Revisiting The Dark Knight

A lot can change in three-and-a-half years. I was once a college freshman, awed by the mystery surrounding a movie critic and how he or she viewed a film. I was enamored with The Dark Knight, as most young men tend to be, enamored with the emotions I felt while watching it, yet unsure exactly how to put them into words. Now that I'm somewhat more grown, the thing that shocked me the most about rewatching this movie was how tragic it actually is. I found myself glued to the screen yet again, this time with tears welling in my eyes as I watched the final act of the Joker's master plan unfold, watched a once-good man who had lost his entire family to the machinations of a system he would never fully understand, threaten to murder the innocent wife and children of a man who thought he could.

The Dark Knight is infinitely more than just a comic book movie. It is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions that is paradoxically little more than the mad dog that is the Joker doing his damnedest to expose Batman, the good-hearted District Attorney Harvey Dent, and the people of Gotham City themselves as frauds and fakers, the whole lot. The philosophical ideas it touches on are both heady and somehow fundamental to who we are as human beings, ranging from whether people are basically good or evil to the very nature of fairness itself. It's likewise a brilliantly constructed and claustrophobic movie; watching it is very much like having an intelligent person slowly tighten their grip around your throat whilst philosophizing to you. This is the single most intelligent and sorrowful superhero movie, superhero film, ever made.

It is a comic book movie, yes, but Christopher Nolan is practically winking at us all the way through it with his signature directing trademarks, which he is in complete command of here. He doesn't just succeed with this movie; he goes above and beyond, and much of why it is so loved is that it is just as much a Nolan movie as it is a Batman movie. The Dark Knight doesn't just do things. It takes time to think deeply about what it does, to challenge its audiences and force them to consider the implications of these ideas' place in the world. It doesn't just make simple statements; it asks hard questions, too.

But of course, when it is a comic book movie, The Dark Knight is bar none the best of them. It works on both a macro level, as an immaculately paced, gradually crescendoing story, and a micro one as well, as an unpredictable, plot-twist-ridden thrill ride. Watching so many of its individual moments is like watching a miniature movie with its own distinctive twist and resolution. Still, it never loses sight of its desire to be far more than mere entertainment, and its frantic carnival ride through chaos on the eve of a hoped-for change in Gotham serves its characters and their evolution, whether for good or for tragic evil. The heady ideas of The Dark Knight are grounded in real, emotional stakes.

Heath Ledger's Joker is simply the brilliant, unmatchable bright spot of a stellar cast, the flame testing how much heat the other characters and their respective ideologies can take until they melt. Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent is his test dummy, an intense and complex character with two personalities, two faces. Rachel Dawes and Bruce himself are worthy additions to the cast, though they're not nearly as fundamental to the larger points The Dark Knight is trying to make. This is a story about the Joker doing his best to tear down Harvey, a man who would do anything, anything at all, to be the hero, the type of man who would plunge his hands into filth if it meant the rest of the world could stay clean. The only problem is that even a single speck of dirt can corrupt a white knight, and Joker hopes to drag Harvey into the mud pit.

Apart from the occasional bit of choppy choreography, the almost-completely-practical technical aspects of The Dark Knight are all exceptionally well done, and any director who chooses to flip a real semi-tractor trailer head over wheels on a real city street earns my vote. However, this movie is far more than the sum of its technical parts, and I feel as though I would be doing it a disservice by getting bogged down in them, as incredible as they are. All of these spectacular and very real setpieces are in service of harsh philosophies that can be very difficult to stomach, and this film pushes you philosophically to the point of throwing up. The fact that so many of the Joker's machinations end up looking like news coverage of a post-9/11 terrorist attack is but the knife that Nolan and those he works with slip into you when they bypass your defenses to confront you with a movie that sometimes feels uncomfortably grounded in reality. This movie is a collection of grim truths with a bit of merciful fantasy mixed in, whereas many superhero movies have it the other way around.

It doesn't matter that it's a comic book movie; The Dark Knight remains a masterwork of cinema, superhero-oriented or otherwise. It is a movie that both critics and audiences gravitated to, and I'm not ashamed to admit that its high-thinking philosophies and near-perfect plotting place it among the greatest I've ever seen. Nolan has turned Batman into a vessel for both spectacular storytelling that almost doesn't belong in a superhero movie and philosophies that are all but alien to the genre. Not that superhero movies are bad, just that they're never this self-transcendent. The Dark Knight is a spectacular film, an intelligent and action-packed tragedy, both with rich ties to cinema history yet unlike any other you will ever watch.

A lot can change in three-and-a-half years, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. I still love The Dark Knight, even if my reasons for doing so have evolved and grown more complex with time. This is a film well-served by in-depth analysis, and the biggest reason I keep coming back for more is that every time I do, I notice something about it I never have before.

The Dark Knight - 10/10

Psalm 32:3-5