The Dark Knight (Single-Disc Widescreen Edition)

First of all, this is a GREAT film, not just a great Batman film.Others have compared Christopher Nolan's two Batman films to the Tim Burton Batman films, so I won't repeat their observations. Let me simply say that everything about this movie, from the script to the casting to the CGI to the acting and ultimately the directing is superb.Now to Plato. The meta-message of The Dark Knight is a meditation on the nature of good and evil, the veneer of civilization, the virtues of principle and the necessity and the danger of bending principle in emergencies, the differences between evil for gain or power and evil for mere destruction and chaos, and the tension between public duty and private loyalty. Finally there is the question of the place for facts and the place for "sacred" myth.(Caution: this review refers to specific scenes and characters.)The mafia in Gotham is evil for gain and power. They want money and they want influence. They also want order. When the manager of the bank objects to the robbery he complains that the usual rules and courtesies among criminals are being violated. The corrupt police officers are evil for gain as well. They too need general acceptance of rules and procedures.The Joker is evil for evil's sake. He sows chaos and disorder and wants to expose the thin veneer of civilization. He seeks only to unmask what he sees as contradiction and hypocrisy in human nature and to demonstrate that so-called good citizens are really evil underneath.Scarecrow, who was featured in Batman Begins and has a minor role in the drug bust scene in The Dark Knight, is a deranged psychiatrist whose evil comes from desire for power over others as he uncovers the weaknesses in the minds of others.The Mayor is out for power but does not resort to evil. Police Lieutenant James Gordon represents incorruptible good. This is ultimately stressed when Gordon must make a choice between public duty and personal relationship. Batman faces that same dilemma when he must decide whether to rescue Harvey Dent or Rachel Dawes. Likewise, the passengers in the ferries must choose between what they are told will be personal survival and the deaths of others, in another of The Joker's nefarious experiments. When the Wayne Industries accountant is about to reveal the identity of Batman, The Joker announces that the accountant must die, and citizens try to assassinate him. Personal safety trumps adherence to the good sometimes, but not all times.Batman seems weaker than The Joker because he adheres to rules. The Biblical injunction, "Justice, justice shall you pursue," has been understood as demanding that justice be pursued justly. Evil, especially evil for its own sake, makes no such demand. We see this every time terrorists deliberately target innocents and hide themselves behind children knowing that those in pursuit will not purposely aim at innocent bystanders. This gives evil a huge temporary advantage.Yet sometimes the good must bend and even break the rules. Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus during a critical interval during the Civil War. Batman asks Lucius Fox to preside over such a broken rule to locate and catch The Joker. When and how can we know when good can break rules to catch evil? Batman answers by creating a mechanism to restore the rules as soon as the crisis is over.Alfred Pennyworth indirectly poses the question, "Knowing that evil, if attacked, will double its efforts and create even more destruction, is it really wise to go after evil?" The bad guys cause huge destruction after Batman and Gordon squeeze the mafia, creating enormous conflict and guilt in Batman. But without disturbing the hornet's nest, evil would prevail anyway. So the battle must be joined in any event.Harvey Dent is extremely complex. He berates Gordon for compromising his police unit by accepting some corrupt officers to his staff. Gordon answers by claiming that sometimes those who know corruption can be the most effective in fighting it. Dent is identified as the "White Knight" whose public persona will rally the public against evil. But Dent himself participates in an untruthful diversion to help trap The Joker. Even he compromises good for the sake of fighting evil.When Rachel and Dent are being held in danger Batman and Gordon each race to save them. Batman declares he is going to save Rachel but is tricked into going to Dent's location. Rachel dies and Dent is severely injured. In a brilliant make-up creation the right side of Dent's face remains normal and the left side is severely and dramatically changed. He has physically transformed from a White Knight into his derisive nickname, "Two Face." Reminiscent of Jekyll and Hyde, Dent's nature is now permanently divided.The death of Rachel has destroyed Dent's belief in good and has dissolved his commitment to the public's welfare. Now he only thinks of his own personal pain and loss. But he is not a creature of pure evil. His hurt and grudge turn him into a near nihilist. The lucky coin with two heads has been transformed. One side is now ruined and becomes for him the oracle of ethics. Life and death depend solely on chance; solely on the flip of a coin.Furious at Gordon for the actions of the corrupt police officers in Gordon's unit who betrayed Rachel, Dent finds Gordon's wife and children. Recognizing that Gordon's young son is dearest to him, Dent demands that Gordon reassure the son as Dent flips his coin to decide the boy's fate.Batman, for whom good and evil, life and death, are not decided by chance, intervenes. In their fight Dent and Batman both plunge to the ground from a height. Batman survives and tells Gordon that the myth of Dent's goodness must become the rallying point for the city. Dent remains the White Knight, while Batman allows himself to become The Dark Knight, spurned by the public, identified wrongly but necessarily as the source of evil, who can then secretly work for the good. Only Gordon and his son know the true story behind this myth. Gotham thus gets the hero it deserves.The Joker is captured but his fate is left hanging, literally and figuratively. We do not even know for certain whether Dent died, or unconscious, has survived his fall. All we know for sure is that the complexity of fighting evil and the compromises permitted for good are unsolved. Civilization continues but only barely. The Joker has destroyed Rachel, transformed Dent, and caused everlasting turmoil and doubt within Batman.The need to resort to myth over facts after arguing previously for the absolute value of Truth, ends Plato's Republic, with the famous story of the myth of the cave. We too are left in the dark, in the company of The Dark Knight, at the end of this superb film.We can only wonder what the sequel might have been, with The Joker and Two Face challenging Batman, had Heath Ledger survived.Speaking of Heath Ledger I want to mention a few things about his performance as The Joker. There is a small pantheon of presentations of psychiatrically deranged individuals in film. Among the best are Olivia Thailand in Snake Pit, Gregory Peck in Spellbound, Jack Nickelson in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Ledger's perhaps surpasses them all.For those with a psychiatric or medical background like myself, the use of his slight head tics and the seemingly random movement of his tongue suggest that The Joker has been in a psychiatric institution and medicated with drugs that left him with a case of tardive dyskinesia, a rare but serious and irreversible movement disorder that can be a side effect of certain psychotropic medications. This touch, which I believe was meticulously and masterfully added to the portrayal by Ledger, makes The Joker both more convincing and more dangerous.I am told that Ledger immersed himself in The Joker's state of mind before and during the filming. It is not unknown for an actor to have difficulty extricating himself from such a wrenching and demanding role. Joaquin Phoenix and Faye Dunaway have each spoken about this as they worked to emerge from Johnny Cash and Joan Crawford. If this was so for Ledger then The Joker got an undeserved bitter laugh while we have only tears.Addendum July 23, 2008: One of The Joker's henchmen must have gotten into my spell checker to change Olivia De Havilland into Olivia Thailand. Sorry for that.I want to expand on one point distinguishing Batman from Dent. When The Joker reveals the locations of Rachel and Dent, Gordon asks Batman which location he is going to. Batman says Rachel's but I believe he is aware of The Joker's double crosses and switches, and knowingly goes to Dent's location. That Batman expresses no surprise at finding Dent rather than Rachel confirms this view. Bruce Wayne would have rescued Rachel but Batman, a true hero, puts his public duty above his private preferences.After Rachel is killed Dent loses his sense of public duty and loses faith in goodness. Batman, equally in love with Rachel and equally convinced she will marry him, retains his public duty and goodness, though he is burdened with grief and guilt. Perhaps a White Knight cannot endure crushing disappointment. Perhaps only a Dark Knight, who has already experienced the crushing loss of viewing the murders of his father and mother, and holding himself responsible for that tragedy, can make his way through darkness without losing his way.A final note, in response to a commenter who took issue with my portrayal of Gordon as incorruptibly good, I agree that Gordon made pragmatic choices, and refer to them in the essay. But as a person he is beyond bribery and never loses sight of his duty to the citizenry. So how about personally incorruptible but one who made some seemingly necessary but ultimately unwise alliances.

Even before The Dark Knight opened in theaters, it had taken on a macabre mystique. Heath Ledger's untimely death and glimpses of his makeup and performance created part of a box office draw rarely equaled in motion picture history. But not even the trailers and TV ads could prepare audiences for Ledger's inspired and disturbing performance. The previous incarnation of the Joker, played by Jack Nicholson, was nothing but a violent, hyperactive clown. Nicholson overplayed the role and made the character conform to his larger-than-life persona. But Ledger nailed the real essence of the Joker and bore no resemblance to Nicholson's caricature. The Joker of The Dark Knight is not a simple murderer and bank robber. His goal is to inspire evil in others so that even the most law abiding citizen will be driven to commit acts of crime or murder.At any opportunity, the Joker tries to drive crime fighters toward crime by sowing the seeds of terror and chaos. He allows himself to fall into a police trap so that he can spring a more diabolical plot. He arranges to have two ferries full of passengers forced into committing mass murder against one another. He dresses restrained civilians as criminals so police will be responsible for murdering innocents. To portray such a character, Ledger adopted mannerisms that at times seemed insect-like, similar to Jeff Goldblum's performance in The Fly. At other times, Ledger's performance invoked Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. But the combination of nihilism and violent eruption that defined the Joker was achieved purely by Ledger's own artistry and for that he should be considered for a posthumous Academy Award. Despite Christian Bale getting top billing, Ledger played a more important, challenging role in the film. Wayne is well defined from Batman Begins and the Joker is firmly established in the prologue, a bank heist in which all the accomplices are shot and the Joker issues his tenet, which is a twist on Nietzsche: "What doesn't kill you makes you stranger."But the central character in The Dark Knight is neither the Joker nor Batman. It's Harvey Dent. The film follows the major changes that transform him from the public attorney into DC comic book villain Two-Face. The bulk of the character development focuses on Dent's complicated descent from a dedicated, fearless political figure, passionate about defeating criminals using the rule of law. This white knight of Gotham lives by his tenet, "you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Dent is able to achieve popularity and make good on his promise to put violent mafia figures behind bars mainly because Batman is willing to do the dirty work and get no credit for it. As Batman's success in the streets and Dent's success in the courtroom push the mob organizations into an increasingly small corner, the Joker appeals to the mob bosses and rallies them against Batman. In the ensuing chaos, it becomes clear that Dent lacks ethical principles. When he loses his girlfriend, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and damages half his face in one of the Joker's vicious schemes, Dent turns his back on the law altogether. With some words of inspiration from the Joker, Dent transforms himself into Two-Face. Dent had gone after criminals. But Two-Face preys upon cops, including Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), using a two-headed coin similar to the one Nolan and Bale used in The Prestige. Instead of magic tricks, however, Two-Face uses the coin to determine the fate of his victims.The significance of the coin and of Dent's prophetic quote about becoming a villain is to show how easy it is to succumb to chance and chaos in the absence of real principles. One of the themes of The Dark Knight is to evaluate how different characters respond to the pressures of leadership and of fighting evil. Nolan hits upon a truth seemingly missed by the entire press corps: leaders must be willing to sacrifice their popularity to do what's right. This core message of The Dark Knight is demonstrated in a subplot about telecommunications surveillance taken right from the front pages of newspapers during the US debate about the Homeland Security Act of 2007. Bruce Wayne uses government contractors to build an advanced telecom technology that taps into ordinary cellphones to triangulate and illuminate the location of anyone in Gotham. The technology is the only way to locate and catch the Joker. But when Wayne Enterprises' most trusted official, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), finds out what Wayne is up to, he says that no man should have that much power and tenders his resignation.Faced with an adversary who is threatening countless lives and the future of Gotham, Wayne understands the consequences if he doesn't do what's necessary to end the Joker's campaign of terror. Dent proves to be an unprincipled politician with a rotten core and no one but Wayne/Batman is willing to sacrifice popularity to win the fight against evil. Ultimately, Batman decides he must take the blame for the actions of Two-Face in order to defeat the Joker and restore faith to the people of Gotham. The decision has major consequences. Gordon ultimately describes Batman as, "not a hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector...a dark knight." Public perception is always secondary to Batman. His principles guide him to defeat evil and save lives, but the result is his loss of popularity and respect. Some things are more important than public perception.Approximating the viewing experience in IMAX theaters, the Blu-ray version of The Dark Knight shifts between 1.78:1 and 2.4:1 sequences, which is a tremendous asset in preserving the vision of the filmmaker and in attempting to get an IMAX-like experience in viewers' home theaters. The prologue, as well as other 1.78:1 sequences, appear with lifelike detail and good depth. Some have complained about the subtle use of edge enhancement as detracting from the overall picture quality, but I believe what they are seeing is an ever-so-slight glow effect that makes the bright areas of some scenes appear heightened. Deducting points for this type of brightness would be silly. Meanwhile, the black level is remarkable as it conveys all gradations of grey and retains very good definition. Since so much of the film has dark, dimly lit scenes, the inky blacks contribute greatly to the depth and weight of the picture.So how does the resolution of the 2.4:1 content compare to the 1.78:1 picture quality? Believe it or not, the detail remains nearly consistent in both aspect ratios--there's just more presence in the scenes shot using the IMAX cameras. Non-IMAX sequences give up surprisingly little in definition. Perhaps the most extraordinary scene to view the differences is when Batman raids the high rise building in Hong Kong to extract Lau (Chin Han). In the full IMAX resolution, with much of the screen enveloped in deep black, Batman is shown perched above the city. He then descends through the air, breaking through the window nearby the desk where Lau is working and quickly dispatches Lau's body guards. Finally, as he holds Lau near the broken windows, both men are whisked out of the building by a floating device and a passing aircraft. The complicated, busy action coupled with poor lighting would be problematic if not for the detail delivered both by the 1.78:1 and 2.4:1 shots that make up the scene. While the IMAX picture is preferable because of a greater sense of depth and resolution, the 2.4:1 content shares its small, gentle grain and otherwise clean, highly detailed presentation. Some element of the grain has a digital sheen to it, but I cannot justify deducting a point or half-point for that. In keeping with the dark visuals, the sound throughout The Dark Knight is weighted toward the lower registers with heavy LFE content. While the audio across the dynamic range is delivered in good detail, with plenty of resolution, the Dolby TrueHD content is clearly bass-heavy. It doesn't have quite the 3D impact one might expect in an action movie, with very little content assigned assigned to the rear channels. But it is preferable to err on the conservative side than to have an overly aggressive surround soundstage where it is really not warranted. On the other hand, some multichannel audiophiles may nitpick that the surrounds are underutilized. The anchoring across the center channel delivers all the dialog, while the front left and right speakers provide the bulk of the score. The music by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard is less thematic and more of a mood amplifier to make the story more hard-hitting. Aside from the sound effects and subwoofer content, the soundtrack mostly disappears in the action and visuals. Looking back on it, that is a unique accomplishment for an action film, to be such a visual work of art that one hardly notices the score as sound. While all detail of the dialog and music is clearly articulated across the front channels, it often sounds diminutive in comparison to deeper content.Listen to the scene where Batman, Lt. Gordon and Dent have a rooftop meeting together. Gordon's and Dent's voices are perfectly reproduced, crisp and detailed, yet they sound slightly anemic compared to Batman's deeper, more open voice. While the audio engineering is actually very good, the bass emphasis can overshadow the more relaxed dialog, especially Gordon's voice. This is a minor complaint, as all dialog is plainly audible and every word and breath expertly recorded. And of course, the advantage of having a pronounced LFE channel is on display throughout The Dark Knight. Listen to the scene where the 18 wheeler flips over its horizontal axis--an impressive bit of stuntwork--creating a cacaphony of deep bass rumble, crashing steel and other sound effects. Explosions, breaking glass, gunshots and other effects are impressively engineered. The amazing feature of the Dolby TrueHD track is that nothing gets lost in the mix, regardless of the minimal use of surrounds.Warner's BD is a must-have for your collection. The film is truly unique and riveting, and Warner did a great job integrating the IMAX footage for 1080p. Highest recommendations.