Warner Brothers Pictures

I went to the special midnight showing of “The Dark Knight” last night. While this makes me a more capable critic than, say, someone who hasn’t seen it yet, I also can’t claim to have seen the whole movie…I got tired about 2 hours in and dozed for ten minutes. Luckily this still left 20 minutes of ending as the whole film last 2.5 hours. That’s a lot of action movie.
Make no mistake, I’m not complaining about the movie…it was great. I’d go so far as to say it’s the best superhero/comic book movie I’ve ever seen. Not being a huge fan of the genre, it’s still a ways from all-time greats like “The Big Lebowski” or “No Country for Old Men” (I like the Coen brothers’ style). But you definitely come away from this movie feeling like you got your money’s worth. Heath Ledger’s performance in itself was worth the $10 I paid for advance tickets. I’d be hard-pressed to outdo other critics’ gushing about the maniacal, psychopathic persona he assumed for this role. Suffice it to say that he is the Joker on that silver screen.
A superhero movie with great acting, or even the potential for great acting, is a rarity and makes this movie stand out, but there are other bright spots to “The Dark Knight”. It seems like any sequel is by definition handicapped in its storytelling…you’ve already seen the origins and much of the background of the main characters, so where do you go from there? Christopher Nolan (along with his brother Jonathan Nolan) managed to bring out new elements of a now changed Gotham City to keep the movie interesting and compelling. Whereas before we saw a city in the grips of rampant crime and corruption, we start this movie with a prospering and relatively crime-free metropolis where the drug-lords and mafia are afraid to conduct business at night for fear of “the Batman”. Of course, the Joker, a self-proclaimed “agent of chaos” throws a wrench in the works when he tries to bring out and ultimately reveal the identity of Batman. He’s not interested in money or power, he just wants to “watch the world burn”. A number of the reviews I’ve perused have mentioned the somewhat obvious links to 9/11. While there are no overt attempts to mimic or reference that type of terrorism, there are more general aspects of chaos that the movie explores. What is a good guy, guided by moral principles, supposed to do against a bad guy who plays by no rules and recognizes no moral code. What if he can’t win unless he bends his own rules? By bending them does the good guy become bad? I suppose this is pretty well-worn territory in many superhero movies, but The Dark Knight seems to touch on them in more subtle and varied ways than some of the other comic book movies I can recall.
In summation, go see this movie. I’m going to check it out in IMAX on Saturday…stay tuned.