10 Ways The Dark Knight Is The Ultimate Batman Movie

10 Ways The Dark Knight Is The Ultimate Batman Movie

Between Heath Ledger’s show-stopping performance as Joker and Christopher Nolan’s depiction of Gotham, The Dark Knight is the best Batman movie ever.

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After teasing a Joker card at the end of Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan followed up his masterfully crafted but rigid origin story with one of the greatest superhero sequels of all time (and one of the greatest action movies ever made, too), The Dark Knight. The movie was an instant hit, topping $1 billion at the worldwide box office, and was universally praised by critics — even Academy members.

Although Matt Reeves’ The Batman looks like it’ll be a promising contender, The Dark Knight is the movie that best encapsulates the Batman character and what makes him tick. From its perfect representation of Batman and the Joker’s two-sides-of-the-same-coin dynamic to its eye-popping IMAX set pieces, The Dark Knight is the Caped Crusader’s ultimate big-screen outing.

10 Heath Ledger’s Joker Is The All-Time Greatest Portrayal Of A Supervillain

Heath Ledger’s unforgettable Oscar-winning portrayal of the Joker isn’t just the best on-screen portrayal of a Batman villain or the best on-screen portrayal of a comic book villain; it’s one of the greatest villain performances in film history, alongside Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched and Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter.

His performance as a sadistic, unpredictable lunatic is mesmerizing and steals the spotlight in every scene (it’s not easy to steal a Batman movie from Batman), but there’s also a lot of depth under the surface and a surprising amount of truth in his madness.

9 Nolan Took Cues From Film Noir

One of the most exciting things about the upcoming The Batman — besides Robert Pattinson’s younger, rougher Caped Crusader — is the influence of film noir. Batman’s pursuit of the Riddler is set up like a detective story, and Matt Reeves has cited neo-noir masterpieces Chinatown and Klute as inspirations.

Batman stories are crying out to be adapted as noirs. The Bat is a crimefighter operating outside the law to bring down bad guys in a corrupt world — he’s basically Philip Marlowe with a cape.

Nolan took plenty of cues from film noir in crafting The Dark Knight. The Joker’s reign of terror captured the fears of post-9/11 America in the same way ‘70s noirs like Chinatown captured post-Watergate paranoia.

8 It Captures Batman And The Joker’s Relationship Beautifully

Batman and the Joker are one of the most iconic hero-villain pairings of all time, and even more effectively than Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan identified all the core themes that make that relationship work so well on the page — and in Batman: The Animated Series — and put them on the big screen in The Dark Knight.

The Joker enjoys creating chaos on the streets of Gotham because it’s fun to watch Batman try to bring hope and order to the ensuing mayhem. Batman wants to understand what makes the Joker tick, but Alfred tells him some people are just pure evil. The Joker sums up their relationship perfectly with one sarcastic romantic quip in the interrogation scene: “You complete me.”

7 It Uses The Secondary Villain Effectively

A lot of secondary villains in comic book movies can feel tacked-on or perfunctory, like Black Manta in Aquaman or Venom in Spider-Man 3. The Dark Knight uses its secondary villain effectively because corrupting Harvey Dent is crucial to the Joker’s plan to destroy Batman’s optimistic ethos.

If the Joker can turn Dent — Gotham’s “white knight,” on a crusade to put the city’s criminals behind bars — into a heartless murderer, then he’ll prove anyone can be corrupted and Gotham doesn’t have any hope. And while his grand plan ultimately fails, in this regard, he succeeds.

6 Nolan Spends As Much Time With Bruce As Batman

The best Batman stories explore the character’s dichotomy. It’s easy to just have fun with a masked crimefighter beating bad guys to a pulp, but what’s really fascinating about Batman is his ongoing identity crisis. He’s more comfortable in the guise of his superhero alter ego than as the man he really is. Billionaire Bruce Wayne is the mask that Batman puts on to protect his identity.

Nolan understands this and spends as much time with Bruce Wayne as he does with Batman throughout The Dark Knight. Christian Bale’s Batman voice was the source of some ridicule, but he nailed the two sides of the character’s personality.

5 The IMAX Action Sequences Are Stunning

From the opening bank heist to the police convoy chase, The Dark Knight is filled with stunning action set pieces shot on IMAX cameras. Nolan helmed some of the most cinematic action sequences ever filmed for this movie.

Unlike most comic book movies, The Dark Knight uses minimal CGI. If a stunt or effect could be pulled off practically, then Nolan and his team did it practically. They flipped an 18-wheel truck on its head. They blew up an abandoned building. The results — especially when they’re realized on glorious 70mm film — are breathtaking.

4 It Gets Bruce & Alfred’s Father-Son Dynamic Right

Getting Bruce and Alfred’s relationship right is crucial to telling a satisfying Batman story — Alfred is the closest thing Bruce has to a father, and he’s the only person in the world he can truly be himself around — and across The Dark Knight trilogy, Christian Bale and Michael Caine nailed it.

Bale and Caine share tangible father-son chemistry in the iconic roles, and Caine’s command of human emotion formed by decades of acting experience ensures the emotional scenes ring true, despite the pulpiness of the plot.

3 Nolan’s Gotham Is The Best Ever Seen On The Big Screen

While Tim Burton’s expressionistic Gotham set a high bar and Todd Phillips’ “New York circa Taxi Driver” aesthetic in Joker was beautifully realized by cinematographer Lawrence Sher, Christopher Nolan’s pseudo-realistic portrayal of a crime-ridden Gotham is still the greatest.

Nolan was inspired by Michael Mann’s gritty noir-tinged take on L.A. seen in his classic crime epic Heat. Unlike Phillips’ shallow imitation of Scorsese, Nolan was subtle in applying the complex themes of Mann’s film to the comic book world of The Dark Knight.

2 The Joker Presents A Psychological Threat

Batman’s greatest asset is his brute force. He’s got a genius intellect and an arsenal of weapons and gadgets and aircraft that he can use when brute force doesn’t work, but most of the time, it does work. In The Dark Knight, the Joker threatens the Bat psychologically.

The Joker claims to be an agent of chaos, but he does have an agenda: he wants to prove Batman’s code wrong. And that code is all he has. Having seen his parents gunned down in front of him as a child, his psyche is hanging on by a thread on the belief that he can bring law and order to the streets of Gotham as a masked vigilante. The Joker comes dangerously close to proving that’s a fallacy.

1 The Final Sacrifice Is The Kind Of Sacrifice Only Batman Can Make

The final scene of The Dark Knight sees Batman taking the fall for Dent to preserve his image as Gotham’s beacon of hope. Batman allows himself to be vilified for the good of his city.

This is the kind of sacrifice that only Batman can make. He’s perfectly capable of going on the run and evading capture — the final shot of the movie sees him disappearing into the night —– and this tough decision proves he realizes that the fight for law and order in Gotham is bigger than himself.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/christopher-nolan-dark-knight-best-batman-movie-all-time/

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