New Classic

Rating: 8/10 (17 July 2008)

The Dark Knight is unlike any superhero movie that has come before it, and that includes the stellar Batman Begins. While 2005's origin story was a breakthrough with its Gothic visuals and harsh realistic tone, director Christopher Nolan's next entry in the series shatters what we've known as the walls of the superhero genre. An ensemble political thriller as much as it is a tale of revenge and derring-do, The Dark Knight is a wondrous, terrifying epic.
Heath Ledger's Joker is the embodiment of all terror and rage, an evil force as illogical as a tornado, and fearless in the way only a sociopath can be. He sets his sights on Batman only because he wants the game of crime to be more fun, and wages a war of aimless chaos against Gotham while taunting Batman to reveal his face. The Joker demands that Gotham accept a life without rules, and as Dent, Gordon and Batman become increasingly desperate to stop him, they're each forced to break the rules they've lived by. The Dark Knight is peppered with lots of talk about dark vs. light, good vs. evil, freak vs. human-- familiar comic book stuff, and familiar stuff for Christopher Nolan too, he of Memento and The Prestige. Nolan believes so much in the real-world implications of Batman's story that what seems hokey in other movies feels desperately urgent here. There are lots and lots of speeches, with deeply intoned aphorisms about morality and truth, but they fit into Nolan's larger portrait of a city just barely teetering above chaos. As the Joker says near the end of the film, "Madness is like gravityall it takes is a single push." Each of the main characters, the Joker included, are standing on a ledge.
They say every era gets the kind of hero it deserves, and The Dark Knight is surely a superhero movie for our times, in which even the best of men can find themselves doing wrong. The hopeful exuberance of Spider-Man, made before 9/11, isn't bad in comparison; it just doesn't fit with where we are now. Nolan has shown a new way to tell a superhero story, and it may turn out to be the only way to tell a story about heroes in this troublingly amoral time. We may want our white knights, but it's the dark knight that we need.