[NO SPOILERS, don't worry.]
So finally, The Dark Knight. Christopher Nolan’s followup to 2006’s Batman Begins is easily the most anticipated movie of the year, and early reviews have been unanimously positive (or as close to unanimous as is possible with this sort of movie). I’m gonna get the obvious bit out of the way first: Nobody is exaggerating when they say that Heath Ledger’s performance is jaw-droppingly good. His Joker is as creepy as Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter, as slimey as Robert De Niro’s Max Cady, and as malevolent as Kevin Spacey’s John Doe. In that sense, The Dark Knight does take a lot of cues from the old guard: there are smatterings of The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en all over this movie.
Usually, I would rail at the unoriginal parts of any movie, but The Dark Knight’s influences are just that – influences. It pulls off many of its twists with a unique flair, much of it powered completely off of Legder’s showmanship.
My problem with this movie lay mostly in two things: the first act, and the third act. Specifically: I found the first act to be really irregular and disorganized, and the third act to be mostly unnecessary. Interestingly, my problems with the first act were mostly because of the existence of the third, i.e., we needed to set up so many characters and situations in order for the psycho-analytic/social commentary bits towards the end to make any sense. If he had instead trimmed all of that fat away and concentrated on the tension between the two main leads, I think he would have found that there was more than enough story material in there already. The question is why he decided to do it the way he did. I don’t profess to know the answer to that but of course I have a theory: Nolan was trying to make The Greatest Superhero Movie Ever.
Now, I appreciate that kind of ambition, and I’m sure that quite a few people would even agree that he had actually reached this lofty goal. I do personally think that he lost focus though, and tried to make the material do more than it was necessarily meant to, or even needed to. Nolan’s love for the Batman mythos has always had a lot to do with the depth of the title character’s psychosis – easy pickings for any serious film director. The 2005 Batman spent a lot of time mulling over the concept of fear, while this followup reflects on the dichotomy of order and chaos. I’ve noticed that Nolan likes to use a lot of repetition in his movies, both in dialogue (characters are constantly repeating key lines back to each other) and in characterization. In The Dark Knight, Batman and the Joker are portrayed as opposite sides of the coin, a duality that is then represented visually by Harvey Dent/Two-Face. Both of his previous films, Insomnia and The Prestige, spent a lot of time dealing with similar subject matter in a similar style, but sadly, DK is neither as complex as the former, or as creative as the latter.
So given that I mostly disliked both the first and third acts of the film, it may be hard to believe me when I say that I thought that Dark Knight was a really good movie, up there with Iron Man and Spider-Man II as one of my all-time favorites. That’s how good the second act was; it was lean and spry most of the way through, and idled just enough to allow the tension to build back up again. I’ll probably have to see it again one of these days to make up my mind, but at the moment, DK is at #3 on my personal list of best superhero movies ever made.