sdelmonte | Dark Knight Expanded

There is so very much I could say about The Dark Knight that I can't resist doing a longer post. But I will try to be selective.

Short form: This might be the best super-hero inspired film ever made. And Heath Ledger is about as good as advertised, though I stop just an inch short of saying he should get an Oscar.

Maybe it could have been shorter, but I never looked at my watch.

Even with the Joker dominating the screen, Batman never became (as the critic in the NY Times said incorrectly) the Joker's sidekick. Bale holds his own, and creates a Bruce Wayne/Batman full of pain and doubt but also one who is always a hero (if a more reluctant one than in the comics).

The entire ensemble was great, even Maggie Gyllenhaal in a role that is a bit thankless. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine once again still the show when on screen, and Gary Oldman once again gives an effortless and grounded performance as Jim Gordon. I think that Gordon's normalcy and humanity are essential to these films.

The reinterpretation of the Joker and of his relationship with Batman is very interesting. It's not quite as intriguing to me as Paul Dini's notion that the Joker is always preparing for the next joke, but it's very close. And clearly Nolan and Ledger read a lot of the best Joker stories and got to the heart of them. (Yes, Alan Moore, it's another movie based on one of your comics - The Killing Joke. Try not to get angry when sales go up again and DC tries to send you another big check.)

The film was dark, and raises big questions about the role of the hero, about sanity and order and chaos, about ourselves, but it never becomes grim. Which is how it should be in a Batman story. The good guys are supposed to win in a Batman story. It just shouldn't be easy, and it wasn't.

I still love the look of the Burton Batman films. The bizarre expressionism of the comic book Gotham is part of what makes Batman's world, and movies should be able to capture that. I missed that in Batman Begins. But this time, I didn't. Somehow Nolan was able to create Gotham from Chicago with just how he shot the film. Amazing. (I still miss the Elfman score, if only because I still love his Batman theme.)

Great moments? Almost every Batman-Joker confrontation. Almost any scene with Jim Gordon. Joker and Harvey in the hospital. The people on the ferries, facing the hardest decision and making the right choice. Bruce and the Lamborghini. Jim and his son after he catches the Joker. The Joker swaggering out of the hospital and having far too much fun blowing it up. And that heartwrenching and yet strangely hopeful final scene.

There were so many moments lifted from this comic and that. I won't list them, but I love that. Also, Jim has a red headed daughter.

What next for Batman in the movies? I know that Nolan and Bale have sworn not to have a Robin, that their films are too dark. I disagree, and think that it could be done, if maybe you make Dick Grayson a tiny bit older than 10. You would just have to build up to his debut as Robin (which is Jeph Loeb's suggestion, based on how he did in in Dark Victory). Which bad guys? I don't know if there is anyone that would work after you've upped the ante so much here. But I have one idea...Catwoman, done right. In a smaller story, perhaps.

For ages I have resisted letting anything top the 1978 Superman film as my pick for best super-hero film. That one, if now very dated and always a bit silly, captured the essence of Superman and of the wonder and grace of his world. A few other films had the right idea, but came up short - Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hellboy, the 1989 Batman. All did get that there was something special about the characters and about their crusades, but none made me feel like it was the comic book hero on the screen the way Superman did. Till now.

And none ever quite understood that the strength of the best super-hero comics is that super-hero comics are not really a genre but a place where genres collide. Hellboy 2 comes close, by mixing straight fantasy and heroics. But Dark Knight gets there, gets that what makes Batman works is that his adventures are not just the story of a guy in a bat-suit. They are crime dramas. They are thrillers. They are probing psychological analysis. They are tales of average people in extraordinary situations. They are James Bond-style action. They are anything that the writer wants, limited only by page count and imagination and maybe the internal rules of the particular comic. And by mixing all these pieces on the screen, Chris Nolan and his cast and crew have made the single best super-hero film I have ever seen.