The Dark Knight

Buff Justice

With a measured audacity, but a relative lack of noise, 2005’s Batman Begins reignited a dormant franchise whilst simultaneously erasing any fondue memories associated with a character long absent from the big screen. The impressively self-assured origin story seemed to slink, akin to the MO of its title protagonist, out the shadows from nowhere, yet performed well at the box office giving the green light (or should that be bat signal?) for director Christopher Nolan and scriptwriter David S. Goyer to return for another helping.

Three years on, and the approach to the second chapter in the caped crusader’s saga was anything but stealthy. Thanks to an ingenious viral marketing campaign leading up to release day, general interest snowballed into a furious avalanche of fevered expectation, paving the way for not so much a sequel as a bonafide movie event. Despite the pressure though, Nolan et al delivered. Armed with a larger budget and unshackled from the expositional requirements of universe rebooting, they achieved the impossible by matching the hype and upping the ante in pretty much every conceivable way.
Bigger, badder, louder; The Dark Knight is a monster of a movie with the locomotive heft of a runaway Wayne Enterprises monorail. Depicting a hero in his prime faced with a threat of equal vitality, things will invariably be blown up, smashed and bashed in a display of destructive machismo.

Yet the action isn’t of the brain dead throwaway sort so often accompanying films of this kind. Nolan’s insistence on grounding the farfetched in some level of reality makes the high level of spectacle all the more visceral and exciting. This, along with the director’s refreshing commitment for using real stunts with minimal use of cgi, layers the set-pieces – a kidnap sequence in Hong Kong and a swat team takedown being obvious highlights- with a real sense of peril and immediacy.

So it’s a pumped up blockbuster yes, but the attention given to pyrotechnic displays and wanton obliteration doesn’t undermine the film’s impressive devotion to character. WhereBegins went back to the conceptual circumstances and choices that created Batman, here such core ideas are put under scrutiny as the man beneath the cowl wrestles with the brutal nature of the justice he empowers.
Influenced in no small part by Jeff Loeb and Tim Sale’s graphic novel The Long Halloween,The Dark Knight concerns itself with billionaire Bruce Wayne, whose nocturnal thug-busting vigilantism has caught the attention of Gotham’s enthusiastic district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). With the help of Batman’s old ally Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman) Dent and the pointy-eared-one team up to undertake a pronounced offensive against the organised crime leeching the city of its money and morals.

While Eckhart summons the right amount of clout for a D.A keen to take on the underworld, Oldman is still the perfect choice for the softly spoken police lieutenant introduced in Begins. This time around though, we see Gordon squeezed and compromised by his stretched department, having to ‘make do’ with a potentially corrupt force. The actor squints and furrows his brow, transforming into the world weary realist who stubbornly refuses to take heed of Dent’s warnings regarding the bent cops; something Nolan cleverly has us dismiss as inconsequential, but which comes back to haunt the newly formed triumvirate to devastating effect later on.

Taking the lead in this impeccable cast is Christian Bale, who proves again that he is the right man to wear the cowl and cape. Following on from the solid narrative groundwork laid out in Begins, one of the successes of The Dark Knight is that we are made to care as much about Bruce Wayne as his more infamous winged creation; a tricky dramatic prerequisite helped along by Bale’s heartfelt performance.  Aptly conveying the heavy emotional and physical strains of a man acting out of guilt, Bale portrays Wayne as a damaged individual wary of succumbing to optimism. The desire to live a normal life with long time sweetheart Rachael Dawes remains strong however and as Dent’s legitimate campaign against corruption gathers strength, Wayne is unable to resist believing that his true goal of making Batman obsolete by inspiring a functional good, may finally have been realised..
..But then things, as they have a habit of doing, take an incy wincy turn for the worse. In their desperation the gang bosses parlay with someone they don’t fully understand – an unhinged, lizard mouthed, twitchy Beelzebub called The Joker.

In tour de force mode Heath Ledger is gobsmackingly mesmerising as the clown prince of crime, summoning something so unexpected yet frighteningly powerful and convincing, it’s easy to forget this is an actor at play. Ledger’s Joker is a ghastly archetype, less of a man and more of an abstract of archaic evil; a self-entitled ‘messenger of chaos.’ It’s an absolutely astounding performance, complemented by an ingenious original score composed by Hans Zimmer, which uses only a handful of rising notes to match the character’s unsettling strangeness.

Promoting anarchy as the true law of the universe The Joker unleashes a campaign of terror upon Gotham, trampling upon Bruce Wayne’s dream in the process. Setting out to prove the folly of placing faith in people because they are invariably corruptible, he is painted (both literally and figuratively) as some sort of deranged, extremist revolutionary, instigating the downfall of Harvey Dent as his coup de grace.

Though Dent’s story at times feels somewhat tacked on, especially towards the final third, Goyer and the scriptwriters have done well to etch-in and condense such an integral character of Batman lore along-side The Joker’s scene/film stealing. Ekhart, on the reverse of his two sided performance, is excellent depicting a fallen hero who rapidly descends into madness after being manipulated by The Joker and exposed to the world’s dark truths.

As the title would suggest this is a dark film, sometimes oppressively so for the immersed viewer subjected to its ample running time. Length aside the film is well paced and lean as hell, perhaps even to its disadvantage where, as has since become customary, Nolan is almost too sharp for his own good. Despite juggling many moving parts things always seem to conveniently ‘fit’ and fall into place in Nolan’s films, which in this instance lies at odds with the chaotic nature of one chief antagonist who just does things. But really, this is just nit-picking an otherwise impeccable film that hurtles along towards its appealingly downbeat conclusion. Ultimately Nolan, an obvious respecter of audience intelligence, must be lauded for creating a thematically rich and rewarding experience that demands our attention: this is fantasy for the thinking person indeed.

Like how The Joker says ‘In their last moments, people show you who they really are’, the true colouring of Nolan and his creative sidekicks’ monumental effort becomes apparent during the moody finale. As Gordon summarises in profound soliloquy and the last shots play out with a crescendo of resonance, one can’t help but feel that The Dark Knight fulfils a potential, essentially sixty-plus years in the making, the ‘Batman film’ always had. Allowing us to forget the meatloaf of the past it is a prime steak of sumptuous cinematic quality, standing as the antidote for the, let’s face it, increasingly troubled summer blockbuster, and providing the powered-up interpretation such a complex and mythic character both needed and deserved.

Stick a fork in it Mr Nolan. Or better yet a pencil.