THE REVIST – THE DARK KNIGHT
I’ve seen this now, what, like 6 times, probably more, but I’ve never watched it after watching Rises. I appreciated this one so much more now in contrast to the third entry into the Nolan trilogy. A lot of people will contribute the greatness that is The Dark Knight to the Joker, or rather, Heath Ledger’s Joker. I won’t say that he made this movie, because that is definitely not the case, but he did contribute something that will haunt the Batman franchise for years to come.
There you have it, the first glimpse of the Joker, it was fairly obvious he was the lead clown during the awesome opening, but hearing the crescendo of the score as he took off his mask really intensified his presence. I’m getting a little ahead of myself, I think The Joker was a good character, but nothing during this movie caused me to refer to him as one of the greatest movie characters of the decade, or anything like that. The run time of The Dark Knight was 152 minutes, while the Joker’s presence was roughly 35. That isn’t too bad of a ratio but I wish he had more screen time, so Batman got all the screen time here while Bane got all the screen time in The Dark Knight Rises, I wonder if that was intentional?
As for the movie itself, it just felt larger than TDKR, something about it had more of an epic feeling, and the overall tone was different. Not to mention most of the action takes place at night, which I prefer because things just look better on screen. The Joker was always the perfect villain for Batman, as he states at the end of the film – An unstoppable force meets an immovable object, they need each other, and that’s the main problem here. Unfortunately Ledger died, so that arch-nemesis plot couldn’t ever be fully fleshed out, and that’s a real shame because I could only imagine what TDKR would have been like with the Joker involved.
There you have it, the final shot of a severely underused and under developed character in Nolan’s Batman franchise. The sad thing is that Ledger wasn’t around to even see the final cut of his best performance in his career. I guess in this universe, he is still rotting away in a padded cell over at the Arkham Asylum. Then there’s Two Face, who was cool, but again, not used to his full potential and killed off too quick. I don’t think he should have been included in this movie, personally. There was enough of a plot with just the Joker going after Batman. He wasn’t even really a threat to Batman, but more so to Commissioner Gordon, you could remove everything involving Two Face and the overall story wouldn’t even be affected, having Dent as the DA could stay in, but just never turned into Two Face.
I enjoyed the overall plot in TDK, there was no twist or strange back story, it was straight forward, very realistic and downright gritty. I’d go so far as to call this one of the better crime thrillers of the 2000’s, it just so happened to be a Batman movie. With that, this is easily my favorite superhero movie, and favorite Batman movie. The charm of the Joker probably falls in the category of “less is more”, there have been other movies where a less than prominent character has completely stolen the show, like Brando in Apocalypse Now. I still don’t fully buy into the Joker’s hype, but what he did to this movie can’t be undone, he introduced us to a truly menacing take on a classic character, maybe not completely original, but still fun to watch.