The Dark Knight Film Review

The Dark Knight begins about a year after Batman Begins. Gotham City is already slowly changing from the nightmare urbanscape of the first movie into something like. The Batman and his relentless campaign against crime has made it so.

The Dark Knight, the Batman, is played once again by Christian Bale, and he is once again the tortured, brooding hero whose soul has been scarred by tragedy. But Batman has dealt with the trauma by becoming a kind of dark hero with a moral code that may not be society's but is strict nevertheless. But that moral code has served the Dark Knight well in his role as the terror to those who would do the terrible.

Enter once of the most frightening characters ever to be displayed on the big screen. The Joker in the Dark Knight is Heath Ledger's masterpiece, a maniacal personification of pure chaos and id. Heath Ledger's Joker is not the fun loving twit that Caesar Romero played in the TV series or even the mad villain played by Jack Nicholson in the previous film franchise. Heath Ledger's Joker is something else entirely, something unimaginable, the most iconic of Batman villians. As Michael Caine's sad, worldly wise Alfred says, the Joker just wants to watch the world burn. And, by the way, provide the match and kerosene.

The Joker showed just what a tragedy Heath Ledger's death was to cinema. If in his late twenties, Heath Ledger could call such a being into life, what could have he had done in later years, with more experience?

Rounding out the trio of characters is Harvey Dent, the crusading district attorney played by Aaron Eckhart, who has a Bobby Kennedy like earnestness about him. And it's not the Bobby Kennedy of the 1968 campaign, filled with empathy for the poor and oppressed. Eckhart's Harvey Dent is Attorney General Bobby Kennedy of the early 1960s, driven, ruthless, and filled with moral righteousness.

And that makes the descent of Harvey Dent into Two Face all the more tragic. Two Face is Harvey Dent after half of his body is horribly scarred and his soul rent into two parts, good and evil, his actions determined not by volition, but by the toss of a coin.

But the battle between Christian Bale's Dark Knight and Heath Ledger's Joker is the core of the movie. Slowly but surely Batman begins to realize that he is facing a different kind of villain, one that cannot be reasoned with, negotiated with, are pleaded with. Batman, the Dark Knight, might have to do the unthinkable to stop the maniacal Joker.

The Dark Knight is wonderfully politically incorrect in that way. Bruce Wayne, the billionaire which serves as the mask for Batman, a man who does honor to capitalism and individual initiative. And the viewer does not know of the origins of the Joker or very much cares. Whatever trauma, if any, that created this monster is irrelevant to the task at hand of stopping him-by any means necessary.

Gary Oldman as police Lt. James Gordon and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachal Dawes, Bruce Wayne's new love interest, rounds out the cast. As Batman Begins, the Dark Knight is splendidly directed by Christopher Nolan.