As pure cinema, The Dark Knight is a triumph for director Christopher Nolan beyond any and all expectation or hyperbole. As the last completed performance of actor Heath Ledger’s career, it is also a soaring and magnificent testament to a singular talent gone far too soon.  For those reasons alone, the film is an immediate must-see. For those that need a little more convincing, thankfully they aren’t the only ones.

The late Heath Ledger in Warner Bros' The Dark Knight

I’m going to try and keep this brief, because the less a person knows going in the better it is. Basically, this second chapter in Nolan’s reinvention of Bob Kane’s immortal comic character picks up one year after Batman Begins. The Caped Crusader (Christian Bale) is still leading a double life, doing all he can to help Gotham police Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) rid the streets of the mob menace poisoning its very soul.

He is helped when new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), currently dating his former lady love Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes), is elected and starts living up to all the promises made during his campaign. He is the city’s proverbial White Knight, and with him standing up to all the worst that Gotham has to offer Batman finally foresees a day when the city he calls home no longer needs him as its savior.

Enter The Joker (Ledger), and with his sudden appearance all bets are off, the rules of law and order – whether engineered by the close-knit mob bosses or by those in governmental authority – now null and void, chaos and anarchy the new religions of the day.

There has been talk for some time that Ledger is going to win a posthumous Academy Award for his work in this. While I will not go quite that far, what I will say is that this talk isn’t premature. What the actor does as The Joker defies any and all easy descriptions. This isn’t so much a performance as it is a possession. There is no arc here, no deep meaning or tidy resolutions explaining how this man of pure mayhem and murder came to be, nothing comfortable or easy about him to give audiences a moments peace or quiet.

He just is, the cocksure actor turning The Joker into a purely malevolent force of magnetic evil unlike anything the screen has ever seen. Without a doubt, this is one of the titanic portraits of our time, and like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, Bette Davis in All About Eve, Marlon Brando in Streetcar Named Desire, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice and Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull this is a bit of screen acting guaranteed to become the stuff of legend.

But this isn’t the only reason The Dark Knight borders on magnificence. Nolan has turned this comic book icon into almost Wagnerian opera, the characters going through more twists, turns and crescendos then any I could have ever imagined. Nothing that came before prepares you for the depths and complexity found in Christopher and brother Jonathan’s script (with a story assist from David S. Goyer). People wrap one round the other, merging here and extricating themselves there only to ultimately find they're in an unforeseen place beyond any they could have anticipated.

I must make a couple of admissions. Having seen the film twice (once in IMAX – the definitive way to watch it – and once in standard 35mm) I have significant problems with the movie’s length. At 152 minutes I think the filmmaker could have easily trimmed a good 15 to 20 of running time and not lost an ounce of majesty. Also, as brilliant as much of longtime Nolan cinematographer Wally Pfister’s work is (and I say give him the Oscar right now, it’s that good), a few of the action scenes are so weirdly close-up and tight it’s fairly difficult to get a decent POV of what it is exactly that’s going on. 

These are minor problems, however, and ones I don’t feel like dwelling on. Much like The Empire Strikes Back the director has crafted a singular piece of work that not only continues the mythology begun in the initial chapter but also brilliantly hints at the hopefully intricate complexities and imaginative dramaturgy of what is still to come. Yet The Dark Knight is also a wondrous stand-alone epic unlike anything else Hollywood has even remotely attempted all year, Nolan and company taking the comic book genre to a place of emotionally electric significance the likes of which it has never experienced before and, I dare say, probably never will again.

Film Rating: êêêê (out of 4)

Additional Links

-  The Dark Knight Theatrical Trailer
-  Batman Begins Theatrical Trailer