The culmination of a summer filled with promising comic book movies came with the release of The Dark Knight, the second installment of a new series of Batman movies starring Christian Bale as the Batman and directed by Christopher Nolan. The series started three summers ago with Batman Begins. I saw this movie opening night, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think it pushes the comic book movie genre nearly as far as it can go.
This new movie featured Heath Ledger as the Joker. The Joker was an amazing villain! The villain is probably the hardest character to adapt from a comic book to a movie, but the Joker in this movie walked that fine line between (on the one hand) extravagant absurdity and (on the other) enough realism that he could be taken seriously. And all the good things said the greatness of Heath Ledger’s acting in the movie is true. If an actor ever wins an award for portraying a comic book villain, it will be Heath Ledger for this role.
The movie asks some important questions. It looks at human nature, asking how little would it take for average human beings to commit deeds of great evil and cruelty. Relevant to our own recent political activity, it explores the proper response a society should have to terrorism and depicts how the wrong response can make it worse. And the movie reminds us (characters in all kinds of fantasy stories forget this wisdom): never trust the villain’s description of any situation or make a deal with him.
The movie was not perfect, though. The movie suffered from an overabundance of action. I have noticed in the last few years that increasing in the amount of “action” (car chases, explosions, gun fights, etc. — any scene with fast motion, loud noise, and no more dialogue than cliche one-liners) has actually started to make movies boring. (I got incredibly bored in Indiana Jones 4, for example, which I was not expecting from a movie with so much action.) I now refer to these types of scenes as “mind-numbing action”. The action sequences in The Dark Knight do move the plot along and contribute to the story (which cannot be said for most movies these days), but I still felt there was just too much of it and got bored in places.
If you look on IMDb right now, The Dark Knight has an average rating of 9.4 — which would make it the best movie ever made. I simply cannot agree with this. It was a very good movie and it really showed the potential for comic book stories to be serious films, but it was not great art or great philosophy or anything like that. Some of the themes from this movie were better explored in Unbreakable, which is probably my favorite movie based on comic book themes, but without all the mind-numbing action.