Batman: The Dark Knight Analysis

THE DARK KNIGHT is not only my vote for best movie in the series, but is also my personal favorite Batman story ever told, surpassing all the other films and all the classic Batman graphic novels.

It achieves this by putting all the right elements in play that to me have made Batman go beyond “comic book pulp” and given the character literary merit. These include: moral ambiguity, paralleling Batman with his villains, realistic depiction of crime and detective work, and a large cast of equally compelling characters.

The story of THE DARK KNIGHT isn’t entirely about Batman, nor is it entirely about the Joker. It’s about Harvey Dent.

This isn’t your typical Good vs. Evil or Batman vs. Joker story. It is Batman and the Joker fighting for Gotham City’s soul…and the soul of Harvey Dent. In the end, the story is a tragedy.

The film’s narrative brings the character of Batman into a moral philosopher. Yes, we’ve seen Batman as an outcast and angry vigilante before. Here we see him at his most human, questioning the ethics of his job every step of the way (this is slightly different from the hero we saw in BATMAN RETURNS, who was so human that he was generally a failure). Is he really doing the right thing; is it moral for Bruce Wayne to be Batman? Good and evil are not so black and white. Likewise, we had seen the Joker and Two-Face many times before; here they retained some of their pulp nature but became symbols.

BRIEF WORDS

As happy as I was with this film’s success, I was slightly disappointed that most of the acclaim went solely to Heath Ledger. His performance is great, but once the buzz died down it seemed like Ledger’s makeup-splattered face had become the film’s lasting icon. I wish the film’s screenplay and direction had gotten the credit they deserve as well, and so I hope with this essay to bring to light much of what this film was able to achieve.

I will go through the film, split into three acts, and put my commentary in parenthesis. Since this is a considerably longer film with a more complex narrative, there is a lot more to say, and so bear with me in the next 3 posts each with one acts analysed.