The Dark Knight arrives with amazing hype ( best superhero picture ever? Post-mortem Oscar for Heath Ledger? ), and incredibly, it lives up to the whole thing.
But calling it the best superhero picture ever appears like faint praise, since part of what makes the flick great–in addition to pitch-perfect casting, excellent writing, and a forcing vision–is that it bypasses the standard fantasy component of the superhero idiom and makes it all terrifyingly real.
Harvey Dent ( Aaron Eckhart ) is Gotham Town’s new district solicitor, charged with cleaning up the crime rings that have paralyzed the town. He enters a nervous coalition with the young police lieutenant, Jim Gordon ( Gary Oldman ), and Batman ( Christian Bale ), the caped vigilante who appears to trust only Gordon–and whom only Gordon appears to trust.
They make progress till a mad and threatening new player enters the game : the Joker ( Heath Ledger ), who offers the crime bosses a solution–kill the Batman.
Further complicating matters is that Dent is now dating Rachel Dawes ( Maggie Gyllenhaal, after Katie Holmes turned down the opportunity to reprise her role ), the longtime love of Batman’s alter ego, Bruce Wayne.
In his last finished role before his sad death, Ledger is astounding as the Joker, a volcanic, really frightening force of evil. And he sets the tone of the flick : the world is a dark, perilous place where there are no simple decisions.
Eckhart and Oldman also shine, but as good as Bale is, his personality turns out rather tasteless in comparison ( not unusual for heroes facing more colorful villains ).
Except for most film fans–and not just superhero fans–The Dark Knight is a film for the ages. The detail and colors are amazing in both dark and bright scenes ( the Gotham General scene is a great example of the latter ), and the punishing Dolby TrueHD soundtrack makes the house rattle. ( After giving us only Dolby 5.1 in some enormous Blu-ray releases this autumn, Warner came through with Dolby TrueHD on this one. )
One of the most engaging components of The Dark Knight was how certain scenes were shot in IMAX, and if you saw the film in an IMAX theater the film’s aspect proportion would all of a sudden change from standard 2.40:1 to a stirring 1.43:1 that filled up the screen 6 stories high. For the Blu-ray disc, director Christopher Nolan has rather re-created this experience by shifting his film from 2.40:1 aspect proportion ( thru almost all of the film ) to 1.78:1 in the IMAX scenes.
While the effect isn’t as dramatic as it was in theaters, it’s still a crowd pleasing experience to be watching the film on a widescreen Television with black bars at the top and bottom, then seeing the 1.78:1 scenes fully fill the screen.
The main bonus feature on disc one is “Gotham Exposed : The Creation of a Scene,” which is 81 mins of behind-the-scenes photographs about the IMAX scenes, the Bat suit, Gotham Central, and others.
You can watch the film and access these featurettes when the icon turns up, or you can simply watch them from the main menu. A welcome and weird feature is that in addition to British , French, and Spanish audio and subtitles, there’s an audio-described option that permits the sight-impaired to experience the film too. Disc two has 2 45-minute documentaries on Bat-gadgets and on the psychology of Batman, both in high definition.
They mix picture clips, speaking heads, and comic-book panels, but aren’t the sort of thing one wants to watch twice. More engaging are 6 eight-minute segments of Gotham Central, a faux-news program that gives some backdrop to events in the film, and a selection of trailers, poster art, and more.
The BD-Live element on disc one is more fascinating than on some earlier Blu-ray discs, which may be simply a matter of the content beginning to catch up with the technology. There also are 3 new featurettes ( “Sound of the Batpod,” “Harvey Dent’s Theme,” and “Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard” ) and 2 motion comics ( “Mad Love,” featuring Harley Quinn, and “The Shadow of Ra’s Al Ghul” ).
