Today I will be doing a spoiler-free review of The Dark Knight. I just finally got around to watching this for the first time not too long ago, and I’m very confident in saying it’s a top 5 comic book movie of all time. I’m not even the biggest fan of Batman as a whole, or even the rest of this trilogy, but this movie is truly special. This movie follows Batman being able to keep a tight lid on crime in Gotham City, until the Joker appears. Batman must then tread a fine line between heroism and vigilantism. Batman/Bruce Wayne is played by Christian Bale, who is probably my second favorite Batman casting ever. He is fantastic and doesn’t disappoint at all, and he truly knows how to play a dark and mysterious character like Batman. The rest of the cast falls in around him very well with the likes of Gary Oldman playing James Gordon, Aaron Eckhart playing Harvey Dent, and Michael Caine playing Alfred Pennyworth, which is also one of my favorite castings in this movie. This movie also has a decently long runtime of 2h and 32m, but you don’t feel it at all and the pacing is fantastic.
The main villain of this movie is the Joker played by Heath Ledger, who absolutely steals the show and is the best part of this movie. He is everything you need a villain to be and much more. There aren’t enough great things I can say about his performance, and he even won an Oscar for this. For a movie that came out in 2008, the cinematography was shockingly fantastic, as there are many DC movies made now that have WAY worse effects than this movie. All of the characters are fantastic as well with the ones I’ve already mentioned. There’s also Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes, and Cillain Murphy as Scarecrow. All of these characters are very good too, even though some of them have limited screen time. It also has its fair share of action with it being a superhero movie, but I don’t feel like it’s overused and I enjoyed basically every action sequence.
I always rate the movies I watch and I rate them based on 10 things in the movie. Those things are: action, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, protagonist, and antagonist. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this movie a 95/100, and as I’ve been saying this whole time, this truly is a fantastic movie. I don’t have any nitpicks either honestly, this is just a really fun and good watch led by an outstanding performance by Heath Ledger.
