Believe the hypeThis IS the Movie of 2008.

Rating: 9/10 (10 August 2008)

Believe the hypeThis IS the Movie of 2008. No question about it. Maybe even one of THE best movies of all time. In fact, it's not just the movie of the year, The Dark Knight is now a milestone in cinema history. It will change how future summer blockbusters will be made.
Every Hollywood film maker in the world should now have this mother of a movie in the back of their minds when creating their new movie. Trying to work out what on earth Christopher Nolan did to make not only a fantastic summer blockbuster, but a brilliantly written, brilliantly acted and brilliantly intelligent masterpiece.
With The Dark Knight, it's hard to decide where to begin explaining why it's so amazing and why it's one of the finest films ever made. But, we've got to start somewhere so I'll start with my favourite element of the movie: The Joker.
The Joker is not only now my favourite movie villain of all time, but he's also now one of my favourite movie characters of all time, up there with Arnie's T-800 and Weaving's Agent Smith. The character is all what you would want from a movie villain. He's scary, DISTURBINGLY scary, he's funny, DISTURBINGLY funny, intelligent and very witty. But what is also very intriguing and very important is that he has no motive. He doesn't want money, He doesn't want revenge. All he wants, in the words of Michael Caine, is to "Watch the world burn", and he doesn't care who he hurts or what he does to accomplish his goal. There's just SO much more to talk about with the Joker, i.e. the make-up, the costume, the dialogue and his memorable scenes that you could fill an entire page with detail, but I need to talk about everything else as well so unfortunately I should move on. One last thing though about the Joker. I think it's a massive shame that the actor portraying the Joker, Heath Ledger, died shortly after filming, because I'm sure he would had had a fantastic career ahead of him and is sure to win Best Actor at the next Oscars.
Lets move on to Batman himself. The character of Bruce Wayne and Batman are pretty much the same as they were in Begins, only they've obviously learnt a lot over the time that has past. With the character of Batman, it's great to see that he's still developing his suit and gadgets and is in progression of fighting crime, not just Batman fighting a super villain over a clean city. His new suit is awesome, his Batmobile looks better than ever and the Batpod is just incredible.
As you may know, The Dark Knight has two villains: Joker and Two-Face. When I first heard that they were having two villains, I immediately assumed that Two-Face's reveal would be left until the end of the movie and that we would see him as the central villain in the third film, similar to how Begins ended with the Joker card. How wrong was I! Two-Face, or Harvey Dent, is a very important character throughout the entire film and is portrayed brilliantly by Aaron Eckhart. The face make-up and CGI used to create the 'Two-Face' are phenomenal and the whole use of the two headed coin flipping is brilliant. It's hard to believe that Tommy Lee Jones played the same character in Batman Forever as Eckhart's portrayal is a massive contrast! I'm really glad Nolan didn't leave his reveal for the end, as I don't believe the character could match up to the Joker in a third film and don't think he could hold the villain role on his own.
There are so many great and different characters in The Dark Knight it's impossible to go into detail about every one, but here is a quick run down of all the other notable characters. Maggie Gyllenhaal, who portrays Rachel Dawes, is probably the weakest actress and character in the film. She isn't awful, but compared to the rest of the cast she is the weakest. Michael Caine gives a great and funny performance again as Alfred, Morgan Freeman does what he does best as Lucius and Gary Oldman returns as Gordon, the only clean cop in Gotham.
There are so many memorable scenes in the film, but a few that are definitely worth mentioning are the opening bank scene, the Batmobile/Batpod chase, Two-face's burn, reveal and coin tossing, every scene involving the Joker (especially the hospital sequence) and the final action sequence.
After seeing a film like this, it's hard to believe that anything I will see now will surpass this. The film has surpassed all expectations and has done what most sequels fail to do frequently: Surpass the original. Not only does it surpass it, but it also introduces an entirely different style of film.
The only thing left to think about now is what is in store for the third in Nolan's Bat Trilogy? What style of film will we see? What new villains will we see? The Riddler? Penguin? Catwoman? One can only speculate for now, but one thing is for sure, and that is that it's going to take something extremely special to surpass a sequel that has been ranked high with classics like The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption.
Overall, The Dark Knight is one of the finest films ever made and do not let any one tell you any different until you have witnessed this masterpiece for yourself at the theatre. A MUST SEE movie for everyone!