Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is one of the most culturally impactful movies of our generation, winning a Golden Globe for best supporting actor, Academy Award for best supporting actor and sound editing, and a BAFTA award for the best supporting actor, and after seeing the movie multiple times, watching countless documentaries on the creation and writing of the film, and reading comics that inspired the movies story, I cannot dispute that this film is nothing short of a masterpiece.
The year was 2008, when the movie industry was taken by storm by the release of The Dark Knight.
The film had received $158,411,483 in the box office on its opening weekend, and would eventually receive its place in the top 50 highest grossing movies of all time earning $533,345,358 by the year 2018. Prior to The Dark Knight, no superhero movie had been able to accomplish quite a feat. The movie drastically increased the presence of superhero movies and made them a force to be reckoned with.
Prior to the release of The Dark Knight, superhero movies relied on constant quips, and their main heroes to tell their story in interesting ways, giving them the perspective of being more silly and light hearted, which made the release of The Dark Knight all the more satisfying for those creating and featuring in it.
The film had an exposition not seen in the scene of the superhero genre, due to the brilliant plot progression provided by award winning director and writer Christopher Nolan. An example of his shear talent would be shown in the first scene in which all of our central protagonists meet on the rooftop of the Gotham precinct.
The scene creates aporia by putting a tense conflict in the conversation between Harvey and Gordon, while Batman staying true to his character watches over the confrontation silently. The camera work communicates to the audience that this is a conversational standoff by circling around our heroes as they debate aggressively to each other over what their next step will be in their fight against The Joker. The angling treats it almost as a western standoff, building tension between the characters in a way that signifies to the audience that these aren’t characters in a movie, they’re real people, and the dialogue, and camera work displays that perfectly.
The passion shows in each and every one of the actors playing their signified roles no matter how big or small. Heath Ledger, The Joker, is no acception. Before the release of the film, long time fans of Batman were upset over the choice of the role Heath would be playing when selected over A list actors such as Steve Carell, Crispin Glover, and Adrien Brody, with fans going as far as sending threats to the producers over the choice. On July 6th, 2008 the first trailer of the movie was released, and fans went wild over Ledger’s performance. He wasn’t just an actor playing a role, he was the Joker. No other previous Joker actor was able to truly embody the character as much as Heath had done, and in doing so, he’s held as one of the best movie villains in all of film history.
Ledger went to extreme lengths in making sure his adaptation of The Joker would not only be amazing, but the best one film had ever seen. He would lock himself in a hotel room for days at a time with nothing but a journal that’s now referred to as the Joker Diary. Ledger spent hours at a time perfecting his laugh, and even went as far as depriving himself of sleep to furtherly decay his mental state to write the diary, and before shoot takes on set for the film he would go through his diary to ‘bring out’ The Joker. Michael Caine, the actor who played Alfred Pennyworth, expressed how the first time he saw Ledger in full makeup and costume during the shooting of the fundraiser scene, he forgot his lines, and emphasised how absolutely terrified he was by Ledger’s Joker. Sadly on January 22, 2008 at around 3:00pm before the world got to react to Ledger’s legendary performance, he was found dead in his home in New York from acute combined effects of multiple sleeping medications. His death would forever cast a shadow over the film, and the industry as a whole. Ledger’s Joker is what every movie villain should be.
Christopher Nolan’s talent combined with Heath Ledger’s performance provided the audience with a piece of cinematic gold, that can all be proven with just the opening scene of the entire movie. The heist. The sequence starts with a man in a clown mask in a tall builder shooting a grappling hook onto a neighboring building, with a grievous tune playing over the sequence that builds a gritty tension. Hunched over and back faced to the camera on the ground level we see a man with a clown mask dangling from his hand, and a duffle bag over his shoulder as a car pulls in front of him and he gets in. The music becomes more tense and now we as the audience know this is going to be a robbery. We see the sky scraper crew zipline on top of the roof of what we presume is a bank. The dialogue starts when the car crew discusses their shares of the heist, and introduces The Joker through exposition. “Does he think he can sit it out and still get a slice? I know why they call him The Joker”(The Dark Knight). one of the car crew says. The camera cuts back to the rooftop crew as they discuss why ‘they’ call him The Joker.
“I heard he wears makeup”
“Makeup?”
“Yeah to scare people. You know, like warpaint”(The Dark Knight).
The camera then cuts back to the ground crew as they enter the bank with their masks on, guns in hand.
In this sequence so far Chris has already engaged us in who The Joker is by masquerading him in mystery through the dialogue by the robbers. This whole sequence I described so far is only the first minute and a half of the entire movie and the audience’s attention is already peaked from only 4 lines of dialogue. As the scene plays out, the robbers progressively kill each other throughout the robbery as instructed to do so by The Joker, as they can each get a larger share. By the end of the scene we are left with two robbers. One aims a gun at the others head saying.
“I’m betting The Joker told you to kill me as soon as we loaded the cash”
To which the other responds by saying.
“No,no,no, I kill the bus driver.”
“Bus Driver?”(The Dark Knight).
A bus then crashes through the bank wall killing the robber aiming the gun at the other robber. A bus driver emerges, helps load the cash then is shot by The last robber. It’s in this moment when standing over a wounded bank clerk the identity of our last robber is revealed as The Joker. He then makes his getaway and we are now left with how psychotic and brilliant our anaganist will be throughout the course of this film.
The Joker is set on bringing Batman and Gotham to its knees. His motivation is to break Batman’s one no killing rule and expose the true nature of Gotham’s citizens by showing that they will turn on each other to save themselves. In the final climax of the film, Batman isn’t fighting to save the world, in doing so the audience will know the Joker can’t win from a writing standpoint. Batman is standing idly by unable to act. There are two boats carrying 300 hundred people, one of them is full of prisoners, and the other is full of citizens. Both ships are rigged with explosives. Each ship has a detonator that blows up the opposite ship, and after a certain amount of time, both ships will blow up. This creates an enormous amount of tension seeing as no one on the citizen ship can blow up the opposite boat and the prisoners on the other boat threw their detonator into the bay. Both ships will seemingly explode. When the time’s up neither boats explode. The Joker lost in exposing Gothams ‘true nature’ but wins by getting Batman to break his one rule when saving Gordon and his family in the final battle of the film against the now revenge driven Harvey.
Seemingly everything about this film from the acting to the writing is done flawlessly by the crew. It changed how not only me but how collectively everyone views superhero movies, and how they can be just as multi layered and complex as other films. This film earned every penny of its success, and rightfully has gone down as one of if not the best superhero movies of all time. The Dark Knight has been a pillarstone in the film industry in which actors and directors alike are still taking things from, and does not fall short in it’s audiences engagement. We must thank Christopher Nolan and all featured in this movie for giving us something bigger than just a movie.
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