THE DARK KNIGHT
RUNNING TIME 152 minutes
WRITTEN BY Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan
DIRECTED BY Christopher Nolan
STARRING Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Michael Caine, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, from a screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, based on a story by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, is, of course, ultimately from a series of comic books published by DC Comics, with the creation of the Batman character attributed to Bob Kane. In the world of comic-book superheroes, the Batman franchise has specialized in the most eccentrically colorful villains. I still remember Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne/Batman character looking out of the corner of his eye at Jack Nicholson’s clownish antics as the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, the second such cinematic transfer after Laslia Martinson’s 1966 Batman, with Adam West reprising in a campy fashion his hit television role. I remember also Milton Berle’s smirking at the idea of Batman’s “Ward,” Robin (played by Burt Ward), by pursing his lips as he pronounced “Ward.” The comically homophobic Berle also had fun with the name “Bruce.” Anyway, Robin is nowhere to be found in this new ultra-adult version running some 152 minutes and aptly titled The Dark Knight. Indeed, Mr. Nolan’s is a darker and more nihilistic Batman than any of the other six previous forays into the illuminated night sky of Gotham City, with such other Bruce Wayne/Batman impersonators, besides Mr. West and Mr. Keaton, as Val Kilmer, George Clooney and, in Mr. Nolan’s first Batman film, Batman Begins (2005), Christian Bale. Mr. Bale continues in The Dark Knight along with such other cast members from Batman Begins as Gary Oldman as Lieutenant Jim Gordon; Michael Caine as Batman’s major-domo and father figure, Alfred; and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, Bruce Wayne’s business adviser and facilitator.

As it happens, there are three additions to the cast that lift the film into the artistic stratosphere. First and foremost is the late Heath Ledger as the Joker; he transfigures this traditionally villainous role with a ghostly grandeur that has already impelled some journalists to look up the short roster of posthumous Oscar winners, though in this instance it should be for a lead role rather than a supporting one. Almost as impressive are Aaron Eckhart as the crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes, Dent’s legal assistant, who’s torn emotionally between her employer and Bruce Wayne/Batman, with whom she has had a long-term relationship.

What is most unprecedented about the narrative, however, is its largely unsympathetic treatment of the yapping and yowling citizens of Gotham City, a gloomy echo of ourselves, at the gas pumps and grocery stores, still looking for easy answers from the highest bidders for our votes. In this respect, Ledger’s Joker brilliantly incarnates the devil in all our miserable souls as we contemplate a world seemingly without hope.

The extraordinary charisma of the three new arrivals has managed to dim the luster of Batman himself. It is not Mr. Bale’s fault that the director has chosen to downplay the sacredly secret duality of Wayne/Batman; previously a deity, here he tends to be treated as just another guy hanging around police stations and gangster joints. Mr. Nolan even shifts the action briefly to Hong Kong to add Asian flavor the proceedings, perhaps because China has become so obtrusively involved in our affairs and our so-called way of life.

For that matter, Ledger’s Joker takes on the dimension of every terrorist in our most fearful imagination. He is something of a genius with high explosives and their electronic detonators. He always seems to be one step ahead of the authorities, and, on occasion, even Batman himself. By the time he has completely terrorized the people of Gotham City by blowing up half the metropolis, and ingeniously engineering the assassination of its mayor, the people are fleeing on ferries because the bridges and tunnels are too vulnerable to the Joker’s limitless terror stratagems. Ironically, Ledger’s Joker kills more mobsters than all the city’s police forces. But it’s not their loot he is after, but simply an acknowledgment by Batman and the district attorney that the battles of good vs. evil are simply exercises in futility. Finally, Batman’s greatest fear is that the Joker will completely succeed in corrupting the citizens of Gotham City, and by the time the film is over, one is not quite sure if good has really triumphed over evil. What is certain, however, is that the struggle will continue well into the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.

The copious production notes for the film tell us: “Six sequences of The Dark Knight were filmed with IMAX cameras, including the opening six minutes. This marks the first time ever that a major feature film has been even partially shot using IMAX cameras, marking a revolutionary integration of the two film formats. The IMAX Experience will appear in IMAX DMR (letterbox) while scenes shot with IMAX cameras on 15/70mm film will expand vertically to fill the entire IMAX screen, which can be up to eight stories tall, for an all-encompassing moviegoing experience.”

I must confess that I did not see The Dark Knight on an IMAX screen as I was promised by the distributor. It seems that Kung Fu Panda had a prior claim to the IMAX screen. No matter; I have survived such “revolutionary” advances as 3-D, Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision, and who can remember what else? All I can say is that in my humbly Luddite opinion, The Dark Knight doesn’t have to go eight stories high to impress me with its technical virtuosity, for which I must thank, in addition to the Nolan brothers, the director of photography, Wally Pfister; the production designer, Nathan Crowley; the editor, Lee Smith; composers Hans Zimmer and Newton Howard; and the costume designer, Lindy Hemming.

HAVING NOW PRAISED The Dark Knight to the skies, and recommended it to everyone this side of Gotham City, I must ask the reader to read no further in my review of this masterpiece because I am about to reveal its darkest secret. (In other words, spoiler alert.) And what is that? Now, don’t peek. It is simply the wanton slaughter of the two most dynamic and most idealistic innocents, Mr. Eckhart’s Harvey Dent and Ms. Gyllenhaal’s Rachel Dawes. Their deaths are testaments to the omnipotently anarchic evil of Ledger’s Joker. And for once, Bruce Wayne/Batman, for all his wiles and wizardry, is unable to save either Dent or Rachel, when earlier Batmen could have rescued them with a climatic swoop of their Batmobile, and have thrown in a wedding for the two virtuous lovers besides.

But Mr. Nolan seems to have fallen into a darker mood between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, less than three years later. Has the world changed that much for the worse in the interim? One is hard-pressed to answer that question in the negative, though it may seem strange for many that so much weight is being given to a movie about a comic-book superhero. Actually, the moral despair in The Dark Knight has moved me so strongly because Mr. Nolan and his collaborators have not gone out of their way to zap the zeitgeist in primitively Bush-bashing fashion as have so many contemporary fiction and nonfiction filmmakers with a chip on their left shoulders. The political issues in The Dark Knight remain local and municipal, not really global despite the aforementioned excursion to Hong Kong.

Yet at a time when all social systems are veering toward moral bankruptcy, I was struck by the way Gotham City is presented for the first time in Batman movie history as a city with global connections, and not merely as a self-contained abstraction of a city with its own hermetically sealed morality and innocence.

Of the two precedent-shattering victims of the Joker’s anarchic ability to corrupt the most law-abiding citizens into betraying their friends and associates, Rachel is disposed of fairly quickly and without much suffering. Dent’s destruction, by contrast, is excruciatingly prolonged by its being divided into two stages, the first when half of his face is burned up at the very moment when Batman is desperately trying to save his life. Dent then briefly becomes a Batman-genre grotesque nicknamed Two-Face, who goes on a murderous spree directed against the once-trusted individuals who had betrayed him and Rachel. The Joker has thus succeeded in turning the once-crusading-for-justice Dent into everything he had previously hated.

In the end, Bruce Wayne/Batman, Alfred and Lucius Fox try to pick up the pieces of a shattered community, but their hearts don’t seem to be in it. Too many good people have died in a seemingly futile effort to reform their society. Doesn’t that seem too close to the daily world news, even though The Dark Knight is not intentionally trying to establish any real-life parallels with its own gory fictions?

I previously have had my own auteurist doubts about Mr. Nolan’s work, even though he has been much honored for his stylistic innovations in Memento (2001) and The Prestige (2006). But after The Dark Knight, I may have to rethink my past reservations about Mr. Nolan’s place in the 21st-century cinema.

asarris@observer.com