Overall Rating
  Awesome: 68.49%
Worth A Look: 18.49%
Average: 5.88%
Pretty Bad: 2.1%
Total Crap: 5.04%
10 reviews, 178 user ratings
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| Dark Knight, The |
by William Goss
"Bruce Almighty"
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When’s the last time a movie made you gasp? Truly startled you into sitting up and shutting up, obedient to the screen and the screen alone? Better yet, when’s the last time a big fat summer blockbuster provoked that response, and not with spectacle but rather suspense?This occurs on more than one occasion throughout The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s taut, twisty, and altogether thrilling follow-up to his 2005 reboot, Batman Begins, and the majority of menace stems from the antics of the Joker. As played by the late Heath Ledger, he is a self-proclaimed agent of chaos, an ambassador of anarchy solely dedicated to bringing the entire community of Gotham to its knees by placing both its very citizens and its most revered champions – Bruce Wayne and crime-fighting alter ego Batman (Christian Bale), police lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman), district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) – in the most critical of moral dilemmas and villainous schemes.
Earlier this summer, I remarked on how I wasn’t intentionally building the latest Indiana Jones installment up to something comparable to, say, No Country for Old Men, but that comparison seems far more apt here. It’s a tale of what happens to fighting the good fight when the crusaders of justice find themselves facing a villain that is simply beyond them, with all of our characters find themselves making tough choices: Bruce wants to hang up his suit and let Harvey save the city in the light of the day; Harvey wants to settle down with assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes); Rachel isn’t quite sure if she wants either of them; and Gordon isn’t sure he can even trust his compatriots when it comes to capturing the criminals.
Hell, even the criminals aren’t entirely sure if they can trust the newest among the ranks; after all, the Joker follows no rule of his own and manages to be brilliant enough to defy the code of the cops and the mob alike. He may make off with a hefty sum following the exceptional bank heist that opens the film, but he isn’t doing it for money so much as the power. What are the criminals, the citizens, and the champions to do with a man who simply wants to see civilization collapse upon itself and will do anything to see this goal through?
The brothers Nolan (director/co-writer Christopher and co-writer Jonathan) deliver exactly the kind of movie that one would expect from the minds who brought us both Batman Begins and The Prestige: a precisely plotted, thrillingly grounded movie that evolves beyond its comic book roots into an epic crime drama of much merit, with the visceral effect of gangbusters action sequences matched beat for beat by a genuine sense of moral complexity. There’s more thrills and brains here in two and a half hours than most blockbusters can claim, and it’s enough to make one wish that more films could be this bold, this brawny, this brooding. (Not all films, mind you; we still need room in the world for our Hellboys and Iron Men.)
Ledger embodies the Joker as a shambling physical presence, a man smart enough to think of everything and yet unhinged enough to do anything, and it’s this marvelous threat of spontaneity that propels action and casts tension beyond his scenes. More importantly, he seems like exactly the catalyst that would be able to bring the stoic Bale to break his own rules in the name of saving Gotham, making his Batman every bit as willing to do anything – every bit as dangerous – as the Joker himself. In the wake of this central conflict and Eckhart’s tragic arc (the latter is perhaps best left unelaborated upon), Oldman delivers a quieter but no less compelling portrait of a noble man facing a seemingly insurmountable foe on behalf of his city and the loved ones within it, and Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine both return from Begins and serve even more so as the walking, talking consciences to Bruce Wayne’s actions and, more importantly, consequences.
In fittingly oppressive fashion, Wally Pfister’s graceful cinematography comes to paint Gotham as a prison of glass, concrete, and stone, full of hard edges and dark corners, and all the more so when presented in the uniquely engrossing IMAX format, while the surging score of James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer particularly emphasizes the growing intensity of the Joker’s escalating behavior – that heist, a breathless car chase, and an assassination attempt come most immediately to mind – with a low whine that precedes these segments and recalls the similarly sinister work of Jonny Greenwood on There Will Be Blood.It’s all these elements that build to the little moments we savor, the jumps and jolts and thrill of the genuinely unexpected. 'The Dark Knight' values ideas as considerable spectacle on par with any other, equal to the most special of effects and a lot harder to put a price tag on. With the right emotional and ethical stakes, in a realm where acts of terrorism means that the end of our world doesn’t necessitate the end of the world entire, mere escapism becomes a void excuse. This is all-in storytelling, and if anything, smart filmmaking like this offers bang for the buck beyond the biggest booms, which makes Nolan and Wayne alike decent men in an indecent time, seeing fit to give us not the blockbuster we need, but the masterpiece we deserve.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=17085&reviewer=409
originally posted: 08/01/08 06:10:47
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USA
18-Jul-2008 (PG-13)
UK
N/A
Australia
18-Jul-2008
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