It is often said that the main difference between DC and Marvel is that DC characters live in the fictional world of Gotham and Metropolis, while Marvel characters live in the real world. This was always an exaggeration — Washington DC has appeared in DC Comics (Lex Luthor for President!), and Marvel has plenty of preposterous locations (Genosha? The Savage Land?!?!). In truth, both have their glossy, escapist fare (Superman, Fantastic Four) and their gritty, tortured antiheroes (Batman, Hulk).
In this decade we have had a surplus of Marvel movies, which have generally been very watchable (can we pretend the Fantastic Four never happened?), some quirky independent stuff (Hellboy), and DC were left in the starting blocks. The X-Men and Spiderman in particular have been satisfying franchises, but both suffered from the dreaded sequelitis. In the X-Men case, I put the blame squarely on DC’s poaching of Bryan Singer to direct their dramatic-tension-free Superman fluff (ooo, Superman lifts something… ooo, he lifts something bigger… ooo, he lifts something enormous… aw, he’s sick… ah, he’s better… what, was that it?), which just goes to show that even a good director can’t make a silk purse out of a steaming turd. It seemed that Marvel’s star was in the wane, and DC’s only decent outing (Batman Begins) was a once-off.
Then came two pieces of wonderful news: Robert Downey Junior was cast as Tony Stark (inspired!), and Christopher Nolan was making a Batman sequel. Maybe the superhero movie wasn’t dead after all. Except neither Iron Man nor Batman are, strictly speaking, superheroes. One is a billionaire playboy with no superpowers who dresses up in a high-tech suit that lets him fly around fighting criminals, and the other… er…
Batman Begins was most enjoyable. After Joel “I made a good movie, once” Schumacher successfully morphed Burton’s Batman franchise into a remake of the 60’s TV series minus the anarchic comedy (“You’re not taking me to the coolaah” … oh my sides) it seemed the Caped Crusader was once more a figure of fun. A return to darker, brooding, dramatic form was the only way out, and Nolan gave us just that. This was the first screen Batman that asked the obvious question: how insane does a man have to be to run around at night dressed as a bat fighting crime? But the slightly preposterous climax (all the water pipes and train lines pass through the one building?) strained disbelief slightly, and the city’s blatantly Gothic/Deco ambience made it clear that this was still DC’s fictional dreamworld.
The Dark Knight is a bucket of ice water to the face.
The city of Gotham is no longer cheesily virtual; every building and every street is convincingly real. There is no mansion (it burned down in the last movie), so Batman makes do with a shipping container and a large basement. It’s still a Hollywood action movie; the car chase sequences in particular being as far over the top as you would expect; but the subtext takes it far beyond the usual popcorn fare. Even supposedly “gritty” superhero movies (X-Men being a prime example) have a relatively simple morality at their core. In The Dark Knight, Nolan asks much more unsettling questions. How do you deal with an enemy who has no rational desires? Can you fight terrorism without doing their work for them? Is everyone corruptible? Who will do the lesser-evil things that must still be done? The parallels with modern events are uncomfortably visible.
The Joker is a force of nature, an embodiment of chaos. Like the evil genius in Seven, his only desire is to corrupt and destroy, to prove to the world that evil lies within everyone. The movie isn’t particularly graphic; many of the most violent events are implicit, to even greater effect. It is, however, established early on (and often thereafter) that this script follows no formula, that there are no lines that it won’t cross, that it is less rollercoaster ride and more skydiving with no parachute.
Excellent.
