The Dark Knight (IMAX)

Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker I like a great deal whose career has been slowly, but surely declining. After the stunning Memento, which he followed up with the excellent remake of the Norwegian film Insomnia, he gave us Batman Begins, which I thought was a very fine film and then delivered the rather predictable and underwhelming The Prestige. With his new film, the follow up to Batman Begins, called The Dark Knight, Nolan has stopped the rot but in doing so hasn't lived up to the quality of some of his previous efforts.

The set up is that a Chinese man, in fear of increasing Police raids under Jim Gordon's (Gary Oldman) task force and new D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) has got his hands on all of the crime bosses in Gotham City's money. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is looking to Dent to fill the role he currently has as Batman in putting people behind bars without the need for vigilante justice but they share the same love interest, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal). In their desperation to get their money and control of the streets back the crime bosses turn to The Joker (Heath Ledger) who offers them a way out.

The ensemble is very accomplished. Bale (while not an actor I care for) is fine, Gyllenhaal adds nothing that Katie Holmes wasn't doing in the previous film (because her character is so misused), Michael Caine as Wayne's butler and Morgan Freeman as his colleague add class to the proceedings but don't have much to do in all honesty. The people who are required to do things are Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart. Ledger shows bucketloads of screen presence and takes an interesting approach to the character but his incessent lip-smacking smacks more of attempted scene stealing than sterling character work. Eckhart on the other hand serves Nolan much better, executing a tricky character arc with subtlety and nuance and portraying the most genuine emotions in the film. The acting ranges from solid to impressive and Gary Oldman chips in more the longer the film goes. It's definitely one of the truly successful areas of the film.

The main problem with the film is the hole-ridden screenplay. Far too often scenes are cut away from and we are nonchalantly  "told" of what's happening later or just shown a plot twist with no explanation of how it happened. It's sloppy and resembles The Da Vinci Code as once you accustom yourself to the screenwriting tricks consistently employed they become tired and predictable. Equally so the longer the film goes (and it goes a long time) the more simplistic and condescending the writing gets. The message of the film is repeatedly hit over the audience's head with no subtlety whatsoever, we have all the major characters spelling out what they're doing and what dilemmas they are facing and it comes across more as the screenwriter getting the character motivation out in seemingly endless speeches and back and forths than anything else. This latter part very much resembles Nolan's writing style from Insomnia, but there he didn't have all of the characters doing it all at the same time ad nauseum.

What I did like about the screenplay especially was the handling of Harvey Dent's character. In a way he is the centre of the film, he represents everything The Joker hates and everything Batman hopes for the future. His motivation is clear, the arc is very well structured and it allows Eckhart room to really build a character from the screenplay rather than rely on any special "take" on it to make it memorable.

Overall, aside from his flaws as a screenwriter the film is generally well made by Nolan. The cinematography is very good, especially using the full IMAX ratio, it was a long time into the film before I realised it was swapping between the full screen and a letterbox mode, it's very smoothly done and the darkness of the film helps a lot. The sound is excellent, only not being up to top standard on one or two isolated occasions. The score in general is fine, underscoring the action sequences well, it is less successful in the dramatic moments where the long sustained notes tend to intrude rather than add to the tension. Where it doesn't excel is the editing - the fight scenes try to mimic The Bourne Identity but the darkness of the film doesn't lend itself to this style and a lot of the content just goes missing in a way that didn't happen with Matt Damon's fight scenes. Cross cutting is used throughout the film, but with varying success, it works much better cutting between a couple of intimate scenes rather than sprawling over the conclusion of multiple narratives as it tends to inhibit the natural crescendos as opposed to supplementing them at the climax of the film.

What one has to admire though is the ambition - in spite of the flaws the scale is huge both in terms of what they're trying to pack into the screenplay as well as visually. Technically the camerawork and effects are extremely impressive, especially on the huge IMAX scale. That ambition probably is what prevents the film being as tight and focused as it could have been. What Nolan has fashioned is a very grand film which sadly has turned into an overly marketed "event movie". Taken on its own merits there's a good film in there aside from some frequent eye-raising question marks and for the most part of the very (over) long running time there is enough entertainment to be had to recommend this to most people. Just provided you don't take it as seriously as Nolan did and the marketing department so desperately wants you to.