| Rating: | ★★★★★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Action & Adventure |
For $10, we watched two movies; that's (essentially) $2.50 a ticket. But cinemas cannot survive without $11 ticket prices!
...At any rate, we saw The Dark Knight first. The nature of this film is that it is tremendously difficult to say anything substantive about this movie without giving away plot points; as such I have done two versions of this review, one with and one without spoilers. THIS REVIEW IS THE ONE THAT HAS SPOILERS. So, if you'd rather not spoil the ending for yourself, to go read the other review instead.
Right.
First off, I will say flatly that Heath Ledger deserves a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this portrayal of the Joker. Nicholson played it as an evil man, but one with a sardonic sense of gallows humor; this Joker is far superior. Ledger carries this Joker like a gore-crow, soaring above a field of slaughter on tattered wings, dedicated only to serving chaos and madness; his Joker is an agent evil evil of the worst and most dangerous kind, because his actions serve to force Batman farther and farther into the darkness in his own heart, and farther from the light he reaches for but can never attain.
"Gotham needs a hero who does not need a mask."
Powerful words, and words from Batman himself, referring to the character upon which the whole plot turns throughout; Harvey Dent - later known as Two-Face - Gotham's new District Attorney.
Dent is a true crusader against crime; rather than resorting to beating up crooks in alleys, he uses the law, and rounds up the criminal element of Gotham City wholesale, indicting literally hundreds of mafiosi, gunrunners, money-launderers, druggies, and hitmen at once, from the street thugs to the capos themselves; he is the hero without a mask, and the hopes of the city rest on his shoulders.
The Joker's plan is to undo that hope, to extinguish that light, by showing that given enough strain, even someone like Harvey Dent, even a man willing to risk his life for the rule of law, can become a savage.
There are so many really amazing portrayals here that it honestly leaves you feeling that you wanted more; despite a three-hour runtime, I wanted more of Two-Face in particular, who gains legitimacy as a villain here that he never had in the comics, or in the previous movies; it is because of Dent that Two-Face becomes who he does.
Everything in the plot, literally, turns upon Dent; the Joker's campaign - though orchestrated to appear as though it is against Batman - actually serves a single purpose, and that is to turn Dent into Two-Face. Rachel Dawes, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal (an improvement over Katie Holmes in acting chops, if not in looks,) is dating Dent, and at the critical moment - a moment where Batman is forced to choose between Dent and Rachel's lives - chooses to marry Dent, and tells him so seconds before her death at the hands of the Joker's accomplices. Batman does not know this, and I've no doubt that that element will appear in a third Chris Nolan Batman movie, if we're fortunate enough to get another one.
It is that death, and the charring into the best Two-Face costume ever, that transforms Dent into a villain; the grief and loss snaps his control, and he begins to operate out of blind vengeance.
The Joker, of course, banks on this; his goal is to extinguish the light of hope in the hearts of the people of Gotham by exposing Dent as a killer; at a stroke, this would release into the streets the flood of criminals Dent put away, and convince the people that there's no point in resisting them, because if even the supposedly incorruptible can be corrupted, there's no-one to trust, and that way lies either resignation or madness.
"Some men just want to watch the world burn."
All the bit players do their usual adequate if not stellar job; I was left wishing that both Alfred (Michael Caine) and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) had had more screen time, which is always a sign of a good performance.
Goyer's script really allows both Christian Bale, as Batman, and Ledger's Joker, room to play. The Joker's fiendishness comes out here as never before in the movies or TV; remember that this is the JOKER - someone who, in the comics, made Commissioner Gordon's daughter quadriplegic just to prove a point. The influence of the SAW films is felt here; Joker's traps almost inevitably depend on the heroes' morality to activate themselves.
There is one moment, at the end of the movie - well, in the last ten minutes, anyway - that nearly brought me to my feet, something that almost never happens in the movies.
The Joker's final trap is nasty; two ferries are leaving Gotham, one loaded with innocent civilians, the other with the criminals Dent had put away; both are carrying huge bombs, and the Joker informs them that they have a choice; each boat has the detonator for the other boat's bombs; either one boat sinks the other - and lives - or the Joker will blow them both up at midnight.
As the last minutes tick out, one of the prisoners - Tommy Lister, used in many, many movies when they need a 6'5" dude to play "intimidating black dude with goofy eye" - stands up, tells the guard holding the detonator to give him the detonator "so I can do what you shoulda did ten minutes ago."
Given the detonator, he turns with a grimace of contempt and throws it out the window into the river.
Sorry, Joker; as much as you'd like for the world to be irredeemable, there's always a tiny bit of heart left somewhere.
Batman is faced with an insurmountable situation; he is - as Gordon says, in the last minutes of the film,
...the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one we need...There are major parallels in the ending of this film, and the ending of Watchmen, the highly acclaimed graphic novel (which deserves the acclaim; I have it, and it's fantastic) which has been slavishly adapted for a movie coming "soon."
So, when you watch the Watchmen movie, and you get to the ending, when the heroes allow great evil to pass unnoticed and unremarked because to do otherwise will create even more disorder and chaos, don't feel that The Dark Knight came up with it first; TDK was a homage of the highest order to Alan Moore's work.
Batman finds, at the end, that he must claim responsibility for the deaths of several people - the one crime Batman has NEVER committed is murder - to allow the legend of Harvey Dent to remain unsullied; to defeat the Joker's plot, Dent's treachery and madness can never be revealed, and rather than allow that light of hope to be extinguished, Batman shoulders yet another burden.
...he's the hero Gotham deserves, but he's not the one we need now; so we'll hunt him, because he's tough; he can take it.This is far and away the best Batman ever filmed.
But it's more than that. This is the best movie this year so far.
And I suspect that while others might come close, this film will get more Oscars than just Best Supporting Actor. Best Screenplay and Best Director just LEAP to mind.
It's not every day that I see a movie I want to see again the next night. Or the next month.
But Tara and I are planning to see it again next Friday. So, that should say something.
