Hi, moviegoers, welcome back to the theater!
Today, continuing my look at Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, I’ll be looking at its second installment, ‘The Dark Knight.’ Premiering in 2008, it is again directed by Nolan, and has all the old cast returning (Other than Katie Holmes, who was replaced with Maggie Gyllenhaal for the role of Rachel Dawes), as well as new cast members Aaron Ekhart, Eric Roberts, and of course the late Heath Ledger.
It appears that in the time since the previous movie, Batman (Christian Bale) really has been doing some good for Gotham. Most if not all of Gotham’s criminals that are still in business are constantly looking over their shoulders out of fear of Batman showing up, and several citizens have even become imitators/ wannabes of Batman (Though they lack Bruce’s technology as well as his opposition to the use of guns). Plus, near the start of the film, Batman manages to capture the villain Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy, briefly reprising his role from ‘Batman Begins’), who had eluded him in the previous film.
Thanks to a kind of alliance between Batman, Lt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman) and the rest of the police force, and well- liked new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Eckhart) who happens to be dating Bruce’s old friend Rachel Dawes (Gyllenhaal), organized crime in Gotham is a dying breed. A few crime lords still exist, such as mafia boss Salvatore Maroni (Eric Roberts), but they are a shadow of what they once were. After Batman helps to nab a foreign businessman who was acting as their moneyman, the cops are in fact able to pull a series of high- profile busts of literally hundreds of organized crime bosses and henchmen.
However, one big threat remains to law and order in Gotham: The demented supervillain known as “The Joker†(Ledger). The movie opens with him and his disposable gang pulling off an intense robbery of a mafia- owned bank, then later offering the remaining crime bosses a proposition; They give him an obscene amount of money, and he’ll do what none of them could: Kill Batman. Joker begins attempting to smoke Batman out by targeting and killing high- profile individuals with a bit of a focus on those involved in the prosecution of the upcoming trial against the mobsters, including killing the Police Commissioner, whose position is then taken by Lt. Gordon.
Bruce is perplexed by this new criminal, who appears quite different from other criminals he’s fought. His butler Alfred (Michael Caine) points out to him that not every criminal is after money or power or other traditional motives; Some are simply men who, as he famously puts it, “Just want to watch the world burn.â€
Batman and Joker first clash when the latter of the two crashes a Harvey Dent re- election fundraiser put on by Bruce Wayne. As bodies continue piling up, and Dent and Gordon each have suspicions about someone in their respective ranks being crooked and feeding information to the mobsters, Dent decides on a risky plan to try and smoke out the Joker so Batman can catch him.
After a thrilling car chase scene, the Batmobile is destroyed (And immediately replaced with a Bat- motorcycle) and Joker is captured. This turns out to be part of Joker’s plan, however, as he recovers someone from police custody during a brutal jailbreak, and has Harvey and Rachel both kidnapped. Despite Batman’s efforts, Rachel is killed and Harvey’s face is horrifically burned on the left side.
More carnage unfolds, Joker convinces the disfigured Harvey (Understandably furious over both what happened to him, and the death of Rachel, who had just agreed to marry him) to become the villain “Two- Face†and seek vengeance on those who had betrayed him and led to him and Rachel falling into Joker’s hands, and panic begins overtaking the Gothamites.
There’s a final showdown with Joker in which over a thousand lives are in mortal danger, then a surprising finale in which, in order to deal with the Joker’s last trump card, Batman decides to make a big sacrifice in order to save the soul of Gotham City.
There was obviously a lot of buildup and fan anticipation leading up to the premiere of ‘The Dark Knight,’ further fueled by the sudden and accidental death of Heath Ledger a few months before the film’s premiere. It proved to be, in my opinion and the opinions of most moviegoers, one of the few films with such high expectations that actually lived up to its hype.
That’s not to say ‘The Dark Knight’ is without problems, however. One of the main ones concerns Two- Face. While we see and get to know Harvey Dent well over most of the film, I think it takes a little too long for him to become Two- Face. Also, another character who’s kind of wasted is a corporate lawyer named Coleman Reese who works for Bruce’s company. This irritating attorney discovers Bruce Wayne is Batman through noticing both Bruce’s strange behavior during the day as well as all the old Waynetech equipment that’s gone missing and suddenly become part of Batman’s arsenal. Two- thirds of the way into the film, he even sets out to publicly reveal Batman’s identity, but goes into hiding after Joker threatens to kill him if he does so. That’s the last we see of Reese, we have no clue what eventually happens to him. Another minor issue is that, with the character Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), who clearly knows Bruce is Batman as he’s the one who supplies Bruce with so much of the equipment Batman uses, we never really see him talk with Bruce about that, or how he feels about the whole situation that unfolds.
As I said, ‘The Dark Knight’ proved to be one of the few heavily- anticipated films that actually lived up to its hype. I still love it a lot seeing it today. The storyline was solid, as are its messages about the potential goodness of man as a whole, order prevailing over chaos, and what it means to be a hero.
The fight scenes that are featured (Not as many as the previous film) are really good to watch (Especially the last one), and all the action sequences are very visually impressive to watch and continue to keep me on the edge of my seat, from Bruce capturing the mafia’s moneyman in Hong Kong early in the film, to the car chase scene in the middle of the movie, and finally the climax with Batman attempting to stop Joker and save the lives of all his countless hostages. The way they physically created Two- Face’s appearance looks awesome. The filmmakers were very careful to avoid leaking any images of how Two- Face would look before the film’s premiere. Even after Harvey’s disfiguring accident, it takes some time before we see how he looks, further building viewers’ anticipation, and it pays off. It’s near enough to how he looks in most comics (Though in the comics, rather than being disfigured by fire, it’s by a criminal throwing acid in his face), while still being semi- realistic.
Christian Bale continued to do good things with his portrayals of Bruce Wayne and Batman. Now, he has Bruce wrestling a lot over whether he should continue to be Batman (Harvey Dent was viewed as the city’s “White Knight,†Bruce begins feeling in the beginning that, now that crime’s down in the city, Dent could be the Gotham’s new, more respectable champion fighting crime the proper way and thus inspiring people), as well as how he relates to people, and what must be done to stop a criminal as insane and unpredictable as Joker. We also see a little more of Batman as a detective (One aspect of Batman that most Batman movies tend to neglect), as he attempts to investigate and bring a halt to Joker’s reign of terror. He still has the strange tendency to speak in that growling voice as Batman, but it’s usually not hard to tell what he’s saying.
Maggie Gyllenhaal does a pretty good job as Rachel, though she isn’t able to do as much as Katie Holmes did in the previous film. She initially is doing what she can to help put away the mafia guys on trial, then mainly becomes part of a love triangle involving Bruce and Harvey. Her character’s death, while sad, was not unexpected for me. Women that Bruce manages to get close to, especially those who know his secret the way Rachel does, never last long.
Morgan Freeman is his usual witty self as Lucius Fox, but he also has some good serious scenes, most notably near the climax when he expresses serious doubts about a rather unethical program Bruce is willing to use to help stop the Joker. These sorts of scenes were noticeably absent in the previous film, so I liked seeing them here. Michael Caine makes Alfred much the way he made him in the previous film: Funny, wise, and fiercely loyal to Bruce. A scene in which he tells Bruce about a time earlier in his own life when he was helping to stop a bandit similar to Joker (Only real motive was having fun and screwing people over for kicks) is well- acted and fits perfectly. Aaron Eckhart takes Harvey Dent on a nice range of emotions: Strong and confident in the courtroom and when giving his speeches, worrying about Gotham’s future as well as what may become of him and Rachel, and finally succumbing to his anger when he becomes Two- Face. He just wants the world to be fair and to make sense again.
Of course, I couldn’t review ‘The Dark Knight’ without talking about Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker. Over the decades since the character was first created, there have been mainly two versions of him: The crazy yet mostly harmless clown (i.e. in the old Adam West ‘Batman’ series), and the terrifying, psychotic killer (i.e. Most current portrayals of him in the comics, and a little of whem Jack Nicholson played him in the 1989 film). Occasionally, some incarnations are a mixture/ balance of these two, such as Mark Hamill as his voice in the wonderful 90’s Batman animated series and the video games ‘Arkham Asylum’ and ‘Arkham City,’ but it’s usually one or the other. Ledger’s Joker is a textbook example of the latter of the two portrayals. He has some genuinely frightening scenes that show his brutality and bloodlust, yet even these are interspersed with little bits of humor to make the audience laugh, then feel guilty for doing so (i.e. a now legendary scene involving a “Disappearing pencil†magic trick he does early in the film). This is a villain who’s not trying some big mad- scientist experiment, or out to make a profit, or become the new king of the criminal underworld: He just wants to see Gotham overtaken by chaos and anarchy for no real reason, and he especially wants to see the regular people of Gotham become corrupted. He frequently attempts to trick or goad otherwise good people into doing unspeakable things, that ends up being what his grand master plan is all about. Ledger’s performance as him is an absolute masterstroke. Even just minor details, like his movements (i.e. in the scene when he crashes Harvey’s fundraiser, the way he gnaws on a snack and splashes down a glass of champagne, and the way he gets in guests’ faces to ask them about Harvey), the way he talks, and the various stories he gives for how he got the scars on his face, convey how unhinged and truly insane Joker is. While Joker tends to avoid personally fighting, the scenes when he does physically attack someone are shocking, as he goes all out, ripping and stomping at them like a rabid animal. Words can’t describe how happy I am that Ledger’s performance in ‘The Dark Knight’ earned him a posthumous Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, he definitely earned it. He made not only the best superhero- movie villain I’ve seen, but also one of the best cinematic villains in general that I’ve ever seen.
And there we have ‘The Dark Knight,’ a magnificent film that remains among my all- time favorite movies.
Well, two down, one more to go: I have my tickets purchased in advance, I have a date for the evening, and I’ll soon be ingesting enough sugar and caffeine to make a gazelle’s heart explode. In other words, I’m ready for the midnight premiere of ‘The Dark Knight Rises.’ Expect a full review of it some time tomorrow. See you then!
