As moviegoers, we haven’t dared to look into the mirror of our corruption in the same way since.
It’s more than just the greatest comic-book movie ever made. In the second installment of his “Batman” trilogy, Nolan transcended the genre — he made a movie whose spirit was rooted in the mesmerizing crime cinema of the ’70s, a time when corruption was so pervasive that it came to seem a perverse kind of shadow morality. And so it is here. The Joker, played by Heath Ledger as a slavering psycho high on his own freakishness, is a force of chaos who wants to turn the world upside down… because he can! He’s like every other villain with the practical motive stripped away, and that blows the stakes of the movie sky-high. For once, a superhero in a cape and a mask — Christian Bale’s furtively sinister Batman — matters in the way that Hollywood’s antiheroes used to matter: truly, madly, fiercely. The movie is a violent, tangled conspiracy thriller about a semi-nutjob outlaw-saint who is out to save the world — our world — and discovers that he may need to sacrifice his honor to do it. Though it’s getting hard to remember, “The Dark Knight,” when it came out, wasn’t just a mega-smash. It was huge like “Jaws” and “Titanic” and the “Godfather” films: It defined, and owned, a moment and mood in the culture. As moviegoers, we haven’t dared to look into the mirror of our corruption in the same way since.