"What's the difference between you and me?" (The Dark Knight in review)

    Happy Friday, friends, I hope you're all doing well, and I suspect that you are, especially since the new Batman movie is coming out next week, appropriately titled The Batman. Before the movie comes out and the reviews are in about how amazing or how much of a letdown this movie is though, let me take you back to the year 2008. I was in 8th grade and the prospects of a Batman movie were looking higher than they ever had been. Batman Begins was a big success when it came out, even though I didn't see it until years and years later. The first movie in Christopher Nolan's Batman Trilogy proved that you could play a Batman movie straight, without the cheeziness of the Joel Schumaker movies or the brutal violence and over the top nature of the original Tim Burton films. In addition to this, it worked to make the Scarecrow an actually interesting villain, and developed Ra's Al Ghul in a meaningful light. The movie I'm discussing today has very little to do with the first and third movies in the series, other than they all include the same characters, but even though it is borderline unrelated, it's the clear standout of the three films for sure. Christian Bale continues to do a pretty great job as Batman, while having some cheesy line delivery, he is very believable as the morally black and white vigilante that we love to root for. Joker on the other hand, is an insane villain and brought to life perfectly through what was perhaps Heath Ledger's most iconic performance, as well as one of his final ones. It would also be a crime to not mention Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Gary Oldman as Lucius Fox, Alfred, and James Gordon respectively. I'll try not to just summarize what happens in this movie, since I'm sure you've all seen it by now, but I'll do my best to pick apart various different reasons why The Dark Knight works so well, and still deserves to be seen as one of the best superhero movies of all time. 

A little help from his Bat Friends!

    This movie is full of all kinds of characters on both sides of the law, and it strattles Bruce Wayne and Batman's double life in a more successful way than most movies have in the past. Bruce cares about his childhood friend, Rachel Dawes, more than almost anyone in the world, but in one of the huge twists of the movie, he's given the choice to save either Rachel or her boyfriend, Harvey Dent, the new DA who has vowed to save the city, who are both is very different locations. He knows that the Police, who have vowed to save whichever one he isn't going for, won't make it, and so he chooses Harvey Dent, leading to the death of his friend and on-again off-again love interest, and Harvey's survival. Harvey doesn't get off unscathed, but we'll get to that in a little bit. Alfred, Bruce's butler, is the closest thing to a father figure that Bruce has, as it should be, but he's certainly not just a one trick pony. He supports Bruce's mission (as long as it's not seemingly impossible), but he talks about his time in the army and uses his experience to lend a helping hand to the Joker's temperament, something that Bruce is completely unaware of. "Some men just want to watch the world burn." It doesn't make any sense to Bruce, but Alfred has been around some evil people back during the war who didn't have any specific objective other than to just cause chaos. We also have Lucius Fox, the tech guy for Batman, who is also in charge of Wayne Technology's R&D Department. In this movie, he presents Batman with one of the biggest moral quandaries with whether he should use a new prototype technology to spy on people. He creates a signal that hacks everyone's phones in order to send out a sonar pulse to map out the room, even in the dark, and Lucius is warning him the entire movie not to use it, but he repeats again and again that he needs it. Lucius says essentially that if he makes that, he's going to have to resign from his post. Bruce uses it to catch the Joker, and tells Lucius to type in his name into the program before he leaves. When he does so, the program self destructs, meaning that he'll never use that kind of technology again, no matter how desperate he gets. These are Batman's two main confidants in this movie, other than James Gordon, the police officer who comforted him after his parents died as a child. Gordon becomes the Police Commissioner in this movie after the previous one gets killed by one of Joker's traps, and becomes involved in a pretty pivotal spot in the end of the movie, but again, we'll get to that in a bit. 

The Rogues Gallery expands in a massive way!

    Rachel's new boyfriend, Harvey Dent, is a hugely integral character to the movie, even though Bruce hates his guts for almost no reason other than his dating Rachel. He's poising himself to become Gotham's "White Knight" by fighting the criminals of Gotham while the sun is up and through legal means, in stark contrast to Batman's actions. Bruce tells Rachel that if Harvey succeeds in his efforts the way that he's going, there won't need to be a Batman anymore, and they can finally be together, which is what he wants, but she is happy with Harvey, so Bruce has to live with that. As mentioned before, He ultimately makes the call to save Harvey instead of Rachel because he knows that the city needs him to survive to become a symbol that he could never be. He predicts that the police won't make it in time, and unfortunately this means that Rachel dies while Harvey gets half of his face burned off from laying with one side of his face covered in gasoline. Joker uses this to the fullest to torture him, and eventually he becomes insane and deranged, obsessed with letting his coin determine the fate of people, since Rachel had a 50-50 shot at being rescued, that's the same odds that he uses to see if people survive or not. Joker is the obvious star of the show here, commanding the attention of the audience in a wild way, so menacing yet extremely interesting to watch, and honestly there's nothing that I can put here that hasn't already been said a million times over by this point. His bank heist at the beginning is so masterfully put together, that even though the audience is aware that something horrible is going on, you just simply can't look away from what crazy stuff is happening. The Clown Prince of Crime comes into a mafia meeting and takes charge of the whole situation with a pencil, three grenades, and a piece of string. The voice work is also stunning here, even if you were familiar with Heath Ledger before this point, he was completely unrecognizable in this role. Batman is truly at his best here when facing off against wild enemies like Joker and Two Face, and it is truly interesting how so many parallels are drawn between Batman and his enemies in this movie, in ways that often aren't thought about.

"And here... we... go!"

    This movie is building more and more as we continue along, until all of the dominos begin dropping one by one. Joker has been the real threat all along, and so it is in this final act. Joker is out to prove that people are all terrible in one way or another, and that he is the true sane one, and almost looking to undermine Batman's (and society's) beliefs that people are good generally. There are two ferries out on the river, one with Gotham's elite, and one with some criminals from the prison. Both groups are told that there is a trigger for the other boat on each of them, and if they pull the trigger, then the other bomb will blow up, but they'll be guaranteed to be safe. It's a gambit based on the mistrust between two vastly different groups of people, but what Joker's instructions didn't mention was that both of them would end up blowing up, along with a massive bomb in the city somewhere. Batman arrives to stop Joker's machinations, but Joker also has a trigger that will blow everything up if he tries to interfere, so they're both at the top of this building, watching the ferries in the bay, the time limit comes, but nothing happens. The rich and the criminals trust each other enough to not press the button and kill each other. This breaks Joker's theory, and distracts him for long enough for Batman to get the trigger, and he then leaves him dangling upside down at the top of the building for the police to catch him, despite his constant teasing and trying to talk Batman into killing him, thus proving his point that the two of them aren't too different. With Joker's points unproven, Batman goes off into the night to solve the other big issue that has come up.

   Commissioner Gordon's son is kidnapped and taken in to a construction site by none other than Harvey Dent. His psyche and morale have been completely broken by the devastating loss of the woman that he loved, and he's taking her death out on Gordon, as a representation of the police who were too slow to save her. He's giving his son the same chance of living that Rachel got, again, 50-50. He tosses the coin up in the air, but Batman tackles both Two-Face and Gordon's son off the edge of this construction site. Batman catches the son, but Dent falls to his death. He helps the boy up to the edge and then falls himself down below. He's fine, but he sees the damage that has been caused. Gordon prepares to call in what has happened. Dent has shot and killed five people, abducted his son and threatened to kill him as well, and something needs to be done about this, justice needs to be served somehow. Batman, however, tells Gordon to tell the other officers that he did all of this. The Joker did succeed in his plan, corrupting one of the brightest presences in Gotham and bringing him down to his level, that of a killer. Batman takes the fall for all of this though. People already see the Batman as a vigilante and a criminal, but the population must never know the depths that Harvey Dent sank to in the end. Batman runs away from the crime scene and evades the police while Gordon closes the movie with some heavy words. "He's not a hero, he's a silent guardian, and he'll run because he can take it." These are paraphrases, but essentially he's saying that "The Batman" is more than a hero, he doesn't care about doing heroic things for praise, he does what is right for society as a whole.

"I'm not wearing hockey pads"

    I completely missed the point of this ending when I was younger, but it's a very brave and bizarre way to end a superhero movie, especially before "superhero movies" were a genre in themselves. Most movies of this sort will end with a pick-me-up type of ending, or a hopeful ending where the hero stands tall over the defeated villain. Batman ends this movie literally on the run, and as you see in The Dark Knight Rises, the sequel to this film, Batman goes into hiding for many years until he's needed once again to face another massive threat to the city. Batman isn't hailed as a hero for anything in this movie, instead he makes the hard choice, not out of glory to himself, but to bring some degree of peace to the city that he loves. I titled this post after one of the lines at the very beginning of the movie. Batman has tracked down the Scarecrow, and there are a lot of imitator Batmans (Bat-men?) that he also ties up along with the villain from Batman Begins. One of the imitators says, "What makes you so special? What's the difference between you and me?" Batman replies, "I'm not wearing hockey pads." It's a hilarious line, but it also perfectly encapsulates what this movie is about. Bruce Wayne has been through so much training and pretty much only he has the resources required to take down the threats that face Gotham. After the figure of Batman showed up in Batman Begins, of course there were going to be imitators, but they were all about making a name for themselves, trying to get honor or glory from the title. Only billionaire Bruce Wayne, a man who literally cannot escape from the spotlight, wants to give back to the city, no matter what the cost may be. He pretends to be a huge, egotistical maniac who will just buy a french acrobat troop and hang out with bikini models on his private boat, but all throughout the movie, he doesn't truly enjoy himself. It's all done for the safety of the people of Gotham, especially the ones that he cares most about. His dearest friend doesn't even get special treatment, which also denies Bruce the company of one of the only people who has ever made him happy once she is gone. Batman is not a hero, he is indeed a silent protector, living in the shadows to protect the light.

    Thank you so much for reading this little retrospective today, friends. Though The Batman is right around the corner, I thought it was important to come back to this older movie that really hits the nail on the head in tone with what Batman represents. I don't know much about the new movie other than Robert Pattinson is playing Bruce and Zoe Kravitz is playing Selina Kyle, AKA Catwoman, and I think Riddler is the villain in this one, but I hope the new film will do a nice job of capturing the essence of Batman. It's a tall order, but he's an interesting character to capture. I'm sending my best wishes to the whole production team as the movie enters theaters next week, and I really hope you will all like the movie! Thanks again for reading this post, and I hope you're all doing well. Until next time, I've been your dark, brooding, Self-Proclaimed Dreamer. Have a good week, and stay safe, everyone!