Nearly Perfect.....Nearly...

Many, many spoilers ahead....

I want to start this review off by stating that I am not only a huge Batman fan, but a huge fan of comics in general. I’ve had a rather extensive collection for years and while I stopped reading a lot of them after several reboots a few years back, I still manage to keep up where I can. I have my personal favorites and my top three have always been made up of Spider-man, Superman, and Batman. I grew up on these. I had daily rendezvous with their toys as a child and with their stories as an adult. I grew up looking for those hard-to-find issues, stopping in strip malls and hoping to get lucky at some random po-dunk stripshop holding weekend specials. Garage sales were a kid’s best friend when searching for old comics and comic book toys.

And while all that may sound pretty geeky, I haven’t even described the worst of my moments in pure geek-isms. During the mid-90s, the Fox television station took up residence on air and one of their attempts at locking down a solid television market included new cartoon shows. Many of you will remember the amazing X-Men series (yet to be released on DVD..legally..) and I’m sure many more will remember the Batman Animated series. To even attempt to describe this show as my favorite wouldn’t do it justice. As a bored, fourteen-year old, I would sit in front of my parents’ 27” tube in the living room and pop a VHS tape into the VCR every day at 4pm and hit record. I wanted every single episode of the Batman Animated series on tape so I could watch them over and over whenever I wanted. I would even hit stop at the start of a commercial and then record again once the commercial was over. Yes, I was a total Batman nerd.

I loved Batman Begins with every ounce of my being. To me, that film is the definitive of a comic book movie. At times it is brilliant. At others it is geeky. And in the end it is just plain cheesy. But, for those who have read their fair share of comics, this is how things go. A plan to release toxic gas into the air to intoxicate all of Gotham? Cheesy? Hell yes. But no more cheesy than a man fighting crime dressed as a giant bat. As soon as I walked out of the theater after seeing Batman Begins, I wanted to see it again. And again. I went around quoting it. I absolutely loved it.

And yet, sadly, I cannot say the same for The Dark Knight.

The Dark Knight is, as everyone else has stated, a wonderful film. This is no surprise and shouldn’t be to anyone as Christopher Nolan and crew have been knocking them out of the parks for years now. The giant, arching camera swings throughout Gotham are stunning. The majority of the action is directed in such a way that you can’t help but eat it up every chance you get. Christian Bale has crafted his Batman/Bruce Wayne in a way that no other actor ever has and if you’re not smiling whenever Wayne is on screen, there’s something wrong with you. Bale is clearly having fun in everything he does here, just as he did in Batman Begins, but in The Dark Knight he has it perfected. And of course, there is no doubt that the work Heath Ledger did will go down in history as one of the finest performances ever. And as you will see, these are also the majority of the reasons that I don’t love the film.

Plot: The Dark Knight picks up shortly after the ending of Batman Begins. Things have changed in Gotham, with copycat Batmans springing up and causing more trouble than good. A character calling himself the Joker is on the prowl, creating mischief and causing trouble among the remaining Gotham mob members. Batman and Gordon are on a much stricter work relationship now, both trusting one another completely. A new cat, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckheart) is trying his best to stir up a hornet’s nest among the same crew that the Joker is trying to rally with. Thus, it becomes Batman’s job to stop the Joker, find out if Harvey Dent is truly as trustworthy as he seems, and of course, help save Gotham from the evil overrunning it. All of these things eventually tie into one another providing a deeply engaging and extremely terrifying look into the ‘mouth of madness’.

The movie really is a stunning work of film, from beginning to end. Visually, Nolan does here what we haven’t seen him do before. He has dropped most of his work with closeups and intense scenes with one-on-one dialogue. Nolan’s typical style has been replaced with large, sweeping views of Gotham and large, grand scale action sequences that are beautiful enough to make you sigh in relief once they’re over. Fistfights in small prison yards in foreign countries have been replaced with massive gunfights within large parking garages. The Batmobile/Tumbler tearing through a two-lane freeway is now tumbling through a four-six lane underground tunnel while bullets and rockets fire as if it was an orchestrated symphony. Nothing is small here. Everything is gigantic. Think Titanic big. Then multiply that by twenty. Nolan really outdoes himself here and it will be very interesting to see how he plans on returning with the third (and final?) installment of this franchise.

The acting is everything you’ve heard. Words can’t begin to describe just how wonderful Heath Ledger is in this. You really have to see it for yourself. I could sit here and detail exactly how he slivers the tongue in his mouth from time to time, as if he were the devil himself, and it still wouldn’t do it justice. You just have to see it. He’s not scary. He’s psychotic. Which is much worse than scary. This isn’t a character that goes bump in the night. This is a character that will murder your entire family, while you sleep, and laugh about it the whole time. He’s worse than the boogeyman, the headless horseman, or Jack the Ripper. Ledger’s Joker is in every way the murdering psychotic you’ve all grown up with from the comic books. There’s no doubt Ledger touched on something truly genius here.

Christian Bale, as mentioned earlier, creates such a convincing Batman/Bruce Wayne that another actor should never be allowed to step into the suit. Bale owns this role. Take the franchise in the direction of Batman Beyond if you have to, but leave Batman/Wayne to Bale. He deserves them. While Aaron Eckhart wasn’t Nolan’s first decision to be Harvey Dent (see Matt Damon), I’d have to argue that things worked out pretty darn well. Eckhart finally gets his chance to show the world what he’s made of. Eckhart’s had a questionable career, with films like No Reservations, The Wicker Man, and The Core not helping to bring light to his work done in films like Thank You for Smoking. Here, he owns Dent and you never doubt that this ‘White Knight” truly cares about the city he’s trying so hard to redeem. Eckhart’s change at the end of the film is magical as well, and it also adds to his showcase as an actor that he can credibly accomplish both sides of this two-sided character. Maggie Gyllenhaal is, as always, Maggie Gyllenhaal. Her acting nods are about the same in every film she’s done and she puts great life into the character of Rachel Dawes. Something that the awful Mrs. Cruise couldn’t possibly accomplish.

But with as great as the acting, directing, and writing might be, there are just too many things wrong with this film that keep it from achieving the legendary status of Batman Begins. There are far too many things that never get explained. Take the opening of the film for example. There’s some setup going on, there’s something going on with the mob, but why is Scarecrow there? What’s his purpose? How long does it take a multi-billionaire to reconstruct a mansion? How can they build batsuits and underground tunnels so quickly, yet, they’re stuck using a weird hideout for all their work means. While it’s much harder to follow a batmobile as it travels through the woods outside of Wayne Manor, then hides among an underground cave just outside, how hard is it to follow a guy wearing a cape who enters into an empty storage container? Why did the party scene end with Batman jumping out a window? What happened to the Joker? Why introduce Harvey Dent as Two-Face if you’re going to kill him less than forty minutes later? Why hire a new actress to replace one that didn’t want to reprise her role when you’re just going to kill her off? What happened to the Joker at the end of the movie? The first time we see Batman capture him, it was because the Joker _wanted_ him to be captured. How do we not know this happened again? Instead, we’re left with the main villain of the film hanging from a building with absolutely no answers.

Ledger’s acting here is so incredible, but with so little information given about the character (a real origin or a real ending), why should we care about him? Yes, he’s creepy. Yes, we should be scared of him. But why? We’re never given enough information with the exception that he just wants to know who Batman is. And even this point stops getting played out after he’s arrested. Are we supposed to think he’s cool and fun, or are we supposed to think he’s pure evil in every way imaginable? We can’t know for sure, because the film doesn’t give us enough to answer the questions it raises. And while the grand, sweeping camera shots of the city of Gotham are beautiful, how many times do we need to see Batman standing on a building’s ledge? What’s the point of it, other than to showoff your new IMAX camera work? Did Harvey really die at the end? Why does a short fall ruin one man’s knees yet kills another? And that bike…..that awful, awful bike.

This is a film about sacrifice. Wayne has sacrificed his love for Rachel with his desire to be the man Gotham needs. Gordon sacrifices himself, and the emotions of his family, to help protect them. And ultimately Dent sacrifices his own image by giving in to his new one. The ending of the film has Batman sacrificing the way Gotham-ites see him, whether hero or foe, just to help restore Gotham’s faith in its officials. Yet, the film sacrifices what could have been a 100% perfect comic book film by not answering questions it raised.

Even with all the things mentioned above, The Dark Knight is still one of the best comic book movies ever made. It falls short of Batman Begins, but what comic book movie doesn’t? Rumor has it that a three hour version (or longer) exists and could make its way to BluRay at some point. Lets just hope that version answers many of the questions that this one didn’t.