The Dark Knight

4/4 stars

When Spider-Man 2 came out, and in the years following, I've been one of many moviegoers to treat it as a guide on what the superhero film looks like at its best. Now, after my second viewing of The Dark Knight, there is no doubt left in my mind that Nolan's new film has supplanted the wall-crawler's second outing as the apogee of that genre. As it was with Raimi's Spider-Man series, the first installment existed to make way for the second, because an origin is an obligatory part of a superhero series, not because the best storytelling takes place there. Having reminded the audience of the already familiar characters and setting with the first movie, the second seems to be where the real work begins. Spider-Man 2 was the best at the time because we had never seen a truer attempt at a character-driven yet iconic superhero tale. The Dark Knight succeeds in many of the same places, through the synthesis of the most potent images and story elements that the source material has to offer. The film's influences will be appreciable to those familiar with them, particularly the graphic novels The Long Halloween and The Killing Joke, but also quite noticabley Michael Mann's exceptional film Heat, all of which are consulted, rather than copied, to create an entirely new story. But where Dark Knight surpasses the earlier film is in offering characters who are not just fully developed and faithful renditions of their comic book counterparts, but take on the role of mythic figures, battling to shape their world, as they were originally envisioned. This movie is a full-blown epic, with all the moral gravity and tragic poetry that such a title implies. The city of Gotham as delivered by Nolan is a living organism, and the actions of Batman, and The Joker (yes, Heath Ledger is excellent), and Harvey Dent and Jim Gordon carry weight and consequences therein. Seven Batman movies have been theatrically released in my lifetime, but the latest two have risen easily to the top of the pile. Christopher Nolan has saved the franchise from obsolescence and embarrassment, while intelligent and inspired films like The Dark Knight, the Spider-Man series and V for Vendetta continue to save the superhero genre from irrelevance.

Written July 21, 2008.