The Dark Knight (2008)

The Dark Knight (2008)

July 30, 2008

The Big Picture, Seattle, WA

**** / ****

by Scott Muoio

The Dark Knight is an intense thrill ride that dares to be different than every comic book movie that has come before it. With chases, explosions, and all manner of complex and sophisticated relationships and underminings, the bread and butter of the superhero genre, turned up to the Nth degree, The Dark Knight doesn’t stop there in breaking from the superhero pack. Where The Dark Knight does clearly separate itself from its Spiderman, X-Men, and Superman cousins is in the care, detail, and abundance of realistic back-story it gives any and all characters that appear in its frame. From the tormented superhero in the batsuit (Christian Bale) to the random thug henchman, the noble gadget guru (Morgan Freeman) to the heroic District Attorney (Aaron Eckard), and everything in between, all are imbued with a detailed past and serve roles much more meaningful than mere plot points, the manner in which lesser films would surely treat them. The Dark Knight instead gives all of its characters weighty meaning, a monumental improvement on the genre that adds a veneer of seriousness and grit to the picture that every movie could benefit from. Yet for all its grand ambition and careful calculation the one man whose story we’re dying to know more about, the maniacal Joker (Heath Ledger), is regrettably the one person the movie intentionally tells us has no past. It’s a cruel bit of irony and the most glaring chink in this terrific film’s armor that proves even the most carefully written screenplay can still fall victim to the perils of thinking too much.

The good in this ongoing saga of the masked vigilante fighting crime in the cesspool known as Gotham City is that the drama, character development, action, thrills, special effects, and the delicate balance between realism and hyper-realism are as good if not better than just about any movie you will see this year. Writer/Director Christopher Nolan treats his Batman incarnation as a real person living in the real world and struggling with real emotions, challenges, and choices. Gone is the hokieness present in past versions of the Batman story, replaced by a gritty, take-no-prisoners approach that gives greater weight and meaning to the characters’ decisions than has ever been present before. It is a fine bit of mastery taking Batman out of the doldrums as the lowest common denominator of cinematic fare and instead positing the dark knight as one of cinema’s darkest and most conflicted symbols of justice, and the Batman legacy is all the better for it. With numerous characters getting prime slices of cinematic pie this installment may not be all about Batman (it’s really about District Attorney Harvey Dent), but the ever-changing symbol of what the dark knight stands for is the 2-ton elephant that never leaves the room elevating the story to appropriately epic proportions.

Batman’s foil this go around, The Joker (Heath Ledger), is himself painted in realistic colors even if he is a cackling psychopath in face paint and a clown suit. Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the bad guy du jour is particularly astute as he brings to the forefront this consummate creep’s full humanity. His portrayal gets especially tricky when one considers that The Joker’s humanity exists entirely of man’s greatest evil inclination: a motivation with no greater or lesser purpose than to watch humanity burn to the ground. That Ledger died shortly after completing the film adds an additional weight to the character that is as haunting as it is tragic and unexpected.

The Dark Knight’s weakness as a film is that Christopher Nolan tries to tell so many stories and in such great detail that his 2 ½ hour film feels bloated. The film is really a fairly straight forward story, but with numerous ethical questions and sharp character arcs constantly vying for your attention the film grows tiresome during its final 40 minutes. Like his camera’s intense zoom in the fight scenes, it is Nolan’s over-magnification and explanation of the details that is the film’s biggest liability, bogging it down with unnecessary embellishment and tangents. A few tics that stand out as less than desirable flourishes include Batman’s distracting growl, District Attorney Harvey Dent’s asinine obsession with flipping his lucky coin, and The Joker’s absurd lip smacking, three character faux pas that occur much too often and unfortunately remind us just how silly we are for taking any of this caped crusader business seriously in the first place. There’s also the whole breadth and impracticality of The Joker’s immensely complex series of terrorist acts, but now I’m nitpicking. Certainly these shortcomings aren’t enough to derail the picture as a whole even if they are noticeable cinematic infractions that show a director whose ambition is slightly greater than his editing eye.

Overall though, The Dark Knight gives a viewer much more than he or she could ever expect from a Batman film. The Dark Knight unquestionably brings a new level of excitement and respectability to the superhero genre that was never present before. While violence, hand-to-hand combat, and gunfights are pushed to their maximum intensity in the film and continue to serve as this genre’s cinematic currency, few movies are capable of also moving a genre forward on so many other unexpected fronts than The Dark Knight. In that sense, The Dark Knight proves itself the newest evolution of the comic book film and proof positive that the superhero film isn’t merely for children anymore and just might be capable of taking home Academy Award gold.