Posted on 06/27/2008 7:50:22 PM PDT by Vince Ferrer
Heads up: a thunderbolt is about to rip into the blanket of bland we call summer movies. The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan's absolute stunner of a follow-up to 2005's Batman Begins, is a potent provocation decked out as a comic-book movie. Feverish action? Check. Dazzling spectacle? Check. Devilish fun? Check. But Nolan is just warming up. There's something raw and elemental at work in this artfully imagined universe. Striking out from his Batman origin story, Nolan cuts through to a deeper dimension. Huh? Wha? How can a conflicted guy in a bat suit and a villain with a cracked, painted-on clown smile speak to the essentials of the human condition? Just hang on for a shock to the system. The Dark Knight creates a place where good and evil — expected to do battle — decide instead to get it on and dance. "I don't want to kill you," Heath Ledger's psycho Joker tells Christian Bale's stalwart Batman. "You complete me." Don't buy the tease. He means it.
The trouble is that Batman, a.k.a. playboy Bruce Wayne, has had it up to here with being the white knight. He's pissed that the public sees him as a vigilante. He'll leave the hero stuff to district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and stop the DA from moving in on Rachel Dawes (feisty Maggie Gyllenhaal, in for sweetie Katie Holmes), the lady love who is Batman's only hope for a normal life.
Everything gleams like sin in Gotham City (cinematographer Wally Pfister shot on location in Chicago, bringing a gritty reality to a cartoon fantasy). And the bad guys seem jazzed by their evildoing. Take the Joker, who treats a stunningly staged bank robbery like his private video game with accomplices in Joker masks, blood spurting and only one winner. Nolan shot this sequence, and three others, for the IMAX screen and with a finesse for choreographing action that rivals Michael Mann's Heat. But it's what's going on inside the Bathead that pulls us in. Bale is electrifying as a fallibly human crusader at war with his own conscience.
I can only speak superlatives of Ledger, who is mad-crazy-blazing brilliant as the Joker. Miles from Jack Nicholson's broadly funny take on the role in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, Ledger takes the role to the shadows, where even what's comic is hardly a relief. No plastic mask for Ledger; his face is caked with moldy makeup that highlights the red scar of a grin, the grungy hair and the yellowing teeth of a hound fresh out of hell. To the clown prince of crime, a knife is preferable to a gun, the better to "savor the moment."
The deft script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, taking note of Bob Kane's original Batman and Frank Miller's bleak rethink, refuses to explain the Joker with pop psychology. Forget Freudian hints about a dad who carved a smile into his son's face with a razor. As the Joker says, "What doesn't kill you makes you stranger."
The Joker represents the last completed role for Ledger, who died in January at 28 before finishing work on Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It's typical of Ledger's total commitment to films as diverse as Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not There that he does nothing out of vanity or the need to be liked. If there's a movement to get him the first posthumous Oscar since Peter Finch won for 1976's Network, sign me up. Ledger's Joker has no gray areas — he's all rampaging id. Watch him crash a party and circle Rachel, a woman torn between Bale's Bruce (she knows he's Batman) and Eckhart's DA, another lover she has to share with his civic duty. "Hello, beautiful," says the Joker, sniffing Rachel like a feral beast. He's right when he compares himself to a dog chasing a car: The chase is all. The Joker's sadism is limitless, and the masochistic delight he takes in being punched and bloodied to a pulp would shame the Marquis de Sade. "I choose chaos," says the Joker, and those words sum up what's at stake in The Dark Knight.
The Joker wants Batman to choose chaos as well. He knows humanity is what you lose while you're busy making plans to gain power. Every actor brings his A game to show the lure of the dark side. Michael Caine purrs with sarcastic wit as Bruce's butler, Alfred, who harbors a secret that could crush his boss's spirit. Morgan Freeman radiates tough wisdom as Lucius Fox, the scientist who designs those wonderful toys — wait till you get a load of the Batpod — but who finds his own standards being compromised. Gary Oldman is so skilled that he makes virtue exciting as Jim Gordon, the ultimate good cop and as such a prime target for the Joker. As Harvey tells the Caped Crusader, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." Eckhart earns major props for scarily and movingly portraying the DA's transformation into the dreaded Harvey Two-Face, an event sparked by the brutal murder of a major character.
No fair giving away the mysteries of The Dark Knight. It's enough to marvel at the way Nolan — a world-class filmmaker, be it Memento, Insomnia or The Prestige — brings pop escapism whisper-close to enduring art. It's enough to watch Bale chillingly render Batman as a lost warrior, evoking Al Pacino in The Godfather II in his delusion and desolation. It's enough to see Ledger conjure up the anarchy of the Sex Pistols and A Clockwork Orange as he creates a Joker for the ages. Go ahead, bitch about the movie being too long, at two and a half hours, for short attention spans (it is), too somber for the Hulk crowd (it is), too smart for its own good (it isn't). The haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination. It's full of surprises you don't see coming. And just try to get it out of your dreams.
No, that would be the Black Night, although he does seem to have bat ears.
“Dark Knight” comes from a 20 year old rewrite of the Batman story, which among other things spawned the Batman movies, although they have always been a dissapointment. This is the movie fans have been waiting for.
yak yak yak. Too much talk. Too much thinking. Batman should be fun. The review makes me want to find another movie.
Phht, in 20 years they’ll make a another “reboot” [see: Superman, the Hulk, Get Smart, every crap 70s series that gets turned into a “movie”—or two/three if you want to even think about the Brady Bunch].
This Hollywood treadmill got old a long time ago.
You didn’t like Batman Begins, I take it?
Batman Begins was awesome, this might be even better (granted, its just word of mouth).
Agreed and I am not even a comic book fan. I have been looking forward to this not only because of the incredible reviews of it that I have been hearing but Ledger and Bale’s performances are supposedly off the charts.
I never even care about these kinds of films but this is one I am headed to for sure.
I'll bet half that will be dark psychological brooding by everyone.
Me? I wanna watch stuff blow-up.
Agreed. Batman Begins was indeed awesome. The best of them all imo. Bale is one of the best actors out there.
His performance in American Psycho is one of the best ever put on screen. I also loved him in Swing Kids.
I don’t think anyone can give me the other Batman movies and I did buy “Batman Begins”. I loved the opening scenes. I was wondering if I had walked into the wrong theatre.
I’m going to see “Wanted” this weekend starring Angelina Jolie. I’m expecting it to be a horrible movie but I’m looking to be entertained. It’s been a hectic week.
Do not rent “Jumper”. Hollywood gave up it’s moral compass on that one.
I heard “Wall E” is great and Pixtar hit another homer. I just saw “Cars” a couple of days ago. I should have seen it when it came out. It was wonderful. I grew up a couple of miles away from the end of Route 66 outside of Chicago. We went to California in 1960 driving it all the way.
More reviews have come in, and are assuring us the action is going to be beyond spectacular.
http://www.themovieblog.com/2008/06/the-dark-knight-review
http://www.filmfocus.nl/specials/item3.php?id=10309
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080627/ap_en_ot/film_dark_knight_first_look
By the looks of things, they will have a HARD time topping this movie.
Batman’s not supposed to be fun, Batman is supposed to be insane. Batman became fun for a while because of the campy TV show, but the original Batman all the way back to the first comics, and then the reborn Batman after Frank Miller’s Dark Knight series is not a nice person. In the early days he actually crippled bad guys, not fun.
Did you catch the wink/nudge at the beginning, with the Speedway of the South lettering done in the same style at the "Song of the South" movie poster?
The detail level that those Pixar guys are capable of is just astonishing.
I missed that one but did you know from the extras, the blinking lights of Flo’s cafe went on and off in the correct firing sequence of a Ford flathead?
Fillmore was correct that the traffic light was slow on one of the blinks by a half second?
From the Merchant of Venice, a lady lawyer is nicknamed Portia[Porsche] from one of the characters?
The locomotive had the same number as the classroom where the computer guys from Pixtar learned their craft.
In some of the clips from “The Dark Knight,” Bale almost seems to be channeling Patrick Bateman from “American Psycho” in his portrayal of Bruce Wayne.
In a good way, I mean.
So, do you like Huey Lewis and the News?
Um...never heard of ‘em.
Why?
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