Film Retrospective: The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight


The Joker wrecks havoc across Gotham, and his performance remains as chilling and scary as it did the first time around. TDK tries to handle a lot, which is does so mostly successfully. Nolan starts off by detailing the current mob situation in Gotham. The mob is trusting Lao to handle their money, and through inside contacts, realized that Gordon knows where their banks are. Lao takes the money into safekeeping before Gordon can get to it. And then, the Joker arrives, hitting the core of the issue: they need to kill Batman before they can get to business as usual. And so they trust him. Meanwhile, Bruce trusts Dent to be the new hero of Gotham, a public hero, not a vigilante. Lao and the mob are brought to justice, but the Joker starts causing random chaos, asking for Batman's identity, and then turning Harvey into a victim of madness through Rachel's death. In the end, Batman has to take the fall. Batman isn't the hero Gotham needs, because they need a white knight like Dent, someone to give them hope. But it's the hero the city deserves, a city that cannot move past corruption, a city that let a madman neatly bring it to ruin.

Nolan juggles these multiple storylines at the expense of the cohesiveness of the film. It lacks the sharpness of BB, and as a result, seems a little hard to grasp. For example, when Dent pretended to be Batman, how did they know it would lure the Joker out? W did Bruce let Harvey claim he was Batman? Little things like that are a bit above me in this film, and I think it's because Nolan tried to be a bit more complicated that necessary. Maybe part of it was to show the plans people had, and how they all just fall in on themselves.


Cinematographically, this film was beautiful. The chase in the middle of the film was so well done, as were much of the aerial scenes. This film was very good, but it may e overrated.... how TDKR completes the saga will help define how good TDK ultimately is, I think.


 

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