{"id":7832,"date":"2012-07-18T23:20:31","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T13:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=7832"},"modified":"2014-04-30T17:12:31","modified_gmt":"2014-04-30T07:12:31","slug":"the-dark-knight-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=7832","title":{"rendered":"The Dark Knight [2008]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight<\/em>, a sequel to Batman Begins<\/em>, became a part of cinematic folklore before it was even released.\u00a0 The film had a unique aura and mystique about it after Heath Ledger delivered a chilling performance as The Joker but sadly passed away before the theatrical release of the film.\u00a0 The Dark Knight<\/em> went on to smash box office records for its time and received universal praise from fans and critics alike for its quality.\u00a0 It’s easily my favourite super hero film of all time.<\/p>\n

In The Dark Knight<\/em>, we return to the troubled life of Bruce Wayne, playboy billionaire and the alter ego of the masked vigilante Batman.\u00a0 At the end of Batman Begins<\/em>, Wayne was left by his childhood sweetheart Rachel Dawes who tells him that as long as he wears the cloak, they cannot be together.<\/p>\n

Bruce and Gotham both appear to find a second chance in the form of ambitious new district attorney Harvey Dent, Gotham’s white knight.\u00a0 Dent aggressively targets Gotham’s criminal underworld, roots out corruption in the police force and appears to be momentarily successful in tackling the mob.\u00a0 There is a complication for Wayne however: Dent also begins to court Rachel who is receptive to his charms.<\/p>\n

Just when it seems that Dent might have the crime lords on the run, they are visited by a demented psychopath dressed as a clown, named The Joker.\u00a0 He convinces the criminals not to flee with their money but to pay him half in exchange for killing Batman.\u00a0 The Joker then kills one of the mob leaders, takes control of his men and begins a calculated killing spree designed to lead the good people of Gotham to the point of madness.<\/p>\n

The Dark Knight<\/em> is unashamedly lengthy and self indulgent, clocking in at a formidable 2 hours 25 minutes.\u00a0 For someone like myself who can wholy lose themselves in Nolan’s vision and Ledger’s performance, it is a thrilling ride from start to finish.\u00a0 For everyone else, this film probably feels a bit bloated.\u00a0 Ledger’s performance as The Joker deserves all the plaudits it gets though.\u00a0 He is absolutely mesmerizing and terrifying in this role and virtually unrecognizable from anything he has done before.\u00a0 Cleverly, The Joker’s intense screen prescense is accomplished with little onscreen blood-letting and without swearing.\u00a0 It is his utterly convincing portrayal of a mentally disturbed sociopath with zero empathy and craven delight at causing misery that makes you a captive audience.<\/p>\n

The Joker’s near two hour rampage in this film is a Rube Goldberg chain of interconnected events.\u00a0 You might stop him from killing the Mayor but thats because he’s actually busy kidnapping the District Attorney.\u00a0 And if you save the District Attorney, then its at the expense of saving the love of your life.\u00a0 The Joker is constantly redefining his intentions and his origins to everyone he meets but almost all of it is a lie.\u00a0 He describes himself an ‘agent of chaos’ that has no plan and yet when he tells this to Harvey Dent, he absolutely has a plan to lead Harvey into committing a crime of passion.\u00a0 The Joker is single minded in his loathing of humanity, including the mob that he supposedly works for.\u00a0 It shows when we see his final line of defence against Batman – a pack of attack dogs.\u00a0 At least they are loyal.<\/p>\n

The Dark Knight<\/em> plays out like a Shakespearean tragedy.\u00a0 The ‘white knight’ Harvey Dent is of course destined to come up short, unable to live up to his perfect billing.\u00a0 The dark knight Bruce Wayne is tired of defending a thankless Gotham and yearns to be with Rachel.\u00a0 And yet he too is living a lie as unbeknownst to him, Rachel has moved on from him and has chosen Harvey.\u00a0 As for the citizens of Gotham, they are shown to have a mob mentality.\u00a0 Easy to scare and quick to anger.\u00a0 And yet when The Joker rigs explosives on two ferries and gives them the option of saving their own lives by killing the other, the people aboard both ferries refuse to submit to his level.\u00a0 Whichever way they are portrayed, I like that the collective residents of Gotham feel like their own character in this tale.\u00a0 After all, they are the very reason Batman exists.\u00a0 The whole cast of characters in The Dark Knight<\/em> have their moments of greatness and lapses of weakness.<\/p>\n

By the end of the film, many are dead and Bruce Wayne is left with no choice but to go along with the lie that Harvey Dent is still a white knight, leaving Batman to be\u00a0 hunted down in the shadows like an animal by the very people he tries to save.\u00a0 It’s great stuff.<\/p>\n

This film is Christopher Nolan’s opus.\u00a0 It is easily his best work, or at least it will be until The Dark Knight Rises<\/em>.\u00a0 It’s easy to see that he has struck gold with Heath Ledger who is a memorable villain.\u00a0 But the film is also his best action film, with the stuntwork and choreography excellent across the board from the chases in the Bat Mobile to the hand-to-hand combat in the various fight scenes.\u00a0 The score from Hans Zimmer fits the tone of the film perfectly as do the special effects which are effective without being distracting.\u00a0 It would be easy to get carried away with the makeup for The Joker and Two Face but they strike a nice balance between their comic book origins and something suitable for the silver screen.\u00a0 The script is wrought with melodrama, monologues and one liners and why not?\u00a0 This is a blockbuster movie after all.\u00a0 Everything just comes together perfectly in this film for me.\u00a0 I wouldn’t change a thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clowns to left, Jokers to the right<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":7833,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[404,843,600,1325],"class_list":["post-7832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-batman","tag-christian-bale","tag-christopher-nolan","tag-the-dark-knight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7832"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7969,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7832\/revisions\/7969"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}