Batman raises the stakes in his war on crime. With the help of Lt. Jim Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman sets out to dismantle the remaining criminal organizations that plague the st...
WHAT I LIKED: 'The Dark Knight,' is the most expensive ideas movie ever made, as effectively what writer/director Christopher Nolan does here is to take the themes planted in his brilliant predecessor and build a narrative from them that juxtaposes the power that different symbols can have in a corrupt microcosm of society. Indeed, whilst the first film focused on the power of one symbol through the fear that Batman created to contain evil, this sequel adds two more to the fray by offering a symbol of pure chaos and anarchy unaffected by Batman in The Joker, and another of moral compass and peaceful justice in Harvey Dent. This turns it into a symbolic and idealistic battle between the perception of three ideals in Gotham.
Batman striving for better and ruling through fear has worked so far, but he realises he can't be that symbol forever and needs to hand over to someone more peaceful - Dent in this case. However, The Joker doesn't believe in order and justice, and sets out to prove that society's natural state is chaos because that's fair, and when his "powerful force," meets Batman's "immovable," ideals, there's a fascinating clash of perspectives. The Joker waltzes through the film creating his chaos and the Batman is constantly reacting to contain him, then in the end their ideological battle for the fate of their city concludes with the Joker being proven wrong about the nature of a collective people in his little social experiment on the boats, but him succeeding in corrupting Dent so that the Batman decides to take the fall for his death and preserve his legacy. That argues something pretty thought-provoking about the power of perception over truth (a question that was particularly relevant during the Bush era), plus it arguably seeks to present the fabric of orderly society as the fragile state that the Joker attempted to prove that it was all along.
An ideas movie this genuinely is then, and frankly it's staggering that Nolan was able to make it for so much money, but that's not the only thing that keeps your eyes on the screen. The city of Gotham looks genuine and the attention paid to the world-building is astounding, and the characters that symbolise the film's ideas are very well performed. Also, Nolan proved himself as the master of the cinematic blockbuster with Begins, and this is only further proof of that as the set-pieces here are pretty astounding and the whole thing even has a lot of genuine humour too.
All in all that makes for a pretty epic, constantly admirable film that will no doubt have you looking up at the screen in awe from start to finish and frankly amazed that Nolan ever got to make this kind of blockbuster in the first place.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: Being such an ideas-based movie, it does fall into the trap of treating society as an abstract collective where we never really get to understand the thoughts of any of the people that these symbols are battling over. In other words, the film is a conflict of ideas and perception over a group of people who are generally talked about rather than shown.
That may not have been a problem had the characters who embody the conflicting ideas felt more human, but most of all they feel as though they're shaped as symbols rather than characters themselves, so, whilst the ideas play out in a fascinating and spectacular way, they don't necessary transcend all that well beyond the screen.
VERDICT: 'The Dark Knight,' is a fascinating and ambitious blockbuster about a clash of ideals. It's just a shame its characters and world are contained by those symbolic concepts rather than their own humanity.
