#2 Movie of 2008

2. THE DARK KNIGHT

A critical and commercial success, there is so much 'movie' in this movie it was exhausting to sit through. But it had to be this way, in order to explain and define two new villians in ways that aren't clean cut, and to introduce tragedy and conflict in ways where you have no idea what to expect next from any character on the screen

While the 1989 Batman scared me when I was younger, the punches The Dark Knight refuses to pull were so much harsher. I'm also glad that the movie moved so quickly, because otherwise younger more innocent minds might linger too much of their thoughts on the 'pencil', the 'smile', and the giant pile of burning money. And there isn't any lingering aspect of the violence... it just happens with a rawness in this film, hoping, without much success, that we're too desensitized by blind brutality to notice.

As for that breakneck pacing and fast editing that made something like Armageddon so awful, there's no way that some of it, even in this movie, can't be a little irritating. So I give it a very small demotion because the movie could have slowed down for me to absorb some of the subplots.

But regardless, what makes this movie even greater than a perfect 'comic-book' movie is how it reflects, in a rather pessimistic way, the underlying mood of all us in times of great insecurity like we're living in today (although a little bit less as of Inauguration Day) . As the Joker explains his anarchic philosophy and acts on it, it all comes strikingly home, not just because you can recognize the great City of Chicago in many exterior shots. No, the Joker's mayhem plays into something deep, because he values stoking rabid fear and paranoia as gleefully as brutally cutting up someone's face. The terrified Gothaminians are the all-too-vulnerable ends to the Joker's means. In the opening scene before he first appears, as his bank robbery cohorts rapidly off one another, the message to crooks and citizens alike is... "Don't trust anyone, and be loyal to nobody." Batman and Two-Face are variations on this ultimate screen villian's modus operandi, where the swelled up emotions of a terrified populace legitimize an authority's strength, whether costumed or legitimate.