Interstellar

INTERSTELLAR

** SPOILERS **

"People used to look up and wonder about our place in the stars. Now we look down and worry about our place in the dirt." This is the blunt and bitter mission statement of Christopher Nolan's magnum opus Interstellar, a grand, ambitious, and hopeful exploration of human drama poised against Mankind's quest to reach unknown regions of deep space in a desperate attempt to save itself from extinction. Positing a terrible future decades from now where war and armies are unnecessary in the wake of a global famine, the human race has become "caretakers" rather than "explorers," as bitterly and bluntly stated by our hero Matthew McConaughey. A worldwide "Blight" routinely kills all the crops of America's heartland with devastating dust storms. Food production is at a standstill. Humanity is poised to die out within a generation. What's a good ole boy who's tryin' to raise a family to do? There's only one answer for McConaughey: save the world.

In Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey plays Matthew McConaughey, a former hotshot pilot and "highly educated" engineer (somehow more believable here than Mark Wahlberg was as an "inventor" in Transformers: Age of Extinction) who stumbles upon strange phenomena in his Midwestern corn farm. A military drone flying overhead that should have been decommissioned. Weird gravity moving objects in the bedroom of his sweet young daughter, the apple of his eye, played MacKenzie Foy. This all leads McConaughey and Foy in the dead of night to a secret location where they stumble upon the secret remnants of NASA, run in secret by the father-daughter scientist team of Michael Caine and Anne Hathaway. They have a plan to save the world, with a name they must have lifted with a wink from their previous encounters with Ra's al-Ghul in The Dark Knight Trilogy: Project Lazarus -- a manned space mission through a mysterious worm hole in space that appeared next to Saturn, taking them to another galaxy to find a new planet capable of sustaining human life. Plan A: get everyone on Earth to the new planet. Plan B: a population bomb, growing new people on the new planet at the cost of everyone on Earth left to die. Everyone agrees: McConaughey has the right stuff. He is gung ho about going; his daughter pleads with him to stay. Their conflict and heartache will span decades across time and space.

With giddy glee, Interstellar unleashes a payload of quantum physics at the audience. Depicting the grim and gritty realities of outer space travel in the Stanley Kubrick 2001/Ridley Scott Alien tradition, Nolan delights in dazzling us with the physics behind a worm hole (totally different from what Star Trek: Deep Space Nine used to depict), the perils of relativity when traveling in space near a black hole (an hour on one watery planet equals a year on Earth -- a catastrophic tidal wave that astronauts McConaughey and Hathaway survive costs the life of Wes Bentley and 23 years of missed time on Earth), and later, an insane jaunt into a black hole and an exploration into the 5th dimension. Interstellar raises intriguing questions: what if there are no "ghosts" or "supernatural" phenomena but instead all of the unexplainable occurrences throughout time are after effects of the actions of Mankind after it has highly evolved into other dimensions, rendering time meaningless? Meanwhile on Earth, Foy has grown up (to the same age her father was when he abandoned her); now played by Jessica Chastain, she struggles to unravel the scientific equation left behind by the dying Caine, discovering the dark secret behind the Lazarus Mission that dooms the human race on Earth (there is no Plan A. It is all a lie). At the very least, Interstellar makes one want to learn Morse code. It could save the whole world.

All the heady science aside, Interstellar is a movie first and foremost and plays to all the tropes of a blockbuster Hollywood film. In another galaxy, McConaughey and Hathaway find an ice planet and a water planet, convenient landscapes available in Iceland where Interstellar was shot. McConaughey space cowboys his way across the galaxy, performing desperate stunts flying his space ship, refusing the very idea that he won't be able to return to Earth to see his daughter again. Hathaway risks the entire mission because she's in love with a missing scientist from the previous Lazarus mission. And no matter how many trillions of miles across galaxies they can travel, put two dudes on an ice world and somehow they'll get into a fist fight. Matt Damon surprises us with a cameo appearance as a scientist-gone-mad who embarked on a prior Lazarus mission on a frozen world, and it's a bravura performance. Damon plays completely against expectation as a sniveling, manipulative, murderous coward.  It's safe to say you've never hated Matt Damon in a movie as much as you do in Interstellar. The feel good ending begs the question of whether it's true that an old woman on her deathbed's fondest wish is to see her sexy young daddy -- all handsome, tanned, tight jeans, just fell out of a black hole -- swagger into the room to kiss her goodbye.

Interstellar is refreshingly anti-Star Wars in that it is the opposite of phallocentric. The central father-son conflict of Star Wars is eschewed in favor of exploring the relationship between fathers and daughters: McConaughey's sweet relationship with Foy/Chastain and to a lesser extent the relationship between Caine and Hathaway. McConaughey has two kids, a boy and girl, and he ain't too concerned about his son, who grows up to be Casey Affleck and is happy to be a farmer as raised by their grandfather John Lithgow. Heartbreaking scenes of McConaughey watching video messages from his aged son aside, McConaughey really cares most about his daughter, who angrily refuses to acknowledge him for decades until their touching climatic reunion when she's an old lady played by Ellen Burstyn. Interstellar's emotional crux is touchingly all about a father's love for his baby girl, as McConaughey breaches time and space to become the very "ghost" that sets about this entire outer space enterprise and enabling her with the means to solve Caine's math equation and save humanity. A stunning, breathtaking behemoth of a motion picture with big brains and a beating heart, Interstellar reaffirms the human spirit with the idea that the best reason to boldly go where no one has gone before is to do it for your family so that you can come back home and be with them. And then go back into space and find Anne Hathaway, 'cause she's all alone out there and she needs some McConaughey lovin'.

I'm glad the #Interstellar shoot didn't interfere with Christopher Nolan's profitable corn business.
— John Orquiola (@BackoftheHead) November 13, 2014

The Dark Knight Rises

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

** SPOILERS **

"There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne."

The Dark Knight Rises, the epic conclusion to Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, as it is now known, is like a massive jigsaw puzzle. Not all the pieces quite fit, some are jammed right in there to make for a scraggly patchwork. But when one steps back and sees the big picture, it's worthy of awe. Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan have the brass balls to conclude their story about Batman, honoring the tropes of what has come before while blazing new directions. The story of Batman, and more importantly of Bruce Wayne, comes full circle, and in its final breath, The Dark Knight Rises does rise above its flaws and achieves a kind of magnificence.

The Dark Knight Rises pulls freely from Batman comic books of the 1990s, such as "Knightfall", where Bane breaks Batman's back, and "No Man's Land", when Gotham City is cut off from the rest of the world after a cataclysmic earthquake. Yet the Nolans craft an ambitious Batman story we've never quite seen before; if it angers some Batman fanboy "purists", it's because the Nolans treat Bruce Wayne not as a "superhero" but as a person first. A person who has to regain what's extraordinary about himself after suffering through the tragedies of the death of Rachel Dawes and Batman taking the blame for the murder of Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. 

Eight years have passed since the events in The Dark Knight and Bruce Wayne has become a shell of himself, haunting the rebuilt Wayne Manor, a Howard Hughes-like curiosity to the rest of the world. Even after eight years retired, the time he spent as Batman left Wayne with no cartilage in his knees, kidney damage and a scarred, ravaged body. The fanboys rage: "Batman would never quit being Batman!" They demand Batman fight the never-ending battle against evil. But the Nolans have always floated the idea that there's a human being behind the cape and cowl, someone who wouldn't and shouldn't be Batman forever. Harvey Dent even said so in The Dark Knight: "Whoever Batman is, he doesn't want to do this forever. How could he?" Batman the symbol, the legend, can go on, but let us truly consider Bruce Wayne the man and what he needs. The Nolans display a compassion and a hope for Bruce Wayne that is simply unprecedented in any media.

As Bruce Wayne, Christian Bale is once again the primary focus of Rises. Bale throws everything into the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman this final time: limping, growling, screaming, leaping, falling, agonizing, and triumphing as the best cinematic Batman ever. Batman shared the stage more evenly with Harvey Dent, the heroic Commissioner James Gordon, and The Joker (never mentioned) in The Dark Knight, but Rises is mainly and fittingly about Bruce Wayne. Gordon becomes a casualty early and spends most of the movie in a hospital bed while missing and pleading for the Batman to return. (Gary Oldman's Gordon is unabashedly in love with the Batman, almost to the levels that Adam West's Commissioner was in love with him.) Note for all police commissioners: do not personally lead SWAT teams into the sewers; it doesn't work out so well. Michael Caine gives his most emotional performance as Alfred J. Pennyworth, whose monologues serve almost as a surrogate for the Nolans' vision for a better life for Bruce Wayne than being Batman. Meanwhile, Morgan Freeman returns, bemused as ever, giving Batman his most wonderful toy yet, a flying assault vehicle called (fittingly) The Bat*, before being horrified as his vast armory of Batman weapons and vehicles is stolen by Bane and the League of Shadows. Cillian Murphy in a cameo once more as Jonathan (The Scarecrow) Crane draws some welcome laughs.

New playmates for Wayne in this final chapter of the saga include cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway purring Hedy Lamarr-style and slinking about in a form-fitting updated Julie Newmar catsuit) and police detective John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an angry young orphan who has magic Angry Young Orphan X-Ray Vision that allowed him to see right through Batman's mask and figure out he's Bruce Wayne. Wayne/Batman mentoring Blake in his philosophy for masked nocturnal vigilantism is almost as much fun as Batman and Catwoman (no one ever calls her that) in costume smacking down Bane's thugs, though there isn't quite as much of it as one would like. Hathaway is rather fetching sprawled out on Batman's Bat-Pod and barreling down Gotham's streets blowing up Tumblers. Nolan doesn't deviate from the natural conclusion one reaches when seeing Batman and Catwoman together in their matching black night-time gear: they're made for each other. Selina Kyle's main motivation, besides being all excited about the "storm coming" and then freaking when it's Bane bringing the storm, is chasing after "the clean slate", which is a computer program metaphor that wipes away your past. Very necessary for the sexy cat burglar on the go.

The Academy Award-winning performance of the late Heath Ledger as The Joker is an impossible act to follow, but as Bane, an enormously jacked and masked Tom Hardy, creates a different kind of arch villain. Personally, I found Bane fascinating, and Hardy's Bane voice is amusing to imitate. I especially liked the joke of the young boy singing the national anthem and Bane noting, "He has a lovely, lovely voice!" Bane's comic book smarts are maintained, and while Nolan eschewed the notion of Bane gaining super strength through the super steroid called Venom, Bane remains an imposing physical threat who does break the Batman's back in a ferocious, if straightforward fight. I did enjoy Batman's futile screaming and desperation as he falls to Bane, completely outclassed and unprepared for whom he was facing. Bane is a great deal of nasty fun, especially when he launched into what seemed like a ten minute super villain monologue or when he taunted Bruce Wayne about his failures ("Your greatest victory was a lie.") and when he would have Bane's permission to die. In the climactic rematch with Batman, Bane gets his mask damaged and visibly panics, desperate to end the fight as he's overwhelmed by agony and defeated by Batman.

Then there is the mysterious character of Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), the new CEO of Wayne Enterprises, a quickie lover for Bruce Wayne, and a big believer in clean energy and Wayne's fusion reactor. Taking cues from his magic show movie The Prestige, Nolan hides Miranda Tate's true purpose and identity in Rises in plain sight, decoying and feinting with stories about Bane's origins that reaches right back around to R'as Al-Ghul and reveal Tate as Talia Al-Ghul, Daughter of the Demon. Batman was simply shocked when Talia shanked him, but it's understandable: While trapped in Bane's prison pit and healing from his broken back, Bruce Wayne was visited by R'as Al-Ghul (Liam Neeson)'s Force ghost. And like Obi-Wan's Force ghost did to Luke Skywalker several times, R'as mislead Bruce into believing Bane was his son. And speaking of hiding in plain sight, the ultimate destiny of John Blake - full name Robin John Blake - was a jawdropper.

The plot of The Dark Knight Rises is labyrinthine. Details involving the theft of Bruce Wayne's fingerprints by Selina Kyle, a Russian nuclear scientist kidnapped by the masked mercenary Bane, the wheeling and dealing at Wayne Enterprises which causes Bruce Wayne to lose his vast fortune as Miranda Tate is installed by Lucius Fox as CEO, an underground army plotting to take over Gotham City, and a fusion reactor beneath Gotham River which is turned into a nuclear bomb as Bane reveals his grand scheme to destroy Gotham City and fulfill R'as Al-Ghul's destiny a la Batman Begins are lobbed fiercely at the audience. The third act is almost an hour of Gotham City under siege, occupied by Bane and the League of Shadows under the threat of a nuclear holocaust, as Bruce Wayne must find a way to escape a Middle Eastern prison and lead the war to save Gotham City as the Batman. 

The #OccupyGotham act of Rises is the most unwieldy and problematic. Gotham City was really Chicago in the previous installments, but Gotham has grown in the last eight years and has now jarringly become Chicago, Manhattan and Pittsburgh side by side, linked by bridges destroyed by Bane. For five months, Bane and his small army held a city of twelve million people hostage; with many people isolated from their homes, like the executives of Wayne Enterprises trapped in Wayne Tower. Yet somehow everyone was able to maintain their haircuts and made sure to be dressed well even when they had no way to shower for months. Three thousand police officers are trapped in the tunnels under Gotham, but they were able to get food..., uh, why? Why would Bane allow them to not starve to death so they couldn't rise up against him later? As one character notes, "this situation is unprecedented", but many of #OccupyGotham's intricate and logical details seemed to slip through Nolan's grasp, at least until Bruce Wayne returned to Gotham (the hows remain a mystery), became Batman again, and mounted an explosive, all-out assault on Bane's forces.

As Bane mounted #OccupyGotham, Bruce Wayne was trapped in the 'worst hell on Earth' prison, which gave him the chance to heal and regain his true Batmanity. We're told this prison pit where Bane was born is filled with the worst murderers and thieves on Earth, but it didn't seem so bad. Supposedly it's a dark place with no light - Bane says he didn't see light until he was a man - but the place seemed awfully well lit. Maybe Bane was speaking metaphorically. The inmates seemed like a bunch genial chaps who all enjoyed watching rock climbing and chanting together. One of them can even smack a protruding vertebrae back into place. Look hard and maybe you'll see one of those guys helping Tony Stark build a suit of armor in a corner. I really enjoyed Wayne's multiple attempts to climb the pit and duplicate the leap and escape a child once made (who turned out to be Talia). Bruce Wayne is always driven by anger and a lack of fear of death, but he learned the importance of that fear, that he cannot truly rise unless he eschewed his tether and does so with the fear of failure and death. These heady notions would serve Bruce Wayne well into the ending of Rises.

That ending. Despite The Dark Knight Rises' flaws, Nolan's biggest gamble and triumph was truly ending his story of Batman, and he does so in a better, more uplifting fashion than Frank Miller did when he gave Batman his "ending" in the seminal graphic novel "The Dark Knight Returns". Batman takes it upon himself to use The Bat to fly the nuclear bomb away from Gotham, perishing in a nuclear explosion. But Bruce Wayne did not die. How did he survive? After giving it a good deal of thought, I discovered the answer: I don't care. I don't care. Because I didn't want Batman to die. More importantly, I didn't want Bruce Wayne to die. What the Nolans achieved with Rises' conclusion was something the comic books, which must publish Batman stories ad infinitum, can and will never do: give Bruce Wayne the happy ending he's deserved for 70+ years. Because "anyone can be a hero", and Batman is a symbol who can rise again if he's needed. But this Bruce Wayne, our best Bruce Wayne, deserves a chance at something more, a better life, "a clean slate" with Selina Kyle. In grand style, The Dark Knight Rises finally, bravely and boldly, gives a noble and fitting end to Bruce Wayne's dark nights.

* Note that Batman never drives a Tumbler Batmobile in this movie. Why would he? He has The Bat. Once you go Bat, you never go back.

Inception: The IMAX Experience

INCEPTION: THE IMAX EXPERIENCE

** SPOILERS **

Hollywood scuttlebutt is that Christopher Nolan spent ten years conceiving Inception. He began not long after The Matrix came out, I wager. With Inception, Nolan takes on the The Matrix at its own game, freed from the juvenile comic book and chop socky kung fu inspirations of the Wachowski Brothers. Nolan dreams his visually dazzling dreams strictly for grown ups. He concocts a mature and sophisticated but sometimes difficult adventure tome about guilt, love and redemption, using the blurred lines between reality and dreams as its proving ground.

Leonardo DiCaprio leads a stellar cast, some of whom are culled from Nolan's Batman Begins and The Dark Knight - Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, and Michael Caine. The newcomers to Nolan's company of players are DiCaprio as an Extractor of information within dreams. Working for a shadowy corporation, DiCaprio's shadowy job is to invade people's dreams and steal whatever shadowy secrets they're hiding. Jason Gordon-Levitt is his staunch ally, while Tom Hardy is a Forger, a shapeshifter within the dreams. Dileep Rao is the Chemist who induces people to dream. Ellen Page is the newest recruit, the Architect of dreams, able to create and manipulate the reality of a dreamer's dreamscape. How Page is able to do what she does is never explained, but how can you "explain" such awesome sights as an entire addrondissement of Paris inverting upon itself until it's upside down?

Watanabe, their target at the start of the movie, comes to them with a proposal: to plant an idea in the mind of Murphy, his business competitor. ("An idea," DiCaprio informs us," is the greatest virus known to man.") Watanabe wants this idea to be for Murphy to dismantle the business empire he stands to inherit from his dying father, Pete Postlethwaite, lest Murphy's company control 50% of the world's energy and become its own superpower. This would be very bad, Watanabe insists. This process of planting an idea into a dreamer's mind is called "inception".  They say it can't be done, but DiCaprio knows it can. He's done it before. It didn't go so well then, but he'll do it again quid pro quo if Watanabe uses his far-reaching, shadowy connections to allow DiCaprio - a fugitive ex-pat - to return to the US and his children.

With that set up, DiCaprio and his team go after Murphy to commit inception and to extract a secret in a high-tech vault buried deep within Murphy's subconsciousness. To accomplish this, they engage in an elaborate subterfuge to take Murphy not just within a dream, or a dream within a dream, but into a dream within a dream within a dream.  Three layers of dreams, from which they all must wake and survive attacks from Projections, depicted as assault teams from Murphy's mind trained to defend and protect him within the dreams.  There is also a dreaded fourth layer, Limbo, where a dreamer can be lost for decades. DiCaprio knows about Limbo all too well.

DiCaprio's work with Martin Scorsese (The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island) has enabled him to master portraying tortured characters suffering from deep emotional wounds, unsure of their own reality, desperately grasping at tenuous threads to maintain their sanity. In Inception, DiCaprio is haunted, literally in the dream worlds, by his wife Marion Cotillard. Page is the audience's link to understanding DiCaprio's gradual, emotional unraveling. Without Page asking questions, prodding him, and occasionally betraying his wishes within the dreams, we'd never understand why he can't bear to see his children's faces (an amazing device Nolan employs) and why Cotillard waits for DiCaprio in a shambles of a penthouse suite or in the kitchen of their home, chef's knife in hand.

Even more affecting to me than DiCaprio's torment over his wife and his inability in the real world to return to the United States and see his children without being arrested and imprisoned for his wife's death was Murphy's relationship with his father. Assuming the identity in dreams of Postlethwaite's consigliere Tom Berenger (Principal Skinner thinks Bart Simpson would love this movie; it has Tom Berenger), Hardy is the means for the audience to delve deep into Murphy's issues with Postlethwaite's "disappointment" with him as his son and heir. Murphy turns out to be the most sympathetic person in Inception; he is simply a son coping with his father's expectations and lack of affection, while struggling to be his own man.  Our "heroes" spend the entire movie kidnapping, manipulating, and emotionally mindfucking Murphy. Though he comes out of Inception with "inception", he also finds the personal strength to become the man his father knew he could be.

Nolan expects the audience to side with DiCaprio, Page, Gordon-Levitt, Hardy, Rao, and Watanabe (poor Ken spends half the movie slowly dying from a bullet hole in his chest) in their gambit against Murphy, but they are all actually scoundrels. They're likable and charming together; Hardy is a terrific commando and I liked Gordon-Levitt's flirtation with Page and his tricking her into kissing him. To be clear, they're all the real bad guys here. They willingly and purposely invade an innocent man's dreams under questionable circumstances (would it really be so bad if Murphy, who seems like a good man, controlled half the world's energy supply?) and nearly get him and themselves killed.

It's very easy to become lost in the maze of Nolan's dreamscape. His ambitions sometimes extend his reach, especially in the chaotic and action-packed dream within a dream within a dream sequences that comprise the second half of Inception. Nolan does maintain a visual clarity for each dream level: the first, rainy Los Angeles, the second, a luxury hotel, and the third, snowy mountains with a forbidding fortress. Inception's fascinating first half involves DiCaprio and Gordon-Levitt explaining the rules of manipulating the dreamworlds to the inquisitive Page, but when the action kicks in, Nolan keeps it purposefully relentless, perhaps necessarily, so that there's no time for the audience to question the logic or reality of what they're seeing. When Nolan pauses the action and spectacle, his dialogue repeats in rhythms, but he also tends to have his characters over-explain their motivations and actions.

Inception's spectacle is truly awe-inspiring. Even when not in the dream world, Nolan shoots all around the world in Paris, Kyoto, and Los Angeles, using the scope of IMAX to present their real life city scapes in breathtaking fashion. Within dreams, Nolan masterfully uses CGI to create wonders like DiCaprio's personal dream world of decaying skyscrapers cliffside on a breaking beach, and stairwells that become a never-ending maze. Inception also presents us with the longest slow motion van-drives-off-a-bride-and-falls-into-the-water sequence in the history of film.

Nolan's homages to his favorite films are fun to spot. He once again milks his love for Michael Mann's Heat, staging his own version of the famous machine gun shootout on the streets of Los Angeles, this time with rain machines pounding the actors.  An assault on a snowy mountaintop fortress complete with snowmobiles, machine gun ski chases, and an avalanche seems to be Nolan's tribute to James Bond and On Her Majesty's Secret Service.  Gordon-Levitt has the best action scene in the whole shebang: a spectacular, physics-defying fight with Projections in a hotel hallway  that's jaw-droppingly convincing. (It ends, in a sly nod to WWE, with Gordon-Levitt applying the Million Dollar Dream sleeperhold!) When Murphy sees his dying father one last time in the dream within the dream within the dream, Postlethwaithe's room looks suspiciously like a holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Inception's ending leaves us with a dangling question, all determined by whether or not DiCaprio's dream "totem" continued spinning forever or whether it stopped and toppled. Nolan leaves us in mid-spin, implying that DiCaprio never left Limbo and gained his heart's desire there.  I'd like to hope that the totem eventually stopped spinning, that DiCaprio really did return to reality and his children, but I believe Watanabe made good on his promise to DiCaprio in Limbo. The sudden appearance of Michael Caine waiting for DiCaprio at LAX indicates that DiCaprio never woke up from the dream and remains trapped in Limbo. For DiCaprio, the ending of "it was all just a dream" is exactly the kick he was always searching for.

The Dark Knight (****)

THE DARK KNIGHT

"You Either Die A Hero Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain."

The Dark Knight behaves as if it would be surprised to learn it's a comic book superhero movie. It expends a muscular two and a half hours vigorously arguing that it's an epic crime drama and haunting Shakespearean tragedy. The Dark Knight would convincingly win its argument, too, were it not for the guy dressed like a bat, the clown-faced killer, and the man missing half his face. Even then it cuts them all down to size, tears them inside out, and bares their souls for the world to see. The Dark Knight turns out to be a gripping four way dance: three men trying to preserve their city and one enigmatic chaos-bringer tearing apart all their efforts, and tragically later, their bond.

Escalation. This was the idea that ended Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight all but redefines the word. There is so much going on in The Dark Knight, so much happening, often all at once, it's almost staggering. The intricate details of Batman, Gordon and Dent's war on the mob, going after the mob's money laundering, indicting underbosses to turn state's evidence against the godfathers of the city, could be straight from The Wire. Batman outdoes Mission: Impossible III's Ethan Hunt in both coolness and jumping off of buildings when he makes a special and all-kinds-of-illegal side trip to Hong Kong to "extradite" (a better word is "kidnap") Zau, a potential Wayne Industries business partner who works as the Gotham mob's accountant. (Side note: one of the best things about Christopher Nolan's Batman films is that they are global in scope. His Batman and his Gotham City are palpably a part of our world, not existing in a sealed off, self-contained universe of soundstages and CGI cityscapes.) 

Meanwhile, the Joker robs a mob bank in a splendid homage to Heat, and then essentially hires himself as the mob's enforcer, giving himself the assignment of eliminating the Batman. In between, the Joker bumps off each mob boss (played by Eric Roberts and Michael Jai White) and takes over their operations to give Gotham City "a better class of criminal". Then the real shit hits the fan. 

City officials are assassinated. Jim Gordon becomes Comissioner. A pivotal handsome face is scarred irrevocably. And a major death, but not the one expected. Minor characters, like one of Gordon's cops or Bruce Wayne's accountant, end up making huge mistakes that cost our heroes gravely. Even Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman, bemused) and faithful Alfred (Michael Caine, rock solid) get important bits of business. Fox takes a moral stand against Bruce Wayne abusing his technologies while Alfred makes a difficult decision to burn Rachel Dawes' goodbye letter to Bruce and protect his employer from further heartache.

Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, confident and firing at all cylinders) was the singular focus of Batman Begins, and the previous chapter did its job so well that Batman is able share a much grander canvas with Lieutenant James Gordon, District Attorney Harvey Dent, and the Joker without being upstaged and shoved to the background. Wayne's two lives have settled into a successful routine in the last year. He can sleep through his days as Chairman of Wayne Enterprises and flaunt his bevy of easy hotties (to Rachel Dawes' eye-rolling chagrin) thanks to Lucius Fox minding the store. Fox is also ever-upgrading Batman's suit and weapons in the best Q tradition. Meanwhile, Batman has become a mythic figure of inspiration to the people of Gotham. In some ways, the wrong kind of inspiration as bands of misguided caped crusaders dress like him and attempt to protect the city, causing far more trouble than they're worth.

A year after the "Narrows Attack" and demise of Ra's Al Ghul in the first film, Batman, Gordon and Dent have formed an effective team in bringing down the mobs that choke the life out of Gotham City. (It was a nice touch to open the picture with Batman apprehending Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow, (Cillian Murphy, welcome back) tying up a loose end of Batman Begins.) The Joker reveals himself to be a dangerous wildcard, singlehandedly upending all of work being done to save Gotham. As tragedy compounds tragedy despite our heroes' best efforts, Wayne begins to ask the hard questions about what Batman is worth. I thought the pressures the Joker placed on Bruce Wayne midway in the movie where he decided to turn himself in as Batman were weak and insufficient. I didn't buy that part of the story. I was glad to see Rachel didn't either and she was more than a little disgusted at Bruce for allowing Harvey to take the fall for him. But everything worked out fine for them. Wait, no, it really, really didn't.

The strangest stuff was Batman's (off the record) friendly relationship with the Gotham Police. There were moments of Batman in his full regalia inside police headquarters that skate memories of Adam West and Burt Ward hanging out with Commissioner Gordon and Chief O'Hara. The Police didn't seem to mind Batman parking his, presumably unlicensed, Batmobile and Bat-Pod in the police parking garage. Maybe the glove compartment of his now-destroyed Batmobile (which must put smiles on toy licensors' faces) was full of unpaid tickets. Despite all his wonderful toys, there were moments when Batman seemed strangely inadequate for his mission. So much action happens in broad daylight that Bruce Wayne was reduced to meddling in his "much more subtle" Lamhborgini once or twice. And old Batsuit or new, light is not Batman's friend. The more clearly we see the Batsuits, the more the illusion is lost by what eyesores they are.

There has never been a Joker to equal the vile, mesmerizing psychopath the late Heath Ledger created. Ledger's Joker is a creature of pure malevolence, bereft of moral or ethical limitations. Every second the Joker is on the screen, Ledger virtually has his hand clenched around each audience's member's throat, forcing us to pay attention to him. The first big shock of the movie was the "disappearing pen" trick the Joker pulled on a mobster, and we laughed not because it was funny, but because it was sadistic and horrible. It was fascinating gauging the reactions of people in the theater when the Joker was on the screen. I overheard a number of people, mostly girls, whisper "he's so scary." 

All of the Joker's murders, his forward-thinking schemes of escape and attacks, were brilliant, if highly improbable. I loved the Joker's stories about how he got his scars, one about his father told to a mob boss, and another about his wife told to Rachel Dawes. I don't believe a word of it, or anything that comes from that lunatic's mouth, personally. Nolan and Ledger gives us sides of the Joker we've never seen before, like when he's dressed as a nurse visiting Harvey Dent in the hospital, or sitting on the floor "helpless", baiting a stupid cop. I believe Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is the new standard by which the character will now be defined and redefined, in the comics and elsewhere. 

The Dark Knight more than satisfies in Batman's interactions with the Joker. Their classic interplay was brought to life, fully developed, in just a few precious scenes. The Joker's conversations with Batman, challenging Batman's sense of morality, creating dilemmas and provoking his responses, were amazing, far richer and more intriguing than the "comic booky" dialogue route they could have tread. I loved how the Joker quickly deduced Batman's affections for Rachel from the way he "dove after her". (A great bit was Batman's "Let her go" and Joker's retort, "Poor choice of words." before throwing Rachel away like yesterday's garbage.) 

The scene where Batman locks the interrogation room from the inside because he wants to beat the Joker half to death to find out where Rachel and Dent are was electrifying. This is most terrifying Batman has ever been in a movie, but even at his most intimidating, the Joker just laughed Batman's physical threats off. The Joker knows Batman's limits all too well. I adored how Joker lied to Batman, sending him to Dent's location and not Rachel's. Finally, the Joker's scheme to force one ferry of passengers to choose to blow up the other failing was great, especially in how it was a victory for Gotham and the goodness of the people who live there, proving Batman's point over the Joker's. Considering Ledger cannot return for any sequels, it was more than a little surprising that his Joker didn't take the long drop into a dirt nap that Jack Nicholson's Joker did.

Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, doing fine work), Gotham City's "White Knight", emerges as a bright, heroic hope-bringer, everything Batman can't be. So persuasive is Dent's crusading passion that Bruce Wayne's jealous asshole attempts to cock block him from their mutual love, Rachel Dawes, ends with him firmly on Dent's side. Bruce Wayne believes in Harvey Dent, and so do we. He was the best of them, as Batman says. I loved the way the movie showed violent little cracks in Dent's shimmering armor, like his tendancy to cheat chance with his lucky two-headed dollar coin, and when he kidnapped and went ballistic on one of the Joker's mental patient henchmen, foreshadowing the tragedy meant to befall him. The inventive way Nolan devised for Dent to lose half his face - to flames instead of acid - and become Harvey Two-Face, along with the runner of where the name came from, were light years better than the comic book's explanation of a mob boss throwing acid at Dent's face during a trial (as depicted hilariously in Batman Forever). It's tragic, operatic stuff and it works brilliantly. We truly feel for Dent, how he suffered, what he's lost. The special effects for the "scarred" side of Two-Face are grotesquely persuasive.

Perhaps even moreso than Batman, Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman, for my money the MVP) emerges as the true hero of Gotham City. Half of The Dark Knight is a cop procedural, with Gordon front and center, making the hard calls, facing down mobsters and madmen alike. The difficulties of Gordon's job leading the police in the most corrupt city in America, the frustations he faces, the dangers he and his family endure, the compromises he is forced to make, have never been clearer or more compelling. Gordon pulled off the most shocking moment in his film when he faked his death and apprehended the Joker. (Yes, there was a moment when I did actually think Nolan had busted the ballsiest move in Batman movie history and killed Gordon off.) The climactic events where Batman saved Gordon's son's life stamped the friendship and understanding the two men have. In certain ways, Gordon's job is more difficult than Batman's. Gordon shares the burden of protecting Gotham with Batman but has the added pressures of having to publicly justify and secretly protect Batman himself, especially going forward into future Batman movies.

Replacing Katie Holmes with Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes was a savvy casting decision. Her pretty pout and perpetual headlights aside, Holmes merely (or barely, or hardly, depending on who you ask) held her own in Batman Begins. Gyllenhaal, a superior actor, immediately made the pivotal Rachel character her own. She was convincing as an assistant D.A. convincing Zau to turn state's evidence. More importantly, Gyllenhaal made Rachel a woman worthy of both Bruce Wayne's and Harvey Dent's affections, so much so that her death was a heartbreaker (the audience would probably have applauded if it were Holmes who died). Although the single most unbelievable event in the entire movie is when Batman dove off Wayne Tower after the Joker defenestrated Rachel. They plummeted dozens of stories, crashed into a car, and were both completely unharmed. Sure.

The action in The Dark Knight is superior to Batman Begins', though some of Batman's fight scenes seemed awkward in how limited Bale and his stuntmen could move in the Batsuits, old or new. There's no shortage of car chases and explosions -- an exceptional one was the Joker comically exploding a hospital. Whereas the previous film presented Batman the way a horror movie would -- jump cuts of action from the shadows that were impossible to follow -- The Dark Knight shows Batman's full fighting capabilities, as well as how much he gets hurt. Attack dogs are not the Batman's best friend. Batman is properly injured, and quite a bit too, the most bizarre example being when he coudn't bring himself to run the Joker over with his Bat-Pod and ended up crashing into the overturned trailer truck, knocking himself out in the process. The last time Batman spent this much time on his back in a movie, Catwoman was straddling him and purring about mistletoe.

The presence of the Joker notwithstanding, humor is at a premium. There's nothing funny about living in Nolan's Gotham City, much less trying to protect it. Bruce Wayne's millionaire playboy facade of concurrently dating prima ballerinas and handfuls of supermodels seems to be as much about amusing himself and the audience as providing an alibi for how Wayne is above suspicion as Batman. Does Wayne sleep with any of these girls, though? Seems like there'd be gossip if he didn't. Maybe he pays them off to keep their mouths shut. Or maybe Alfred finishes what Wayne started.

The finale of the movie is devastating. Before The Dark Knight, the bleakest chapter in Batman's cinematic journey was Batman Returns. The concluding events of The Dark Knight eclipse Tim Burton's singular vision of emotionally cracked animal-people living in a freak show. At the end of Batman Returns, Batman is so very sad because he thinks his girlfriend is dead on Christmas. Well, come what may. The Dark Knight pushes the pathos far beyond. Rachel is dead, and thanks to Alfred, Wayne will never know she had moved on. Add Dent's descent to madness plus the end of Batman's detente with the local authorities and no movie Batman has ever lost more. 

In the end, Batman chooses to be an armor-clad Atlas, shouldering the hopes, guilt, and dark secrets of the entire city. Batman takes the blame for Harvey Dent's mistakes so he can die a hero, while Batman becomes a hunted vigilante once more. No movie Batman has ever willingly re-examined his purpose in Gotham like this. As Alfred sagely advised, Batman is the one who can make the hardest choices. Harvey Dent promised that "it's always darkest just before the dawn." I think this Batman, our best Batman, has come to understand that for him, no light of dawn will ever break his dark nights.