Gamertell

Title: The Dark Knight (aka Batman: The Dark Knight, Batman Begins 2, The Dark Knight: The IMAX Experience)
Release Date: July 18, 2008
Company: Warner Bros.
Rating: PG-13
Length: 142 min (2 hours, 22 minutes)
Pros: A lot of great acting, a well-woven story and plenty of psychological creepiness. The more realistic Gotham City is a well-executed contrast to the inner darkness of the characters.
Cons: A little long and a bit too creepy for kids. Only one moment of unbelievability.
Overall Score: Two thumbs up; 93/100; A-; * * * * out of five.

Put away your illusions that this is a big-screen adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic Novel, The Dark Night Returns. While there is a tiny nod or two to the book, this is continuation of the Batman Begins film with a new origin of at least one DC Comics character and a more realistic, visually brighter yet thematically darker take on Batman.

Just After the Beginning…

You can consider this a prequel to the most common Batman stories where James Gordon (Gary Oldman) is still a Lieutenant, Batman (Christian Bale) is still tweaking his costume and other gadgets, with the help of Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), and Joker (Heath Ledger) is just starting to become an arch nemesis.

While one of Batman’s main pseudonyms (being “Dark Knight”) is in the film’s title, the darkness is more of an evolution from the story, a bit of psychological necessity that reinforces the ideals of The Bat while helping to maintain extra order in Gotham. But I’m getting ahead of myself (while trying to avoid true spoilers).

A surprising amount of the movie centers around Harvey Dent who is perfectly portrayed by Aaron Eckhart as the good-looking, ass-kicking, incredibly fair and trustworthy lawyer turned politician. He’s now dating Bruce Wayne’s long-time friend and beau from the previous flick, Rachel Dawes, who is now a D.A.. and well played by the slightly aged yet still sweet Maggie Gyllenhaal.

There are many moments of misdirection in the movie that really move the plot along, playing the Joker’s ability to scheme and lie well against Batman’s ace detective and ninja skills. It’s really a crime film with many villains, several heroes and a plot that intertwines the characters and their diverse takes on justice, ethics and even relationships.

Gotham by Day

The overall tone of the movie is reflected in Gothan, which is not the visually gritty, super-CG or modeled cities from previous movies, being much brighter than Batman Begins and no where as stylized as Tim Burton’s takes. Instead, it’s much more realistic, playing host to the (usually) believable action, helping to put an accentuating contrast to the darkness of the characters, underworld and activities of the film’s many villains.

The Joker has never been this creepy on screen. Not even the painted mustache of Caesar Romero was this creepy. Ledger gives a few tiny nods to Jack Nicholson’s Joker performance, taking the lip licking and occasional lip smacking to a whole new level. It’s never made clear if the white face is real or makeup, though it is certainly smudgy, wearing thin and coming off in his hands in parts of the movie, further reinforcing the real-wold feeling. And that makes much of it even creepier and darker than any lighting, music or costumes can convey.

There’s plenty of nice costumes to oogle, however, including Gyllenhaul’s dresses, Joker’s custom suits and Wayne’s well-draped Armani wardrobe. Joker’s hair is less green than poorly bleached which, as any blonde will tell you, can turn a weird shade of green after swimming in a pool a few times.

None of the characters do any ginormous, expository monologues, which were pretty common in the earlier films. Instead, important dialog is given through short conversations, keeping the exposition more bearable than a more stoic or annoyingly introspective delivery. This helps to keep the film moving as well as more than one great actor on the screen at all times.

There are many appearance by other actors as well, including Anthony Michael Hall as a newscaster, and lots of mobsters including well-cast Eric Roberts as Salvatore Maroni. Michael Caine also returns as the uber-wise and a tab snarky butler, Alfred, once again playing perfectly off of Bale. Bale also gives Wayne a comfortable playboy attitude, not only walking in to a party with multiple ladies on his arm but brushing off a heroic act in an appropriately snobbish way.

Keeping the film rather gritty, there’s death, explosions and plenty of action. It’s not quite the constant action as Begins but there’s enough to keep it moving even when you’ve hit a would-be end to the film. Much of the movie’s grit comes not necessarily from a lot of blood, of which there is actually very little, but the implied grotesqueness of the Joker. As I mentioned in my Sneak Peak, this is not a movie for kids.

Batman also does a fair amount of detective work in this film, some of which is offscreen, incorporating technology to his ethically questionable advantage. That allows a bigger nod to earlier Batman comic stories and adding yet another layer to the film’s pretty well woven story. His sometimes questionable actions are a natural reaction to the Joker who has become a pure terrorist and agent of chaos. Moments of the movie will certainly rub a few people the wrong way, as are meant to do, to bring out the film’s intentional inner darkness.

A word for the soundtrack buffs: German composer Hans Zimmer does a wonderful and often subtly appropriate job, neither trying to outdo Danny Elfman’s work nor leave it forgotten. His minimalist approach to the score is also appropriately echoed in several of the film’s settings, including a sparsely filled Bat-Office, which may indicate a pretty good directorial decision.

Ninja Moves

There’s so much going on that the movie feels as if it has three endings, any of which would have sufficed yet each successively adds completion. If there is a fault, it’s that there are too many themes going on so that not all of them receive due time. Even so, the elements meld well enough together to create a cohesive movie and live up to the “Dark Knight” name.

Dark Knight has officially snuck past Batman Begins as my favorite Batman movie. The levels of thematic complexity, great acting, well-dosed action and well-woven story fill this out as a pretty fine movie. While most comic book movies have a hero that is the epitome of right and goodness and go for the family happy ending, expect a well-orchestrated feeling of darkness when you leave the theater.

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Check out the gallery: The Dark Knight movie screen shots