Masterful. A film that is more than just one performance.

Rating: Null/10 (12 August 2014)

Six years later, The Dark Knight ranks as one of the better films in the last decade, and most definitely, an elite blockbuster picture.
Picking up a few months after Batman Begins, Batman himself is looking to pass on his mantle. He wants Gotham to have an identifiable hero, and that hero is Harvey Dent, the new D.A. who is taking the city by storm. He is just, smart and does anything to bag his man.
Bruce Wayne can see that Dent is a man who can be trusted, and a man who can lead Gotham to a brighter future that he never could.
That's all turned on its head with the appearance of the Joker, a man whose goal is to create chaos and anarchy. He doesn't want this because of revenge, he isn't some bland one note character either. He wants to create new world order just to do it. This makes him all the more terrifying. He is a true psychopath with no real emotional weakness or ties that can bring him down. He's smart, calculating and begins to align himself with Gotham's mob scene to make the entire city his three ring circus of destruction.
His plots to bring Gotham to its knees are genuinely horrifying, and he uses many of the principal characters in the cast to execute his plans which makes us feel pain for the characters we like and for the city they are trying to protect. It wouldn't matter if he was just going around killing random Gothamites, everything Joker does impacts the core characters of Wayne and Dent in a major way.
While loads of praise has been heaped upon Heath Ledger's terrific performance as the Joker, many people let that overshadow just how great of a movie this is independently of Ledger.
Sure, Ledger's Joke is the driving force of the film and instigates utter chaos on screen in ways that weren't thought possible in a mere comic book film. His performance is chilling, maniacal, plotting and above all things, he is an actor in complete command of the character and his performance.
The rest of the movie that is constructed around the plot unfolds like layers of an onion. Typical tropes such as saving the damsel in distress and the inability to corrupt heroic archetypes are turned on their heads, and then said heads are cut cleanly off.
The dialog is crisp and mostly devoid of annoying and tedious one liners. There is a great sense of danger in every action scene and you realize that any character can be killed at any time as the utter chaos unleashed by the Joker is felt throughout the film.
It's unnerving and unconventional. The Dark Knight is a brooding film, and you feel it's energy and power in every frame of Wally Pfister's cinematography under the brilliant eye of director Christopher Nolan. The Dark Knight is grounded in gritty reality, and that grit elevates it above its competition because of how well its executed.
The effects are all practical (for the most part), where there is CGI, it's seamless. The characters' motivations are all realistic and understandable. These characters feel real, thusly connecting you with them. There is more emotional power in one scene of Nolan's film than in any other contemporary comic book picture.
Performances by Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne is impressive, as is his emotional foil Alfred, played with grace and panache by the venerable Michael Caine. Aaron Eckhart does a great job with Harvey Dent's dark character arc. These three, along with an always fantastic Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman lead an all star cast in the true blockbuster of this generation.
Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's score accentuate the action perfectly and Christopher and Jonathan Nolan's script is tight, well constructed and moves at a breakneck speed that is so unrelenting that you'll need to catch your breath for a few minutes after your first viewing.
The Dark Knight is peerless as a comic book film, and is one of the best action pictures of its time. Regardless of what you think of action movies or comic book movies, this movie must be experienced by anyone who loves good performances, crisp visuals, great direction and well constructed screenplays.