The Dark Knight: Review and Analysis

I warn you now. This post will have major and pervasive spoilers for the movie. If you haven't seen the movie, you were apparently one of the few who didn't this weekend. Go fulfill your duty as an American filmgoer and see it. Then come back to this post. And I apologize in advance for the length of this post. As you might imagine, I have a few thoughts.

Ok. This is basically the best movie of the year. Hands down. People are going to be very tempted to write it off as a comic book movie. And it is, but it's much, much deeper than that. Yeah, I know that people always say that about comic book movies, but for this one it's really true. It's an examination of the human response to chaos and self-preservation and it's absolutely outstanding. Make no mistake, this movie is a tragedy in the Greek sense of it. The heroes have flaws which ultimately bring them down. And that's part of the brilliance of the film.

So, what was good.

Well, of course, Heath Ledger as the Joker was outstanding. It's interesting to watch a movie like Knight's Tale and then this one and recognize the masterful acting that he was capable of. Ledger's Joker is an all consuming vortex of chaos. And it's without purpose. In my mind, he's really only a criminal because that's how society views someone who sows chaos in the way he does. He's scary, because he's so unpredictable. You don't know what he's got up his sleeve, each time he comes on screen and that's what takes your breath away each time he does. You almost hold your breath waiting to see what he does.

I loved the shooting of this film compared to Batman Begins. I watched the first one just prior to seeing The Dark Knight and it was interesting to see how much was CGI in the first one and how the Gotham of this movie is basically Chicago. I liked how much they tried to make everything as realistic possible. The city itself almost became a character in the movie, and especially the citizens.

I thought the casting of Aaron Eckhart has Harvey Dent was terrific. He really did the White Knight very well and it made his transformation into Two-Face that much more tragic.

The overall story was good, if a bit convoluted. I'm definitely going to have to see it again (IMAX, anyone?) because I want to try and follow the Joker's plots. How much relied on coincidence? How much could he have known was going to happen or how people would react to certain situations? Could he have known that Gordon would fake his own death or did his plans just ooze around that bump in the roadmap?

Maggie Gyllenhal was a suitable replacement to Katie Holmes, but Rachel Dawes was still a pawn in the whole game. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman were stellar in their supporting roles, as usual. Nice to hear some of Alfred's non-butler-y background stories.

Not so good? Well, unfortunately, like the Burton Batman movies (who? Joel Schumacher? Never heard of him...), Batman himself can almost fade into the background on these. I think they did a good job over all of trying to counterbalance the seething serenity of Batman with the chaos of the Joker, but in the face of a whirlwind like that character, it's tough to be as memorable.

And while I liked the cameo by Dr. Crane/Scarecrow, it did make me wonder how they solved the issue of the escaped criminals in the Narrows and the fear toxin, but not too much. And the whole Hong Kong sequence was kind of pointless to me, even though the director might have been making a subtle commentary on American intervention in sovereign nations. He definitely made a not-at-all subtle commentary on technological eavesdropping.

However, one of my absolute favorite parts of the movie didn't involve any of the main characters. It was with the two ferries. On one, many of the regular citizens of Gotham; on the other, criminals being transported away from Gotham. The Joker has rigged both of them with explosives, but put the trigger for each boat on the other boat. And if one boat doesn't blow up the other in 15 minutes, he'll blow up both of them. There's a tense time where the civilian boat votes to blow up the prison boat and the prison boat is seeing this as a chance to escape. I was sure that they were going to give into the temptation of self-preservation, but at the last minute, one of the prisoners stands up and says that he'll do what needs to be done, since none of the rest seems to be willing to destroy the other boat. He takes the trigger... and tosses it out the window. And I'm might have been the only one in my theater who did, but I applauded that moment in the movie, because I knew that this was the fulfillment of the words that Harvey Dent spoke earlier in the movie: "The night is darkest before the dawn, but the dawn is coming." And when that prisoner (played by Tiny Lister) threw the trigger out the window, I knew that was the dawn that Chris Nolan (writer and director) was going for. The decision on the part of the people on each boat to not take lives, but be willing to sacrifice themselves. It was a beautiful moment in a dark, dark film. (For more analysis, check out this link: http://www.slashfilm.com/2008/07/20/assessing-the-themes-of-the-dark-knight/ )

This is a movie that's going to be thought about and analyzed for years. This might be the pinnacle of comic book movie making and what pushes the genre out of the niche mindset and fully into the mainstream. This movie is Godfather II to Batman Begins' Godfather. The Dark Knight takes a larger scope on the whole thing and tells a deeper story than just Batman vs. the Joker. And that was the unexpected pleasure that came from it.

(Addendum 8/27) For further thoughts after seeing the movie a second time, click here.