Guest Blogger: Daniel 2

The movie The Dark Knight is the second movie in a trilogy about a troubled orphan billionaire who uses his fear and anger to fight crime in the city of Gotham. In this movie, Batman, who has become an icon in the city of Gotham, is forced to fight his toughest enemy yet, the psychotic and sociopathic Joker. Heath Ledger, who played the Joker, puts a dark twist on an otherwise silly comic book villain who, before, was never taken seriously. Ledger’s performance won an Oscar and some believe that the intensity of the role was what ultimately led him to commit suicide shortly after the filming of the movie. Christian Bale, who played Batman, did a great job of transitioning from dark mysterious vigilante at night to eccentric billionaire playboy during the day. The Joker starts off as a villain committing, comparatively, small crimes and just trying to get people on his side, by the end of the movie he starts to show how truly insane he actually is and that he just does this stuff for the “fun” of it. The theme of this movie, like many other superhero movies is that good always trumps evil, but in this movie it takes that common theme and goes even deeper. The theme is that people are inherently good and even when they are being threatened by a psychotic terrorist they will usually do the right thing. Another theme we can see in this movie is that sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the greater good, we see this multiple times throughout the movie as Batman is forced to make decisions in order to protect people. Roger Ebert said in his review in July of 2008 “’Batman’ isn’t a comic book anymore. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is a haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy”. This is my exact feeling on this movie, it’s a movie that took the comic book genre and made it real, it added suspense, mystery, and a darkness that you just don’t see in any comic book movies from the past or the present. In my opinion, this movie is the greatest superhero movie of all time and should certainly be high up in the list of greatest movies of all time, it is definitely worth your time and money to see.