The Dark Knight Blu-ray

Milo Wakelin explains why The Dark Knight is no ordinary comic book adaptation.

Christopher Nolan’s first foray into Gotham City was widely praised for taking the franchise in a more realistic direction, and with The Dark Knight, he has ditched the last few remaining comic book trappings to turn in an epic crime drama in the mould of Michael Mann or Martin Scorsese. Gone is the expressionism and shop-window-display gothic of Batman’s previous incarnations. In place of special-effects miniatures and stylised CGI, Nolan has taken his cameras onto the streets of Chicago. The Dark Knight is as much the story of a city as it is about any one of its inhabitants, and Nolan brings Gotham City to life as an intricate machine in which the police, led by Commissioner Gordon, the judiciary, led by DA Harvey Dent, and the criminal underworld all play their part.

As a result of Batman’s war on organised crime, this machine has been thrown out of balance, and into the breach swaggers a nameless terrorist known only as The Joker. Like Batman, The Joker’s methods are unconventional and his approach is single-minded; together the pair struggle for Gotham’s sanity and its soul, emblemised by the city’s crusading new DA.

The Dark Knight’s more realistic tone has succeeded in considerably upping the dramatic ante. Heath Ledger’s performance – the last he completed before his death – has justly received great praise, and his take on The Joker ditches any pretence of fun or flamboyance, depicting Batman’s nemesis as a crumpled, insouciant, unpredictable, scarily credible psychopath.

Unlike Mann, who used handheld digital cameras to capture the atmosphere of city nightlife in films such as Collateral (2004) and Miami Vice (2006), Nolan has rolled out the big guns: large portions of the film (including the major action sequences and external establishing shots) were shot in IMAX format, where the negative is run through the camera horizontally, exposing a greater area in each frame. This is a feature film first.

The Dark Knight’s bravura cinematography is a perfect fit for the story’s epic scope. Gripping, thrilling and frequently terrifying, not since the days of David Lean has there been such a compelling argument for large-format filmmaking.

Milo Wakelin on 1st November 2008
Author of 105 reviews