Jul 18 2008
The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight has finally hit the big screens in one of the widest releases in history. Amid the critical hysteria and the isolated dissent the film has received more attention than any other release of 2008, and for good reason. The Dark Knight is a taut intelligent thriller, that continues the story of director Christopher Nolan’s highly praised Batman Begins.
What is really working in Nolan’s reinvention of the Batman series is that he takes the characters very seriously, he doesn’t treat them with the same kind of comic book flare that saturates other comic book adaptations of recent years, like Hellboy or The Incredible Hulk. The film is very dark and the characters very real. Nolan seems to invest himself whole-heartedly in the mythology of Batman. Reinventing the classic villains as real characters who were once just an everyday person. Much of the dissent has been, aside from a slightly convoluted plot structure, that the late Heath Ledger’s Joker does not seem to follow this formula, but that is the nature of the Joker. Since the early years of the comic book the Joker has not been a character with a past, he is a character that kind of just appears as the antithesis to Batman. Batman has raised the bar in Gotham and the Joker is the underworld’s answer. He is more symbol than most of the Batman villains, and The Dark Knight portrays that perfectly.
Heath Ledger gives a stellar performance as the completely deranged Joker. His performance is filled with subtlety and nuance that is truly quite surprising, considering there was a great danger of Ledger borrowing heavily from Jack Nicholson’s Joker performance in Tim Burton’s Batman. The film is full of great performances. Even Aaron Eckhart gives a great performance as Harvey Dent. He seems a somewhat off choice to play a character as deranged as Harvey Two-Face. But his solid stance as Harvey Dent, DA, gives a fullness of character to Two-Face by the end, it gives it a foundation to grow from. Two-Face becomes a character who truly has two sides, a character who has given everything to fight crime in the city, and is conflicted between his desire to continue his battle and to seek revenge against those who have destroyed his life during his attempts to make life better for everyone.
The Dark Knight’s biggest weakness is that Nolan tries to make it too real, in a sense. There is something inside of the highly intricate plot that makes it a little too heavy to pull it’s own weight through two and half hours. Subplots develop and are never fleshed out, the audience is expected to accept that subplots start and end and you will know very little about the whole story. For the most part this approach – which has become something that is standard in almost all of Christopher Nolan’s films – works, there are times when it becomes a bit too much and feels a little tacked on, but on the whole it functions. The film comes together very nicely and moves rather quickly through its lengthy run time. Maybe the calls for an Oscar nomination for Ledger are a bit too strong, but The Dark Knight is certainly the best film of the summer, and the best comic book film to come out in a very long time.
