It's been just over a year since The Dark Knight exploded into theatres, becoming the biggest hit of the decade and making its indelible imprint on pop culture. People love this movie. All kinds of people, too. From the fanboys who were counting down the seconds before its release, to casual moviegoers, to hardened film critics that are usually unnecessarily dismissive and harsh on comic book movies (why should we be unwilling to take characters named the Joker and Batman as seriously as any other cinematic or literary symbols?). Hell, even my mother loved The Dark Knight.
I, of course, loved it. It shot right up into the top half of my best-of list of 2008, and I'm on record on this site as saying it was a travesty that it wasn't nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. My foremost reaction to the flick was that it represented the first time in a long, long while that I could get really excited about going to the movies. I enjoyed it so much that even though I saw its flaws, I chose to look right past them and to focus on what I loved about it. This is a movie that feels sprawling -- from the opening crane shot of Gotham City (below), represented as a fun-house of smoke and mirrors for the Joker to play in to the truck flipping over itself, this movie is an epic. Let's focus on that flipping truck for a moment. It's jaw-dropping, and done entirely without CGI. In a movie where the stakes had already been raised so high, Nolan introduces a spectacular action set piece that reverts to old-fashioned stunt-work. This stuff used to be the fare of mid-90s action movies, yet here it was in a huge blockbuster in the age of the ultra-slick Transformers and Iron Man. Who would have thought, right?
The modern, real but sinister city that is Nolan's GothamBehind the scenes of the truck flip
I still stand by my statement that The Dark Knight should have been nominated for Best Picture, if only because of what it achieved. It has its detractors, and certainly has its flaws, but The Dark Knight was revolutionary. It got under the skin of the public in the way that only few movies (including last year's Best Picture winner, Slumdog Millionaire) are capable of doing. I'm not just talking about box-office bang. This movie got under the skin of Western culture.
This film also provoked some of the best discussion on the web of last year. If you don't believe me, read just about all of these posts and their comments. Like Inglourious Basterds has done this year, the 'net was awash with literate and fascinating discussions about what the film meant, if it was a true reflection of the current Zeitgeist, or if it said anything worth listening to. There was a bit of an unfair atmosphere in the critical community, though, that you gave The Dark Knight an unfavourable review at your own peril. Enconiums like "best *blank* ever" were being thrown about like nobody's business. It was difficult to cut through the hype and deliver a rational, balanced opinion of the movie, although a few critics did just that.
Watching it the other night on Blu-Ray (it looks fantastic in 1080p high-definition) I became aware of just how well I know this movie. Warts and all, this film will be a lasting memory of the first decade of this century.
I won't spend too much time talking about what I like about the movie -- Ledger's complete performance, the technical expertise on show in the lighting, shot composition and music, the amazing cast that fit their characters like a glove, because you can read my original review for that.
I've become a little more measured in the way I look at The Dark Knight in the last fourteen months, as much as a film can age in that time. I can accept that it has its deficiencies, though I'll argue until I'm blue in the face that Christopher Nolan is one of the most promising film-makers around today. I'm a little less impressed by the climax of The Dark Knight than I was the first few times I saw it. The Joker comes up with an ingenious conundrum of hijacking two ferries, telling each of them that their boat will be blown up, unless one ferry decides to detonate a bomb on the other. The solution to this? Both ferries throw away their detonators.
I let the movie get away with that the first time I saw it. But on repeat viewings, it becomes clearer and clearer that this is not a realistic resolution. One of the theses of The Dark Knight is that people are inherently good, and if given the opportunity, even in extreme circumstances, will do the good and right thing. Probably half-true, but we see every day what mob mentality can do to people. Throw into the mix that the second ferry was full of violent criminals, and it seems unlikely that both ferries would act so nobly.
There are other smaller deficiencies in the movie that probably account for my taste, more than anything. The overuse of the 360-camera dollies in just about every scene involving Commissioner Gordon, Harvey Dent and Batman, for instance. It worked fine for the first couple of sequences, but its continued use implied that Nolan went on auto-pilot as director. Some holes in the script, too -- when Harvey shoots Maroni's driver late in the film, the car goes careening off the road, resulting in a serious crash. Shortly before he shoots the driver, Harvey unbuckles his seat belt. We see nothing of his escape, but jumping from a car at that speed seconds before it crashes and explodes would not have been easy. A few minutes later, Harvey reappears to confront Gordon, clearly unhurt.
I know, I know. A tiny piece of continuity. I might be nitpicking. But it's such a clear violation of logic, one that takes us directly out of the reality that the film has created. These are minor quibbles, evidence that The Dark Knight was not the Second Coming of cinema that so many proclaimed. But what it achieved, thanks to Nolan and all of the cast and crew, but particularly Heath Ledger, was a reignition of the public's passion in movies. In a decade that has been disappointing, and has featured a massive drop in public interest in most cinematic fare, The Dark Knight towers as a cross-over achievement, pleasing just about every demographic, and encouraging us to be excited about movies. In that respect, it's one of the most significant and important movies of the decade.
Posts
1 comments: