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No longer burdened by the traditional comic book setup of who the "hero" is and how he came to be, the movie thrusts us right into the action with a brilliantly staged robbery. Director Christopher Nolan has said that the movie "Heat" was actually a big inspiration in the making of this movie, and it does have the look of a Michael Mann movie. It also allows us an inspired intro to the chief nemesis of Batman in this movie, Joker. Unlike other movie villains who are interested in money and power, the Joker really has no discernable movie other than creating total chaos. This makes him the scariest kind of villain in that he really has nothing to lose while everyone else around him does. Of all the Batman movies so far, this one gives us a Gotham City that is totally rooted in reality. All the previous movies in this franchise have presented Gotham as a place of gothic buildings and ominously dark colors that consume the spirits of those who live there. It ends up looking like a place that can really only exist in the imagination, and that goes for even "Batman Begins" (also directed by Christopher Nolan) which was the first Batman movie that rooted the comic book character in a world more real than what Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher dreamed up. Shooting in downtown Chicago, there is not the fantastical city we have seen Gotham as in the past, but a city like others we know that deal with high levels of crime and corruption that are seemingly uncontainable. As a result, the look and locale of the movie really adds a lot to the story and the characters in it, and it makes everything seem more dangerous and precarious. To do this I think is a brilliant move on the part of Chris Nolan, and along with this summer's "Iron Man," it helps to completely redefine how a comic book movie can and maybe even should be made. Christian Bale now effectively owns the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman. With Christian Bale, you get a Batman and Bruce Wayne with different levels that he plays ever so effectively. Bruce goes from being a swinging playboy to a fighter of crime in no time at all it seems. Even if Bruce comes off as a cad, you still care about him and root for him because it seems like no one can take care of crime the way he does. But then there's Heath Ledger in what sadly became his final completed onscreen performance as the Joker. There was a lot of talk, before the movie came out, of how he should be nominated for an Oscar, and even receive it to become the first posthumous Academy Award winner since Peter Finch in "Network." Some like Terry Gilliam have found this to be utterly annoying and simply see it as Warner Brothers' way of juicing up the excitement for the movie so that it has one hell of an opening weekend. While that criticism is certainly justified in a lot of respects, having seen the movie, I now count myself on the bandwagon for Heath getting the damn Oscar. Ledger took on a role already made infamous by Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's original "Batman," and he more than succeeded in making it his own. This seemed unthinkable when it was first announced that he would playing it, but Christopher Nolan was correct in his assessment that Ledger was "fearless." Seriously, Heath Ledger's performance in this movie is a work of art. Whereas Nicholson made us share in his gleefully sadistic nature as the Joker to where we couldn't deny that we were endlessly entertained, Ledger gives us a Joker who is a viciously terrifying psychotic who is to be feared at every move he makes. God only knows what depths he went to in order to play this role, but it is easy to see why he lost a lot of sleep over it. His Joker is indeed the scariest of villains in that he has no real motive for doing what he does. This guy is in it for all the chaos and anarchy that he can get out of this city he inhabits, and he couldn't seem to care less about money and power. Ledger makes his Joker a live wire of a character, and the tension when he is in a room with someone he is taunting is so thick that you would need a heavy duty chainsaw cut through it. There is no real back story to his character other than a story he tells about his daddy cut his face to explain why his face is scared to look like a smile. But then again, can you really be sure that he is telling the truth? Ledger's Joker is one of the scariest movie villains that I would put on the same level with Hannibal Lecter from "The Silence of the Lambs" as well as Robert DeNiro's Max Cady from Martin Scorsese's remake of "Cape Fear." I would even go as far as to put him on a pedestal with Ben Kingsley's ragingly raw performance as Don Logan from "Sexy Beast." I love a bad guy that totally gets under the nerves of the audience to such an effect where it's like he or she is reaching out of the screen and into the audience with their hands out to choke you. I get such a fiendish delight out of that, and this performance makes it seem like it has been so long since we have had a truly unnerving villain show up on the big screen. Ironically, the one thing that is as tragic as Heath's untimely death is the story of "The Dark Knight" itself. Unlike other summer movie blockbusters, this one is not afraid to dare us in taking a journey to the darkest and despairing depths of its characters short-lived triumphs and endless sorrows. Like I said before, this is not a story about good guys fighting off the bad guys, but a story of how blurred our moral and ethical boundaries can get when we are pushed beyond our limits. Many choices are made not just by the main characters of the movie, but by the people of Gotham. What will they do to survive? What choice will they make? But more importantly, what will their choice say about them as a person? Are they prepared to live with the consequences of their actions? These questions hit everyone hard, but it hits no other character harder than Batman. Bruce finds that in order to defeat the Joker, he has to become almost as bad as him. But can he live with that? Can the others close to him live with that as well? Bruce starts to find himself boxed into a corner as the Joker continually taunts him in a way that turns the public against him. In the end, Bruce Wayne becomes a lot like Jack Bauer from "24" in that he protects the people as much as he can, but he ends up paying a very high price for what he does and gets very little reward from it. Batman says that he is not a hero, and while his actions are heroic, he does kind of have a point. To protect what integrity that Gotham has left, he has to make some hard sacrifices. Nothing in the city of Gotham is black and white, but an endless sea of grey as people are challenged to see what kind of people they really are. No one is innocent, and everyone is guilty of something. This reminds me of another Michael Mann movie, "The Insider," which many people thought was simply an anti-smoking public service announcement. In fact, the movie was really a look at about endangerment of ethics and morality in an increasingly corporate world. "The Dark Knight" finds its power and its tragedy in the characters who start off good, but soon lose their way and head down a path that they can never turn back from. That's the real threat that the Joker exposes by getting underneath his victim's psyches by manipulating them where they are most vulnerable. "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." email this review to a friend
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