DARK as night and nearly as long, Christopher Nolan's new Batman movie feels like a beginning and something of an end.
The Dark Knight, which opens in the UK on Friday, goes darker and deeper than any other Hollywood comic-book movie – including Batman Begins, Nolan's 2005 pleasurably moody resurrection of the series – largely by embracing an ambivalence that at fir
st glance might be mistaken for pessimism. But no work filled with such thrilling moments of pure cinema can be rightly branded pessimistic.
Talent played a considerable part in Nolan's Bat restoration, naturally, as did his seriousness of purpose. He brought a gravitas to the superhero that wiped away the camp and kitsch that had shrouded Batman in cobwebs. It helped that Christian Bale, a reluctant smiler whose sharply planed face looks as if it had been carved with a chisel, slid into Bruce Wayne's insouciance as easily as he did Batman's suit.
This time around, Nolan has invested Batman with shadows that remind you of the character's troubled beginning but without lingering mustiness. What is more startling is that in The Dark Knight, which picks up the story after the first film ends, Nolan has turned Batman into a villain's sidekick.
That would be the Joker, of course, a demonic creation and three-ring circus of one, wholly inhabited by Heath Ledger.
His Joker is a creature of such ghastly life, and the performance is so visceral, creepy and insistently present that the characterisation pulls you in almost at once. When the Joker enters with a murderous flourish and that sawed-off smile, your nervous laughter will die in your throat. He isn't fighting for anything or anyone. He isn't a terrorist, just terrifying.
From certain angles, the city the Joker threatens looks like New York, but it would be reductive to read the film too directly through the prism of 11 September, 2001 and its aftermath. Like any number of small- and big-screen thrillers, the film's engagement with that day is diffuse, more a matter of inference and ideas (chaos, fear, death) than of direct assertion.
In and out of his black carapace and on the restless move, Batman remains a recessive, almost elusive figure. Nolan, having already told Batman's origin story in the first film, initially doesn't appear motivated to advance the character. Yet by giving him rivals in love and war, he has also shifted Batman's demons from inside his head to the outside world.
That change in emphasis leaches the melodrama from Nolan's original conception, but it gives the story tension and interest beyond one man's personal struggle. This is a darker Batman, less obviously human, more strangely other. When he perches over Gotham on the edge of a skyscraper roof, he looks more like a gargoyle than a saviour. There's a touch of demon in his stealthy menace.
During a crucial scene, one of the film's saner characters asserts that this isn't a time for heroes, the implication being that the moment belongs to villains and madmen. Which is why, when Batman takes flight in this film, his wings stretching across the sky like webbed hands, it's as if he were trying to possess the world as much as save it.
In its grim intensity, The Dark Knight can feel closer to David Fincher's Zodiac than Tim Burton's playfully gothic Batman, which means it's also closer to Bob Kane's original comic and Frank Miller's dark 1986 reinterpretation. That makes it heavy, but Ledger's performance and the film's visual beauty are transporting.
Read our critic Alistair Harkness's verdict on The Dark Knight in Review in The Scotsman on Friday.
The full article contains 611 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
