Review - The Dark Knight
You know that Heath Ledger is dead.
Even if you mostly avoid the news, you know. You may even know that Christian Bale’s temper got the better of him in London recently, and a family barney ended with him sticking one on his poor old mum. Allegedly.
So it should be pretty hard to watch The Dark Knight without a vague awareness of these things. I anticipated feeling an additional layer of poignancy to the Joker’s dementia. Extra ka-blooey to Batman’s ruthless punch-ups. But all this baggage disappeared from the outset, as the film shows itself to be that strangest fish of comic-book adaptations: a proper, serious drama.
Director Christopher Nolan has achieved a gritty, involving feel that calls to mind JJ Abrams’ Mission Impossible III, and the hard-edged re-tooling of the Bond franchise. Where Batman Begins climactically descended into bombastic effects lunacy and exploding scale models, The Dark Knight holds its nerve and serves up a complex tale of real people in the real world, forced to deal with an aggressive agent of chaos. With Batman in it.
The film resembles Batman himself – grim-faced, dark, complex. Not pulling any punches. Punctuations of jokey levity do little to brighten up the tale. It counters the teen-angst love life problems displayed by super-heroics like Spiderman 2, with a grown-up realisation that a masked vigilante who punches people in the eye is not all that much different from an insane criminal.
This seems to be a theme Nolan aims for with his screenplay. Circumstances skew our view of others’ actions. Batman, more than any other ‘hero’, is not so clean cut. His motives and lack of boundaries muddy the water, and he yo-yos from menace to saviour to just conflicted billionaire – and back again.
Performances are uniformly very good. Action is first rate, but not fantastical, with demolition and pile-ups replacing death rays and psycho mad-gas. Hand-held camerawork grounded in the immediacy of Bourne, immediately grounds you in Gotham too. And some astonishing CGI convinces, even as your mind fails to overlook that it is CGI.
A fine crime drama, revealing the conflict between what the law allows to be done, and what needs to be done to uphold the law. With Batman in it.
They’re talking about it here…
Tags: Batman, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight, The Joker
