The Dark Knight

Director – Christopher Nolan

I usually never follow hype. And this new re-imagining of the Batman legacy is, inescapably, bound in it. Already it would have been one of the most highly anticipated superhero flicks even before it tragically became a final legacy for actor Heath Ledger. Before the opening trailers even rolled, there was buzz in the audience of “biggest opening box office sales” and “posthumous Oscars.”

But there is something unique to the Batman myth that makes this all seem, well, justified. Despite its bell-curve dip into camp, in the hands of director Christopher Nolan the franchise has reemerged not only to redefine Batman's cinematic legacy but also the entire genre of superhero films as a whole, showing that these types of films can be a vehicle for more then just big budget effects; they can be a vehicle for powerful storytelling as well.

And though The Dark Knight is not perfect, the film overall almost singlehandedly is elevating the standard of what a super hero genre film can be. It's darker, more tragic, and more human then any such film that has come before. Batman is more then just another cool hero concept in tights, he is the embodiment of vigilante justice, capable of exploring the entire concept of what it means to be a hero or a villain. The Joker is here more then just one of the comic's most popular villains, rather his misanthropic sadism positions him to dig his nails deep under the seeming order of society to expose the raw nerves that lie beneath.

The film's opening scene has a group of clown-masked thugs robing a high security bank. Each time one goon completes his needed role in the operation, another kills him until only one remains. Even among criminals, this seems a perverted logic: no organized crime unite is sustainable without loyalty. But Ledger's Joker is not Jack Nicholson's theatrical Joker, and he doesn't represent any organized crime sensibilities. When he extorts Gotham's top crime bosses of half their entire bank holdings, he simply burns his share of the money. What's most frightening about this Joker is not that he's insane, but that he might be an ideologue.

In fact the movie is carried less by plot and more by its carefully established themes: the line between good and bad; order and chaos. But while it is this very attempt at superhero-film-as-analogy-for-the-human-condition that elevates The Dark Knight above its peers, it can also be problematic.

The film's treatment of the Joker, who despite Ledger's sputtering desperate performance which paints the Joker as the most emotionally empathetic character, overall lacks a moral ambiguity and no real emotional vulnerability so that he seemingly operates with the supernatural resolution of pure evil. Is Nolan's conclusion that the world does in fact possess an inherent evil, a world which is black and white? The Joker has no background, no history - he's relentlessly masochistic and never suggests why his brilliance has lead him towards evil and not good.

Don't get me wrong, this is not to say Ledger's performance is anything less than spectacular. If he were to get a much speculated award nomination, it wouldn't be undeserved. But the performance alone is unable to shed the sense that some comic book sensibilities come creeping back into a genre film which needs to act as a film and not simply a big budget adaptation. In a film that attempts to more fully explore themes of good and evil that are only touched on in the comic, the fact the the Joker is irreducibly bad feels like a missed opportunity.

To that end, it makes more sense to follow the developments of Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne and Aaron Eckhart's Harvy Dent, who struggle with the issue of being a hero across the film.

The film also effectively utilizes a sense that Gotham city is itself a character, helping to elevate the movie's themes to a societal level. Duologue is often filmed in sweeping pans that emphasis the beautiful metropolitan landscape behind them, and suggests that these characters are products of this very environment and just as is the resulting violence. It is this towering order of civilization, money, and power that much like the Joker suggests, is only thinly veiled chaos.

Most comic to film adaptation suffer from the awkward transition of mediums, each with different conventions and expectations. The Dark Knight picks up where Batman Begins left off: sowing that comic book films can be great films, not just a good adaptation. This marks the beginning of a new era in comic book films, one which makes it interesting to see where we will go from here, and one which is fully deserving of its hype.