The Dark Knight Review

If you want excitement in a small, lifeless Midwestern town what do you do in the breath-robbing heat of summer? You go to the multiplex to see a movie that will take you worlds away from where you are. Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," seems to be that place, taking us away from our mundane, hum-drum existence and into the deepest, darkest corners of humanity and Gotham. Ok, that's all well and good, but tell me why a woman with two small children would want to see "The Batman," and not some soupy chick-flick?

I have trouble answering that myself, and in some sense I agree with Robert Downey Jr. who wondered what this film was about anyway. The only thing that I wondered was about all the nonsensical violence involved in this movie. Where is it supposed to go, and what kind of moral sense am I to be left with in the end.

I also question the millions of dollars being spent on toys and merchandise appealing to my 4-year-old, when the movie is way too violent for me to take him to it anyway. It's not just karate chops and sword fights; it gets to be downright sadistic, but hey, the acting is first rate, right?

Many actors had expressed interest in the role of the Joker Robin Williams, Paul Bettany (who better to express volatile madness), Adrien Brody, and Steve Carrell. Having seen Heath Ledger's performance, I cringe to think any one of those actors taking his place it was riveting, and like the summer heat breathtaking in its complexity. There is no honesty, no sense of humanity, no rules just ruthlessness, anarchy, and pure insanity, but yet an uncanny brilliance to manipulate those around him and bring them into his own world. How can you play a role like that and never feel the effects? You can't, and in all the theories that surrounded his own demise, Ledger proved that.

In previous film versions, Batman has always been more of a cartoon than anything else, until Christian Bale made us see the nightmarish possibilities of being the rogue anti-hero, and reminds us of a different, more difficult sense of what moral choices, real moral choices can be, that sometimes it can make us the villain to everyone else. Never has there been a more suitable actor to make this part more real. We all have a part of Batman in us; the one who wants to save the world around him, but also there is a sense of fear, of vulnerability to it. Bale has the depth as an actor to pull off the anti-hero guise. No other actor who

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