Fancast: The Big Picture

The story picks up a year after the first film. Billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), with the help of his butler Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) and his business manager Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), is successfully waging his one-man war against crime under cover of night. Batman's presence has inspired the people of Gotham City to stand up against the corruption that's plagued them for so long - to the point where there's an idealistic and highly popular new district attorney on the job, a former Internal Affairs man by the name of Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). Dent is just as uncompromising as Batman, to the point where he'll butt heads with one of the only other honest cops in Gotham, Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) over just who to trust in his department. This might be why Dent has attracted the affections of Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), Bruce Wayne's childhood love, leading to a situation where Bruce hopes that Dent becomes successful enough that he'd be able to leave the lifestyle he created and be with Rachel once again.

The trouble is that unrelenting idealism isn't the only thing the Caped Crusader has inspired. Not only is there a slew of regular joes dressing up in hockey pads and bat masks toting guns around to police their own streets, but there's an entirely different breed of criminal on the rise, thanks to organized crime leaders getting desperate for a way to kill the Dark Knight. This comes in the form of a greasy, murderous and scarred sociopath in freakish clown makeup and a custom suit, known only as The Joker (Heath Ledger). No other name, no other aliases. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. He's just as uncompromising as Batman and Dent, but he's not after money or power. He's in the pursuit of absolute chaos and anarchy. "The only sensible way to exist in this world is without rules." He's a criminal the Batman can't understand, the complete antithesis to his mission to uphold law and order. The clash between them is titanic, violent and brutal. The unstoppable force meeting the immovable object. Hope vs. the hopeless.

The majority of the hype and buzz is around Ledger's complete and total immersion into the character of The Joker, and it is all well deserved. If Anthony Hopkins can win an Oscar for Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Ledger can certainly qualify for his Clockwork Orange-inspired criminal mastermind who presents an insane and manic persona, yet outsmarts the cops and crusaders at every turn. He's wicked, crooked and twisted, a magnetic mess of a man who dominates the film even when he's not on the screen. His darkly funny and creepy malevolence hangs over the proceedings like the Sword of Damocles, ready to strike down and behead anyone who gets too comfortable with letting the Batman handle everything. The cops run scared from him, scrambling to react to every new threat he presents, unable to truly grasp his mania. A whacked out serial killer is scary enough, but a whacked out mass-murderer with a horrifying agenda and nearly limitless resources is what you call a terrorist. Ledger disappears into this character so well that once you come down from the high of this movie, you'll mourn his loss all over again. The man has no business being dead.

There is very little "down time" in The Dark Knight, and when you do get some, it's necessary to take a breather. The action starts early and doesn't let up for almost all of its epic 2.5 hour length. So many times, you start to believe 'this has to be winding down soon,' only to find that there is so much more that awaits you. The second time through, when you get that feeling that it's about time for regular movies to end, you realize they haven't even gotten to the hospital scenes yet! The hospital sequence is bound to be the source of the most iconic images from the film, and you'll know it when you see it. The Joker, wearing a nurse's uniform, staggering out of a hospital as it explodes and collapses behind them - it was a practical effect, and they had only one take to get it right. Ledger absolutely nailed it. That'll be The Dark Knight's equivalent of the tidal wave of blood in The Shining.

It's completely the Joker's movie, but Nolan never forgets to allow Batman, our hero, to shine in his endeavors to take the Joker down, inspiring Dent and Gordon to strive just as hard to put an end to this crime wave. In most films with colorful villains like this, there's a tendency to root for the bad guys against the stalwart heroes because they are more interesting. Not here. The Joker is scary, and Oldman's low-key, weary-yet-determined portrayal of the only truly good cop in town, combined with Eckhart's Dent and his desperate courage, and Bale's self-recriminating Batman, wringing his hands with guilt at the thought of what he's wrought are all complex and compelling characters who you really want to succeed. As the tension builds, and the more and more invulnerable the Joker seems to be to their efforts, the more we really need the good guys to find a way to win. In the end, it comes down to the strident heroes being forced to compromise their ideals - Gordon's already stuck in that boat having to work with dirty cops; Dent refuses it for as long as he can despite the constant siege against his efforts to make his city a better place, until a brutally traumatic event forces him to break down and compromise everything he's worked for; and that, finally, leads the Dark Knight into a situation where he is forced to betray himself as well.

As Michael Caine says: "It's a dark film, but it's not black. It's more of a navy blue."

Oldman is great as he usually is, and it's truly remarkable to see him playing the sane moral center in a world gone mad, as he's usually the crazy one. Gyllenhaal fit right in as Rachel Dawes, replacing Katie Holmes so there was no longer any drag on the story, and she helped make the triangle between Bruce and Harvey work even better than it should have. Eckhart's Dent is the linchpin of the film, and the pressure that slowly builds up on his shoulders as Gotham's White Knight, the Joker's target and the man even Batman looks up to as a symbol of hope for the future, starts to drive him to dangerous lengths in order to maintain control. That's something the Joker will not let him do. We could have used a little more introspection out of him during his transformation into Harvey Two-Face and his subsequent abrupt change of direction, but Eckhart really held his own in this massive display of talent. Bale's Batman had only a couple of moments where his growly-voice seemed to leave him too breathless to really give the proper punch to his lines, but he's Christian Bale. If ever there's a weak point in a movie, it's not going to be him. Caine and Freeman both bring a much-needed enlightening of the proceedings here and there, welcome moments to relax, woven into the mounting action to give us room to breathe. Fox's handling of a nosy accountant in particular is a great moment.

Other really cool nerd moments of note: the white eyes on the Batmask when he busts out the sonar is a groovy little nerdgasm for the fanboys, a clear nod to his general rendering in the comic books. Also, Nolan really knows how to screw around with the fans' expectations. One of Gordon's cops is a young Latina woman with her hair pulled back into a pony tail, which is the standard look of Detective Renee Montoya, an important character in Gotham's mythos. Most any nerd in the crowd was likely assuming that's who she was playing, even though Gordon only ever referred to her as 'Detective.' When it turned out her name was Ramirez, the same dirty cop Ramirez that Dent has been haranguing Gordon over, it was a complete surprise to me. One of a handful of 'no way!' moments that really put this film over the top.

The only real conceit you have to grant is that this Gotham City is a place where most everyone can be expected to survive a car crash. Otherwise, Batman would have broken his one rule - no killing people - by killing a bunch of cops during the high-speed pursuit in the first film, and more people would have died in this one. But that's a complete nitpick and it's easily overlooked in favor of seeing the bar raised higher than it's ever been for all comic movies to come. Perhaps now, studios will see that they can make superhero movies without lame nu-metal soundtracks and rickety plots.

Everyone I've seen the film with walks away breathless, exhausted and blown away, amazed by the level of maturity and sheer density of Nolan's work, brought to life from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer. This is such an explosive and heavy film that one can scarcely imagine that Nolan could possibly conceive of a way to follow it up with a third. There's no real villain in Batman's Rogue's Gallery that could match this level of intensity and realism, so my prognostication is that Nolan is going to end his saga here, and it's a hell of a way to go out, for both Nolan as well as the late and truly great Heath Ledger.