Knight is Darkest before the Dawn

It took me a few weeks, but I finally saw The Dark Knight, the Batman blockbuster that’s brought in nearly $450 million USD since its release.

I’m not a big comicbook guy (my collection is less than 20 books, all of them ungraded cheapies, which is peanuts by most collectors’ standards), so I can’t tell you which comic the movie was based on or what was left out, added, etc., but it is one kick-ass movie. The Dark Knight transcends the action and superhero genres—it is a dark, gritty tale with the lead character leading a double life, all the while grappling with the slippery moral slope of a vigilante, officially wanted by police, who fights violent crime with violence.

This Batman is as far from the campy Adam West Batman as you can get.

I liked the first Batman movie when it came out as it was the best superhero movie I’d seen up until that point. Michael Keaton’s portrayal of Batman and a sleepy-eyed, distracted Bruce Wayne were well done. But the subsequent Batman series of movies, increasingly camp and more about spectacle than the story of a disturbed man, treated the world of comicbooks as a childish fantasy. The movies were safe, touching on the troubled psyche of Bruce Wayne, but the filmmakers kept their hands clean.

This new Batman movie not only touches on the troubled psyche, it envelopes itself in it. Violence is not camped up—the cause and effect of explosions, blades, and bullets is shown, the victims display the shock and grief those things create in the real world.

Much attention has been paid to Heath Ledger’s Joker, his final performance before his drug overdose. Ledger’s Joker is breathtakingly evil, profane and funny, and one of the best portrayals of a sociopath I’ve seen. He enjoys mayhem for its own sake, so he not only messes with Batman and the Gotham Police, he takes on organized crime, all for the fun of it. Ledger’s Joker is a perfect counterpoint to Bales’s Batman—each is compelled to do what they do for reasons they may not understand (but Bruce Wayne is more self-aware and troubled by the path he has chosen).

The story of Dark Knight is very well done. For a 152-minute movie, there are no gaps or moments where I fell out of the story or got impatient for a scene to finish. And the plot twists were worthy of a first-rate mystery story, with the Joker’s schemes subtle enough that they weren’t obvious like most Hollywood on-screen schemes are. The audience realized the tricks at the same time as the characters, not minutes (or even hours) before. The screenwriters treated their audience’s intelligence with respect and assumed the average viewer would be intelligent enough to understand everything as it happened.

The pacing of the movie is relentless and, coupled with the performances and the story, makes for a very good 152 minutes.

After seeing the movie, I realized that the Batman franchise has updated itself to our times just as the James Bond franchise has done. In our post-9/11 world, violence and disasters have become real, random, and heartbreaking. Dark Knight, like Casino Royale did, reinvents a sometimes cartoonish character for today’s audience.