Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and Maggie Gyllenhaal
Rating: PG-13

Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight. (Courtesy photo)

Already a genre at its peak, the super-hero movie has just taken an evolutionary step forward. The Dark Knight is a powerful piece of filmmaking by any measure. It’s every bit a super-hero movie, fulfilling and usually exceeding our expectations of spectacle and thrills. But this is also a true character study, with strong themes that carry the film through its weaker sequences. At the center are four tremendous performances, one of which will be long remembered. In its opening scene The Dark Knight makes it clear that you will not know what to expect—and that what you get won’t always be fun. This isn’t a movie for kids. The PG-13 rating is ridiculous—this is an intensely dark movie. If 13-year-olds can handle the deeply haunting performance by Heath Ledger that much better than I can, I don’t want to know about it.

The other three great turns, which will go largely unheralded in the wake of Ledger’s masterful and final performance, belong to Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, and Gary Oldman. Bale is Bruce Wayne, playboy billionaire who is secretly Batman. He has teamed with Oldman’s Lieutenant Gordon to clean up Gotham’s streets. Corruption may still be high—especially within the force—but small-time criminals are evaporating and the mob is running scared. That has paved the way for Eckhart’s Harvey Dent, the dashing, idealistic new district attorney who may just have the capacity to wipe out corruption for good. Dent is also dating Bruce’s love, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal takes over for Katie Holmes). Meanwhile, a strange young man in clown makeup is shaking up the underworld. Soon he’ll shake up everyone else as well.

The script by director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan is hugely ambitious, and while it sometimes ventures further than it should, it never strays from its themes. The core themes seem to be how sometimes the hero we need is not the hero we want. From there the other themes spread, carefully threaded through seven different subplots—two or three more than we needed. At 152 minutes, The Dark Knight is a bit long—not so much due to excess as to the challenge of enduring the intensity of the movie. Where other movies falter in digging past the simple themes of super heroes, The Dark Knight expands the themes beyond the genre. In the midst of the labyrinthine plot, the Nolans burst straight into social commentary. Joker’s final large scale “social experiment” is in keeping with the character, sure, but it also transparently allows the Nolans to weigh in on the shaky moral compass of waning Bush-era America.

I was already a fan of Heath Ledger before his awful, untimely death. He had, in a short amount of time, shown incredible range and a true craftman’s attention to detail. This Joker of his is simply jaw-dropping—one of the most frightening, fascinating, and disturbing villains ever created for film. I can’t remember the last time I was so flat-out scared of someone. The entire film is still haunting me a few days later, mostly in the form of Ledger’s mesmerizing work.

But that should not diminish the rest of the cast. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman may not exactly be stretching as, respectively, Alfred the butler and Lucius Fox the inventor. But both are welcome stalwarts. Eckhart (Thank You for Smoking) makes the square-jawed Harvey Dent more than a one-note do-gooder. He’s smart and clever and worthy of battling it out in the mess of Gotham. Oldman has fashioned a minor gem of a performance as Jim Gordon. Fifteen-year-olds who see The Dark Knight will think his restrained Gordon was merely fine. Then one day they’ll stumble upon Sid and Nancy or The Professional or State of Grace, and they’ll be blown away by just what a beautifully modulated piece of work this is. Christian Bale does more than just wisely give the spotlight to Ledger. He hangs back and holds the massive narrative together. As unforgettable as Ledger’s Joker is, even he knows Batman is still the character at the heart of this story. The only place where the casting came up short was with, yet again, Rachel Dawes. Nearly anyone would have been an improvement over poor Katie Holmes. Maggie Gyllenhaal (Stranger Than Fiction) is not exactly a big step up. Like Holmes, she’s all but consumed by the powerhouse work around her.

The movie I most often think of in comparison to The Dark Knight is, oddly enough, There Will Be Blood. The obvious comparison is the towering psychopath at the center of each film. But it’s also in the daring scope of the narrative and the commitment to subject matter that, frankly, darkens so much it turns oppressive at times. It’s not just that the Joker owes some of his technique to the villain of the Saw movies. It’s also that the outlook on humanity is at best only tinged with hope. The Dark Knight is a great film and an incredible summer blockbuster. But that doesn’t mean it’s for all tastes. See it in the frame of mind that you’re going to see an intense crime story and you may be better prepared. Actually, no matter what, you probably can’t prepare for The Dark Knight.