Summer blockbuster movies are famous for enormous over hyping leading up to a movie that is perhaps high on entertainment value but largely mindless escapism.  Rarely does such a movie provide more than superficial entertainment value — typically there's a lot of action and special effects, perhaps even good cinematography, but not much substance in the acting or dialogue.  The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's second installment in his re-imagining of Batman, is no typical summer blockbuster and no typical comic book adaptation.  What Nolan has provided is a summer blockbuster with all the hype, action, and special effects, but he succeeds in countering these with a complex plot and characters that are reminiscent of a Shakespearean tragedy, albeit one injected with an extra dose of darkness and intensity.

Nolan's followup to his brilliant reboot of the Batman franchise in Batman Begins was destined for the hype machine hitting overdrive, but the death of Heath Ledger pushed it to new levels and added a new layer of macabre fascination.  Before the movie was even released, Ledger was being breathlessly suggested for a posthumous Oscar nomination.  Unbelievably, however, he lives up to the billing.  Ledger's Joker is haunting, chilling, psychotic, and pure evil more befitting of a horror movie than a comic book story.  My thought after leaving the theatre was that performing this role, that getting into the character of the Joker in the way Ledger was able to do, surely must have contributed to his death.

Christian Bale and Aaron Eckhardt are also good in their portrayals.  Bale is solid as Batman and Bruce Wayne, although I think the disguising he does of his voice as Batman is overdone.  Wayne is a serious man with obvious demons he is trying to exorcize, yet he builds a facade of being a typical billionaire playboy to assist in keeping his alter ego a secret.  Eckhardt is solid as Harvey Dent, a courageous, confident District Attorney who is seen as a white knight for his crime fighting efforts in Gotham City.  Fans of Batman know that he suffers a psychotic break and becomes the schizophrenic villain Two Face; the nature of his psychotic break is setup during the course of the movie and becomes central to the conclusion.

While the Gotham City mob and villain Scarecrow (the antagonist in Batman Begins) play a role, the former more prominently than the latter, the movie is at its core an Armageddonesque battle between Batman and Joker.  The complexity of their characters makes their yin/yang cat-and-mouse interplay amazing to watch.  The Joker doesn't just enjoy killing people, he loves to do it in ways that not only expose the victim to excruciating pain (he remarks that he loves using knives because the victim dies more slowly and shows his true character; at one point he taunts a police guard with the fact that some of the guards own friends died at his hand and were cowards in facing their own mortality) but also puts him in a moral and ethical quandary.  The Joker loves chaos, and he loves bringing out society's worst demons, setting person against person.  One could see this Joker reveling in Lord of the Flies or the Donner Expedition; he would undoubtedly be Hannibal Lecter's favorite patient.  Ledger nails the psychopathic nature brilliantly, offering up contradictory explanations for his facial scars as he mocks his victims.  He doesn't kill for money, he kills because he enjoys it; he enjoys watching people die, enjoys inciting terror, and he is willing to sacrifice his life if necessary to seduce Batman to succumb to this movie's equivalent to the "dark side".

The movie isn't perfect; I thought there was a little too much car chase, I didn't like the Two-Face look, and the movie went on a bit long (I think maybe 15 minutes could have been cut from some of the chase scenes, and that would have been about perfect).  However, every important detail is seemingly spot on.  Of course, some suspension of disbelief is always necessary in an action movie, but this one brings such a rich complexity and intensity that even some of the most outlandish effects are acceptable.

The Dark Knight is not just a movie you watch; it draws you in and makes you a part of it.  I wouldn't recommend attending any functions where clowns might be present for at least a few days after viewing it, and be warned that it is one of the most intense and dark movies you will see for a while.  But film noir is always compelling when done well, and The Dark Knight is film noir at its best.