Christopher Nolan’s most ambitious work to date is not the sci-fi opera Interstellar, but his second Batman film, The Dark Knight, released in 2008. The director wanted to “revolutionize the genre” by decoupling the fight between good and evil from the laws of comics, from all its improbabilities and silliness. Instead, the duel of broken characters, who under their mask are people like you and me.
The Batman? Not a just avenger, on the contrary, one who would judge the lives of his fellow citizens differently if given a choice. The Joker? A former abused child who wants to fight for his place in society, albeit with criminal methods. How do you know? At least not from the movie. Such conclusions are best guesses that you have to make yourself.
Everything already defined
The result with “The Dark Knight” is the portrait of two fully defined men who are trying to negotiate their roles. Disguised in carnival costumes. They’re entertaining, you can’t take them seriously.
The model for the supposed “character study” is Michael Mann’s “Heat” from 1995. It is considered today’s benchmark for portrait films in which the boundary between heroes and anti-heroes can no longer be defined. The more corpses they mourn, the dirtier the methods become. In the end, Al Pacino as a cop and Robert De Niro as a criminal realize that they were only at opposite ends when they first started working. Then they met in the middle.
However, the characters in “The Dark Knight” do not show this ambivalence. Bruce Wayne aka Batman (Christian Bale) has – at least in the films – no depth. He has childhood trauma because his parents were shot before his eyes. Sometimes the rich heir broods over his responsibilities. Will he succeed in arresting the Gotham gangs? That’s all. Otherwise, the following applies to him: do good until the bat costume falls apart.
Funny is better
The Joker is less successful. Heath Ledger received a posthumous Oscar for his portrayal. According to legend, he had holed himself up in a hotel room for days in preparation for the role. Only this figure lacks any originality in the end. Ledger presents a veritable bouquet of mannerisms. Most notable is his constant lip-smacking, perhaps a parody of Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal, who clicked his tongue like a gourmet. Ledger hobbles, and before he assassinates, he tells each of his victims a different version of his autobiography, and how the corners of his mouth were slit open as a child.
Jack Nicholson’s Joker from the 1989 Batman eschews such life-story swerves, he laughs because he finds things really funny. Like a child with no guilt, which only makes his character all the more diabolical. Nicholson becomes the Joker in the first place because he falls into a chemical bucket during a robbery and melts. And then just looks like a clown. Nicholson doesn’t need depth, he’s a comic book character. Because Dark Knight, on the other hand, relies on realism, author Christopher Nolan attributes his Joker to an illness that sounds malicious, but is usually a sad affliction. Batman tells us the Joker’s diagnosis: “Paranoid schizophrenia”. That sounds like a mass murderer!
Cool Guys Don’t Look At Explosions
Described by fans as the film’s climax, this scene depicts Batman and Joker’s first encounter in a police interrogation room. Both are shown fully lit, so we see a man with rubber eavesdroppers punching a badly made-up Pierrot. That doesn’t look like Gotham, that looks like the drunk tank at the Cologne carnival. Pacino and De Niro met at a diner on “Heat” and delivered some of the best dialogue in recent film history. In “The Dark Knight,” the Batman uses his fists to pound away a clown who won’t speak. (There’s a reasonably funny parody of the interrogation scene here, by the way.)
These two blank characters and their tense confrontation are the biggest disappointment in The Dark Knight. But also Nolan’s claim to a realistic living environment starts to become a burden for the cinema viewer for the first time, at least the development of the story suffers as a result. Because the director relies completely on realism here instead of on the supernaturally created hierarchies of the fantastic comic genre, the rise to power of various antagonists is explained right at the beginning with difficult money transfers. Nobody understands them.
Just as little as the action scene at the end in which Batman and his assistant manage to “visualize mobile phone signals” due to “complicated technology” so that the winged avenger knows where to hit. The viewer sees this on a screen with schematic figures. This is arguably a charming reference to bat echolocation; in the film, this turns into a thunderstorm of Playstation males.
One more goes: Do you know the fun video “Cool Guys Don’t Look At Explosions”? In this collection of scenes, most of the films from which are perhaps Michael Bay’s, you see cliche heroes causing really big conflagrations. The men do what is expected of them: calmly run away with the explosion behind them, no need to turn around. Joining this line of prologue pyros is the Joker in the hospital scene of The Dark Knight, in this action film full of empty gestures.
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