Here's my short response to the film.
The Dark KnightChristopher Nolan 2008 | USA--------------------
While Bruce Wayne encourages District Attorney Harvey Dent as the new heroic face Gotham City needs, Batman's role as vigilante guardian comes under threat when a new violent force, the Joker, comes to prominence.--------------------
Neither as subtle nor as morally ambiguous as it takes itself to be - or, at least, as the hype suggested - this is a film that, when the dust settles (let's be honest), will be known more for being Ledger's last completed performance than for genuine greatness. As the Joker, or Nihilism personified, Ledger makes the most of an unusually thin script, inflecting his contrivedly whogivesafuck dialogue with a facial and bodily commitment that helps distract from the strained hipness of it all. It's a performance to woo the romantics, but the Oscar hype is premature. As for Bale, who is by now used to carrying films on his own, he's more exciting to watch as Bruce Wayne in a Lamborghini than as his titular, masked alter-ego, which is probably in large part due to the silly, gruff voice he suddenly succumbs to when suited and booted, and to the fact that the Batsuit itself is a victim of elaborate over-design. Other factors, as well as these, bring the film close to the campiness it intends to eradicate: the early sequences between Lucius Fox and Bruce Wayne bear a telling familiarity to the recurring, predictable episodes between 007 and Q from the James Bond films; and the moments (few and far between, but present nonetheless) of romantic innuendo and would-be emotional attachment bring it closer still.
But two things save it. Firstly, the production design allows for on-location filming (Chicago substitutes for Gotham), that lends an anonymous, industrial realism to the setting (as opposed to the overwhelming if impressive stylisation of the Burton films). Secondly, and more noticeably, Nolan's ever-reliable feel for narrative pacing and momentum is what makes this a superior comics book adaptation (as with Nolan's two previous films, Lee Smith edits). The opening grips one from the off, with a musical undercurrent running through various viewpoints of a bank robbery, and the film's most exhilarating set-pieces thereafter work in the same way: meaning is established through cross-cutting, in the same way that made the many twists of
The Prestige so riveting. His camera moves a lot, too, mostly in swift, smooth circles round static characters or tall, empowered skyscrapers; the former shot either at head-height or from low angles, the latter from the heavens, encompassing a world at once personal and immediate, yet unstable in its quest for justice or morality.
