Gateway Cinephiles

Review: The Dark Knight

2008
Director: Christopher Nolan
Viewed: July 20, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Indulge me for a moment, as I’m going get effusive right off the bat (pun intended). With The Dark Knight, writer-director Christopher Nolan sets upon the “comic book film” with sledgehammer and napalm, and delivers the sort of sorely needed genre reconstruction that occurs once in a generation. Here we have, at long last, a film that winnows away the limitations of comics, distills their strengths, and emerges as a work wholly cinematic in character, leaving its ancestral medium far behind. The Dark Knight is a noir action epic of the grandest, bleakest, most exhilarating sort. It is not a flawless film, nor is it a masterpiece. However, it is a wonder to behold. It is a film so ambitious, so dizzying in its lofty heights and abyssal depths, I suspect that it was only the appealing Batman branding that permitted Nolan to create it at all. This is Hollywood film-making as bloodless revolution. As Heath Ledger’s terrifying Joker observes, “You’ve changed things. There’s no going back.”

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