailable outside the Gotham of legend, and the viewer can only identify the characters inasmuch as they reflect off of each other. Chaos is juxtaposed against order in this Batman far more than good against evil.
Whether this "works" is up to the viewer, but personally, again, I like a bit of symbolism and I have no problems seeing the old-school Gotham City as a close reflection of the world I live in- and as a result kind of miss the atmosphere evoked in previous movies by its Gothamized depiction. (Maybe it helps I live in NYC. One can't help but feel that this movie may have been an attempt in some ways to "globalize" the franchise ) I feel I need to re-view the movie, solely to further examine Ledger's Joker. I may be missing something, confusing a contradiction with a contrast or not getting the "point" (or rather, pointlessness) of his crimes . This is definitely to Ledger's credit, that his character was so complex, and his performance was the hilight of the film. But its also because I grew pretty bored of the confusing and lacklustre action sequences which took up so much space between Joker appearances and as a result wasn't paying as close attention as I should have been each time there was some Joker or Joker-related dialogue.
So, perhaps some of Ledger's moments aside, there was only one really, truly dark thing about the film and that was the cinematography, which made fight scenes look blurry and hard to follow, and seemed like a cheap way of "rectifying" problem number 1, above, by providing some kind of presumably "gothic" look to the city (at least during night-time.) All in all, 2 hours of generic action fare which failed to live up to either the movie's hype or its predecessor, interspersed with about half an hour's worth of a decent and worthy performance by one actor. And also, the Watchmen preview.