Ahead of The Batman this weekend I started to binge-watch Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and once again, I was blown away by The Dark Knight. It’s a film that never gets old nor does it ever seem to disappoint. Considering how much I enjoyed it last night, I figured I might as well revisit this review I wrote of one of my favorite movies of all time. Enjoy!
Have you ever seen a perfect movie? A movie so undeniably brilliant and spot on that the more you watch it the better it gets? A movie that’s so good that you kind of can’t believe it’s that incredible? The Dark Knight is that movie for me.
I don’t watch The Dark Knight often. But every so often I get the unshakable desire to see it. And so last night with that fervor upon me I decided to watch it.
For two hours and 32 minutes, I was sucked into the dark and demented world of Gotham where a man as horrifically twisted and brilliant as The Joker resides to wreak havoc on Gotham’s citizens for no reason other than pure amusement. And as the story slowly builds upon The Joker’s madness the movie gets better and better and better until one can only stare at the screen in appreciative awe.
The Dark Knight is unlike any other superhero movie that’s been created. In fact, can we even say it’s a superhero movie? Batman isn’t exactly a hero, as the movie made clear. He’s just a man in a cynical world and sometimes the right choices mean you have to become the villain. Simple as that. But I guess that’s the reason why he’s a hero, right?
Gosh, I love this movie. And the reason why I love it is that it’s jam-packed with twists. I mean, the film starts with a twist! The criminals robbing that bank, in the beginning, think they’re conning The Joker (and each other) when really The Joker is among them, ends up killing all of them, obtains the money, and gets away in a school bus that blends in with the rest of the school buses going down the street outside the bank. That’s how the movie starts! It’s so genius.
Honestly, I can’t give this movie enough praise. Fourteen years after its premiere it still can’t be beaten, and that’s even after the dozens of superhero movies (Marvel and DC Comics) that have come out since then.
We can give Black Panther (deserved) Oscar wins, herald Avengers: Endgame for all of its incredible achievements, love Spider-Man: No Way Home for bringing all of the live-action Spider-Men together in a movie that actually lived up to the astronomical levels of hype, but even these films can’t compare to The Dark Knight.
The Dark Knight is a perfect movie through and through for its cinematography, Christopher Nolan’s incredible directorial vision, every actor’s complex and nuanced performance, the music, the action, etc.
It’s going to take an undeniable Best Picture worthy superhero movie to potentially top it as my favorite comic book film of all time.
I thank you for reading and I hope you have a fantastic day.
Annlyel Online 
Well, I went and tossed this grenade into a video call at work when “Marvel vs DC” was being used as an introductory vehicle for a new team: I think there are two or three Marvel movies better than Dark Knight. I don’t think DC went downhill when Nolan left, I think Nolan’s movies were already shaky on their plot holes and contrivances, and Liam Neeson saved the first one and Heath Ledger saved the second one with great acting performances. Tom Hardy couldn’t save the third one from behind the Bane mask, and when we got left with Jesse Eisenberg and Jared Leto, the wheels just came off.
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Those are good points. Which Marvel movies do you feel are better than The Dark Knight? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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Okay, I’m going to try to self-edit so I don’t wind up piggybacking a whole blog post into your comments section, but here’s the movies I think are better or that I’d say I’m on the fence on saying or better in the comic books genre:
Straight-up better (MCU): Doctor Strange, Avengers, Black Panther
Straight-up better (non-MCU): Kick Ass
On the fence (MCU): Avengers: Infinity War, Black Widow, Iron Man
On the fence (non-MCU): Spider Man (first Tobey Maguire), Deadpool
Almost but not quite (non-MCU): X-Men (2000), X-Men First Class
I’ll spare the verbosity of explaining why for them all, but that could go into a whole blog post in itself.
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We have different opinions here but all of those movies are very enjoyable (and far more rewatchable than The Dark Knight.)
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Yeah… rewatchability is a very, very big part of how I evaluate movies. The best movies, to me, are the ones where I can watch it twenty times, and on the twentieth viewing, I’m still saying, “yeah… that’s as good or better now as it was the first time I watched it.” I make no illusions about that to myself or anyone else.
I think it borders on an objective statement of fact that Chris Nolan’s three Batman movies all relied heavily upon the acting performances of their lead villains to let us into that part of his art and distract us from the fact that he’s doing a lot of the narrative with mirrors. In some ways, he kind of does that in all of his movies — he hands the ball to his actors and doesn’t really keep his scripts particularly tight on their narrative logic at all. In the first two Batman movies, as well as Inception, it largely works. In the third Batman movie and Tenet, it largely doesn’t.
I am probably being too harsh when I said the other DC movies didn’t go downhill; Nolan _is_ a genuinely better director than Zack Snyder, and there _is_ a more artful craft to his Batman movies than most of the rest of the schlock that DC has put out. But I also think that he wound up leaving them with a really bad playbook for how to go about making the movies, in the fact that he more or less demonstrated that you don’t need to make the plots make sense to make money with the movies. In some fairness, they have not prioritized the acting in the way that he did, and instead have tried to crib Marvel’s CGI playbook together with Nolan’s slapdash attention to detail on the narrative. And… well… *gestures around at near-wreckage that DC’s left behind since 2012* …we kinda see how that’s mostly gone.
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