Review :

The dark knight could be the best superhero movie of all time. Except it isn’t a superhero movie at all. Yes, it stars Batman though only just. Yes, it has familiar villains though only just. Yes, it is about good versus evil though only just.

Christopher Nolan's film is a genre bender if there ever was one. The Dark Knight is to the Batman series what the graphic novel is to the comic book — it might use the same tools, the same language, but scratch the surface and what you get is something far more intense.




The darkest Batman movie by far is also the darkest superhero movie ever: you’ll have to search hard for a flash of any other color but black on the screen. Just as hard as you’ll have to search for the surety that usually accompanies such films so glibly that the good guys will prevail, that the good guys are in fact the good guys.

Good doesn’t take on evil in The Dark Knight; evil takes on good testing it till it threatens to break. The man in the black cape is Christian Bale the gritty, unsmiling star of Batman Begins who breathed new life into the character. The villain is the Joker, and Heath Ledger’s version is so different from Jack Nicholson’s as to be utterly unrecognisable. He taunts and torments, but there is nothing funny about it. This Joker doesn’t crack jokes at least not any that will make you laugh. His joke is on humanity, his punch-line when he turns honest people into killers, thieves and villains.

Underneath that distorted make-up, where the black, white and red bleed into each other and you can see bits of skin, is a man, not a cartoon. And that is what makes him so frightening. He knows no logic, no reason. He gets millions of dollars only to torch it all he doesn’t want anything so pedestrian as money; Gotham, he believes, deserves a “better class of criminal”. He kills when he doesn’t need to, he spares a life when he can take it, he is every inch the king of chaos he says he is.

And where does that leave our Caped Crusader? More alone and more desperate than ever. He is torn: with the Joker going after lawmakers, judges and officers, does he have what it takes to bring him down? Can he be ruthless and murdering and still live with himself? And whatever he does, he can’t be the Hero. In this world, Batman is still reviled as an outlaw vigilante who should be brought to book. How can he relieve the desolation of innocent civilians who have lost all to mob violence and a crazed criminal when they consider him a villain, too?

Either Batman can unmask himself and surrender as the Joker wants, or he can find a White Knight to shine the light of hope as he does the dirty work in the shadows.