Elevator Music?

The Dark Knight

Hype? Check.

Prerequisite: Tall, dark and handsome hero? Check.

Oh and a healthy dose of skepticism towards caped crusaders? Check. I’ll provide that!

Really, I’ll even throw in a challenge: Blow my mind

“Hmm… Very poor choice of words.”

For a fiend who is so wrong on so many levels, the Joker was dead was dead right about my vocabulary. A more appropriate response would have been: “Like whoa,” proceeded by a temporary stupor of awesomeness.

The Dark Knight appears to set up a game of chess at first, drawing a line between the good and the bad. However, we soon see that they don’t have much intention of playing the game as so much in knocking over the board and watching the pieces fall.

Right from the start we are plunged into one of the most elaborate tributes to chaos and anarchy. Harvey Dent is portrayed as the ‘The White Knight of Gotham’, a legitimate alternative of justice and rules which is the exact opposite that Gotham has come to know. Aaron here just gives the right amount of self-righteousness and projects the aura of Golden Boy very well (helped by the hair). It makes his later descent into the bowels of insanity hard to watch and to accept.

In the other corner is the Batman, played with commendable effort by Christian Bale. Bale’s flexibility in his role as both superficial billionaire (Billionaire Absconds Entire Russian Ballet! Best headline ever.) and the scrounge of the underworld truly makes the idea of ‘secret identity' believable. Also worth mentioning is Commissioner Gordon(Gary Oldman) who appears to be another earnest cop trying to do his best in a field but carries a steely will and fight in him yet.


Terror comes in the form of custom made purple suits and grunge make-up. Enter the Joker(Heath Ledger). There is no worse thing that you can do to a villain than to give them a long, drawn out tragic back story. Am I glad they gave him ambiguous origins. I was afraid when he first started explaining how he got his scars. I mean an abusive father? Come on. Thankfully, he has a few facbrications of varying degress of misery.(Upon research, I htink they are meant to be a nod to the Joker's many origins in the comic book.)


Jonathon and Christopher Nolan have crafted a deeply complex character which required almost Para Paraesque acting to pull off and Heath Ledger has done it. With a joker’s gait, a maniacal laughter from hell and a voice that sounds like knives laced with honey Heath Ledger is equal parts flamboyant ‘entertainment’ and sketchy schizophrenic phycopath

In a frenetic cadence of chaos and destruction, Joker’s erratic decisions make every death as horrifying as the first. Through the Joker, the citizen’s of Gotham are put in front of a wall of madness. The consequences are not glossed over and the audience’s intellect never doubted.

Through the course of the film we see normal citizens teetering on the edge of criminal offence in attempts to rid those they consider criminals. The irony is not lost. One of the questions here is what would people do in the face of anarchy? Are we all too afraid to search our dark corners? When the Joker says, “You’re a freak. just like me”, he isn’t simply taunting Batman. It’s a statement for all of us. Are we just wearing the makeup underneath our skin instead of on it?

Not a second is wasted and every action sequence is done almost to a point of ridiculous perfection. The script is quite fantastic espcially the intereaction between the Joker and The Batman. You can see the Joker really enjoying his torment and the love for his game. On the otherhand, Batman's lack of response and sometimes effective one-liners bring out fustration and sulleness.

Watching Batman is not a simple mind-blowing experience. It doesn’t just happen while you sit in the theatres and stare at the screen. It tides over-an outright annihilation of all previous standards that superhero movies have held and blasting a whole new league of its own.

The world deserved a better class of superhero movies from Hollywood and damn, did The Dark Knight give it to us good.

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Could we get a minute to indulge in a vindictive laughter for Edison Chen's shameless boasting and his one second cameo as hand phone boy?

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Dear Myra,

Never ever demand a review. Ever again. Pressure makes me write something insipid which I am still compelled to post.

Love,
Beverly