CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of The Dark Knight

Saturday, October 11, 2008

this entry brought to you by modest mouse, "march into the sea"

i know my reviews are never timely; the dark knight has been out since the middle of july and everyone in the world has seen it thirteen times already. i myself saw it on august 30th, and it's still taken me over a month to write the review. i wanted to see the movie twice before i wrote the review, and i just finished my second viewing earlier this morning. better late than never.





Batman Begins established that Christopher Nolan's franchise reboot was set in a version of reality that was a tick more hyper than our own. It started off with its feet on the ground, establishing real-world motivations for the way the characters behaved, and established a mythology that allowed all of Batman's tech and abilities to be reasonable. In the last act, however, it took a foot out of reality and a bit more into comic book reality, with Gotham's prison unloading hordes of prisoners into the city, the air being clogged with a hallucinogenic compound that made everyone's fears appear to come true. This wasn't a problem at all; the ideas were implanted logically, so when the movie went a bit over-the-top, it all still made sense. Compared to The Dark Knight, which is much more like a Brian De Palma crime thriller that happens to be inhabited by a guy that dresses as a bat, and a sociopathic anarchist in clown make-up, Batman Begins feels cartoonish. It's not cartoonish, but if you go from one movie to another, one is clearly a comic book movie; The Dark Knight almost feels like something else entirely. It is a dense, gut-wrenching movie with multiple climaxes amongst its growing and evolving plot, and is much, much darker in tone, feeling almost noir. This is the most menacingly dark PG-13 movie ever made, to the point where if they'd added one single swear word it would've instantly been Rated R, and you wouldn't even know the difference. The haunting soundtrack perfectly exhibits this; the Joker's theme, instead of being a rousing piece of action movie scoring as one might expect from a summer blockbuster, is a single note held excruciatingly long. Yet the cinematography is more bright and open than it ever was in the previous movie. There are many more daytime shots, with gorgeous sunlight permeating what's going on on-screen. While the first movie used daylight when things were calm to contrast with the darkness, when crimes were going on and Batman was doing his thing, Dark Knight actually opens up with a violent yet superbly paced bank heist courtesy of the Joker in sun soaked daylight; there are others, including a riveting sequence involving a hospital, that are shot during the day.

Which leads me to the acting. If ever there has been a better acted action movie and a better cast, I'd certainly like to see it. Before I go on to Heath Ledger, I wanted to talk about Christian Bale's performance first. When I initially went into the movie, the hype over Ledger's Joker, and with a second villain, Two-Face, I was afraid Batman would take a bit of a second seat, as he did in Tim Burton's second Batman film. If Bruce Wayne was the focal point of the first one, Batman is very much the focal point here, even with two incredibly solid villains in the cast. Interestingly, and refreshingly, both characters, Wayne himself and his dark alter-ego, get developed more over the course of the movie. Bruce Wayne, having been established with duality in the first movie (the introspective man who never got over his parents death, and his disguise as a model-on-each-arm playboy), gets developed a little more here, with his struggle between keeping appearances up, and wondering exactly how long he needs to be Batman, especially now that he has an heir apparent in Harvey Dent, Gotham's up-and-coming new D.A. He's also shown doing more detective work than in the previous movie, clearly more comfortable with being a hero. Batman himself gets developed more, in a very obvious sense: if Batman was a bad-ass before, he is even more bad-ass here, if that seems possible. But with that comes rage inside him that he struggles to keep from taking over. Initially, when I saw Batman Begins for the first time, Bale's Bat-voice annoyed me. The second time I saw it, however, I didn't notice it at all. By the time I saw The Dark Knight, I genuinely loved his Bat-voice. Instead of just doing a Clint Eastwood bad-ass voice, Bale's Bat-voice is far more animalistic, not so much bad-ass but a force of nature, a hoarse growl when talking, a fierce roar when angered, which plays very well into the mythology of Batman, using his identity as a way to intimidate his foes. Bale plays the struggle of a young billionaire never letting go of his parent's death with grace and subtlety-- well, with as much subtlety as a growling brute who smashes people into windows can have. Seeing thematic connections between Bale's Batman and America's present state of affairs with the rest of the world isn't much of a stretch.

Which leads me to Ledger's performance. It would be easy to overstate how frightening and visceral Heath Ledger is with his portrayal of the Joker. Does he give the best performance of the year? Probably not. Does he give the best performance of his all-too-brief career? Possibly. Does he deserve a nomination for Best Supporting Actor? Actually, yes. Yes he does. I was initially mildly annoyed with the Joker's lack of pranks-- in the comic book, this guy thinks he's hilarious, and in the movie, he only really tries a practical joke once, and it's at the very beginning of the movie. But as the movie went on, this didn't seem like a problem at all-- this wasn't just a guy who thinks he's funny, this guy is the worst kind of maniac, the kind, as Alfred eloquently states, that just wants to watch the world burn. Worse, he is very capable of being the person to do so, and Ledger has a fantastic grasp of making this person believably insane, giving a pathology to the worst kind of villain. He's twitchy and makes faces, he is exaggerated, yet he's not over-the-top or hammy. He seems like the bum who accosted you one time on the street and, although that bum didn't mean any harm to you, he made your skin crawl. Ledger's Joker is that man, with every intent to harm you. The movie establishes early on that this character is very dangerous, and does things you wouldn't expect him to do. He is a monster, and there's palpable tension when he is on screen. Nicholson's Joker was more iconic, in the way that you could more easily turn him into an action figure-- and frankly, it fit Tim Burton's vision perfectly. Can you imagine Ledger's sociopath in the 1989 Batman? It would've left people with an upset stomach. With that said, Ledger's Joker is the real deal.

Props must also go to the rest of the cast. I've been a fan of Aaron Eckhart ever since I saw him in In the Company of Men, and he nailed the white knight with a dark side perfectly with his Harvey Dent. In fact, with so much attention going to Ledger's Joker, it's easy to miss just how good Eckhart's performance is. Eckhart has been a go-to man for indie movies for years; hopefully with this, we'll be seeing him in a lot leading roles, especially ones with a lot of meat. Although she annoyed the 14 year olds, Maggie Gyllenhaal also gets a nod from me, although I have to admit I've had a crush on her for quite some time. She's been called a thinking man's sex symbol, and I agree with that completely, even if she's not supposed to be a sex symbol here. Katie Holmes was in the first movie merely for a pretty face. Gyllenhaal's presence in The Dark Knight helps refocus the attention on the relationship between the three characters, and puts a level of maturity onto it all, rather than being just another pretty face. Gary Oldman has always been known for his ways of being a chameleon, but he is Commissioner Gordon, in such a way that I don't even see Oldman, I just see Gordon, the character from the comic books. Michael Caine as Alfred and Morgan Freeman as Lucious Fox are a joy as always.

The original Superman, at the time it came out, felt very much like a first chapter, a first helping, and that you would be getting the good stuff in the second one. In fact, the entire opening of the movie went out of its way to establish the second movie's villains, as if to consciously tell you, this is just the beginning chapter; we need to get the boring setup stuff out of the way. Batman Begins, another movie that didn't make any pretension that it wasn't the setup of a franchise, however, felt complete at the time. It set up the psychology of Bruce Wayne, it set up a world that was firmly set in reality, and it set up that it was going to be an ongoing franchise-- but nowadays, that's not a big deal. My point is, despite the Begins in the title, Batman Begins didn't feel like merely a prologue at the time. It felt like its own complete entity, and while there was a throw-away suggestion of a sequel, a Joker card that Batman says he would look into, it didn't feel like just set-up. If Batman Begins hadn't been successful enough to warrant a sequel, it would've still been satisfying as its own thing.

That is, that is how it felt at the time. After having watched The Dark Knight, a deep, complex, character based thriller of a superhero action movie, entrenched so much more than its prequel, thinking back on Batman Begins feels like thinking about a mere prologue for the real show: The Dark Knight is a masterpiece, as if every other movie Christopher Nolan has done (all of them being superb films that I enjoy immensely) feel like pet projects he needed to clear out of the way before he got into his life's pursuit. The Dark Knight is very, very good. In fact, and it's not much of a stretch to say this, considering its box office intake has catapulted it to the second highest grossing movie of all time, and at one point was in the runnings of overtaking Titanic, The Dark Knight is easily and readily one of the best action movies of all time, up there with Terminator 2, Aliens, The Empire Strikes Back and The Two Towers. In fact, I hesitate to even use "action movie" as a qualifier-- The Dark Knight is one of the best movies ever, period. The only problem with it is how high it sets the bar-- how will Nolan make a third Batman without disappointing us?
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 * also, i wanted to say, it was very tempting for my review to be called "the dark knight: awesome?" and then the entirety of the text would be "so awesome."

with love from CRS @ 8:54 AM 

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