Christopher Nolan
The Dark Knight

CRASH, a window of a very-high floor shatters and beyond it opens the world that awaits the viewer, and it’s all so clear, everyday, hyper-real. In short, if Christopher Nolan becomes Michael Mann and stages the perfect heist (in both fictional and on-screen execution) in the sweltering urban setting of Gotham City (or Chicago), giving us sweat and nerves on edge, and everything ends on the scars that widen the smile of the Joker, then this time we should really be afraid, the evil might be among us in the theater, and perhaps Batman will do as the train of the Lumière brothers and Neri Parenti, come “this side,” and save us all.

The sensation of inevitable evil is the most sought after, and most "realized," in this "The Dark Knight," the sixth cinematic Batman (or perhaps seventh, depending also on the affection one feels for Adam West's tights), Nolan's second project, which ties into the post-Miller revolution of the comics by binding the script with a double thread to "The Long Halloween" by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, a saga published by DC between 1996 and 1997, narratively driven by the decadent arc of Harvey Dent, the District Attorney of Gotham City better known as Two-Face. On screen, Harvey Dent has the face, soon disfigured, of Aaron Eckhart; he is Gotham's Angel, the man without a mask fighting the city’s mafia headed by boss Sal Maroni, successor to the disgraced Carmine Falcone from the previous "Batman Begins" (2005). And it is he, corroded halfway with poetic license compared to the comic book, who superficially unites the philosophical ambitions of the film (duality, identity, nihilism, chaos, and chance—the coin flip by which he decides people's fates) and its flaws (the make-up and thus, more generally, the visual indecision between "comic-like" for everyone and discourse, more real than real, for the few). Above all, the successful non-treatment of Evil; eternal, stagnant, infectious, without History or need for introductions. Put simply and in other terms, the antagonist that steals the scene from the protagonist.

The late Heath Ledger (1979-2008) makes the Joker's mask his own and collects on the scars and within the abysmal sockets the World's despair, sunk more or less where the laughter of this monster, both distant and next door, is born (narratively, the modern characterization of the Joker, as well as his "completion" with Batman, is attributed primarily to the splendid "The Killing Joke," a comic by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland dated 1988, which, however, also tells his origins, overlooked in this film). It is not Ledger's death that makes this Joker great, but rather the perfect completion, on all levels, from the scenographic to the "signifying" one, that it has with the scenes in which he moves, as Nicholson had already done in the Burtonian universe of the now twenty-year-old "Batman" (1989). Watching the world "burn" is an indecisive Dark Knight on how much to be one, but Nolan doesn’t press the accelerator and Christian Bale, physically impeccable in the dual identity Batman-Bruce Wayne, follows orders.

The usual parade of actors, hopping between alternate editing that does not lack suspense: I’ve already mentioned Aaron Eckhart. He is not Tommy Lee Jones, who was Two-Face in Batman Forever (Joel Schumacher, 1995), but in that immense and stomach-churning hodgepodge, not even Tommy Lee Jones was much himself, so, among the four faces, I would say the two of Eckhart win. There remain, as if it were little, and instead it is too much, Michael Caine (Alfred, Bruce Wayne's butler), Gary Oldman (Commissioner Gordon), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Rachel, loved by diverse champions, Batman-Bruce Wayne and Dent), and Morgan Freeman (executive head of Wayne Enterprise).

There's already talk of the third chapter of the Dark Knight according to Christopher Nolan, but in the meantime, to decide how much I really liked this, I need memory: I miss the discovery, irreverent and "intellectual" staging of the first Burton, the splendid snow-covered characters of "Returns" (1992), but I don’t miss at all Schumacher's fake sideshow metalinguistics ("Batman Forever" and "Batman & Robin" two years later). This is already enough, applause to Nolan. But... the tights of Adam West?