The Dark Knight is a 2008 superhero film directed, co-produced, and co-written by Christopher Nolan. Based on the DC Comics character Batman, the film is the second instalment of Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy and a sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins, starring Christian Bale and supported by Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Morgan Freeman. In the film, Bruce Wayne / Batman (Bale), Police Lieutenant James,Gordon (Oldman) and District Attorney Harvey, Dent (Eckhart) form an alliance to dismantle organised crime in Gotham City, but are menaced by an anarchistic mastermind known as the Joker (Ledger), who seeks to undermine Batman’s influence and throw the city into chaos.
Nolan’s inspiration for the film was the Joker’s comic book debut in 1940, the 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke, and the 1996 series The Long Halloween, which retold Harvey Dent’s origin. The Dark Knight nickname was first applied to Batman in Batman #1 (1940), in a story written by Bill Finger. The Dark Knight was filmed primarily in Chicago, as well as in several other locations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong. The film was the first mainstream feature to partially utilise IMAX 70 mm cameras, with Nolan using them for 28 minutes of the film, including the Joker’s first appearance. Warner Bros. initially created a viral marketing campaign for The Dark Knight, developing promotional websites and trailers highlighting screenshots of Ledger as the Joker. Ledger died on January 22, 2008, some months after he completed filming and six months before the film’s release from a toxic combination of prescription drugs, leading to intense attention from the press and the movie-going public.
Considered one of the best films of its decade and one of the greatest and most influential films of all time, the film received critical acclaim for its screenplay, visual style, musical score, stunts, mature themes, performances (particularly Ledger’s), cinematography, action sequences and direction. The film also set numerous records during its theatrical run. The Dark Knight appeared on 287 critics’ top-ten lists, more than any other film of 2008 with the exception of WALL-E, and more critics (77) named The Dark Knight the best film released that year. With over $1 billion in revenue worldwide, it became the fourth-highest-grossing film at the time, and highest-grossing film of 2008; it also set the record for the highest-grossing domestic opening with $158 million, a record it held for three years. At the 81st Academy Awards, the film received eight nominations; it won the award for Best Sound Editing and Ledger was posthumously awarded Best Supporting Actor. In 2020, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”, becoming the second superhero film after Superman (1978) to earn the honour. The Dark Knight Rises, the final film in the trilogy, was released in 2012.
Critical response
The Dark Knight is regarded as one of the best films of the 2000s and one of the best superhero films ever made. On aggregating review website Rotten Tomatoes, The Dark Knight has an approval rating of 94 percent based on 345 reviews, with an average score of 8.6/10. The site’s critical consensus reads, “Dark, complex and unforgettable, The Dark Knight succeeds not just as an entertaining comic book film, but as a richly thrilling crime saga. Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating based on reviews from top mainstream critics, calculated an average score of 84 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating ‘universal acclaim’. CinemaScore polls reported that the average grade cinemagoers gave the film was ‘A’ on an A+ to F scale; audiences skewed slightly male and older. The Dark Knight appeared on 287 critics’ top-ten lists, more than any other film of 2008 with the exception of WALL-E, and more critics (77) named The Dark Knight the best film released that year.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, awarding four out of four stars, described The Dark Knight as a “haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy.” He praised the performances, direction, and writing, saying the film “redefine[s] the possibilities of the comic-book movie.” Ebert stated that the “key performance” is by Heath Ledger; he pondered whether he would become the first posthumous Academy Award-winning actor since Peter Finch in 1976. The Oscar was awarded to the late Ledger. Ebert ranked this as one of his twenty favorite films of 2008, calling it “the best of all the Batmans”. Film critic Andrew Sarris acknowledged that after seeing The Dark Knight he would “rethink my past reservations” about Nolan’s work. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film four stars out of five calling it “the director’s best work to date”.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote that the film is deeper than its predecessor, with a “deft” script that refuses to scrutinise the Joker with popular psychology, instead pulling the viewer in with an examination of Bruce Wayne’s psyche. Travers praised all the cast, saying each brings his or her ‘A game’ to the film. He says Bale is “electrifying”, evoking Al Pacino in The Godfather Part II, that Eckhart’s portrayal of Harvey Dent is “scarily moving,” and that Oldman “is so skilled that he makes virtue exciting as Jim Gordon.” Travers says Ledger moves the Joker away from Jack Nicholson’s interpretation into darker territory, and expresses his support for any potential campaign to have Ledger nominated for an Academy Award, Travers says that the filmmakers move the film away from comic book cinema and closer to being a genuine work of art, citing Nolan’s direction and the “gritty reality” of Wally Pfister’s cinematography as helping to create a universe that has something “raw and elemental” at work within it. In particular, he cites Nolan’s action choreography in the IMAX-tailored heist sequence as rivaling that of Heat (1995). Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote, “Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind.” Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, “best-of” list, saying, “Every great hero needs a great villain. And in 2008, Christian Bale’s Batman found his in Heath Ledger’s demented dervish, the Joker.” BBC critic Mark Kermode, in a positive review, said that Ledger is “very, very good” but that Oldman’s turn is “the best performance in the film, by a mile”; Kermode felt Oldman was deserving of an Oscar nomination.
Emanuel Levy wrote Ledger “throws himself completely” into the role, and that the film represents Nolan’s “most accomplished and mature” work, and the most technically impressive and resonant of all the Batman films. Levy calls the action sequences some of the most impressive seen in an American film for years, and talks of the Hong Kong-set portion of the film as being particularly visually impressive. Levy and Peter Travers conclude that the film is “haunting and visionary,” while Levy goes on to say that The Dark Knight is “nothing short of brilliant.” On the other hand, David Denby of The New Yorker said that the story is not coherent enough to properly flesh out the disparities. He said the film’s mood is one of “constant climax,” and that it feels rushed and far too long. Denby criticised scenes which he argued to be meaningless or are cut short just as they become interesting. Denby remarks that the central conflict is workable, but that “only half the team can act it,” saying that Bale’s “placid” Bruce Wayne and “dogged but uninteresting” Batman is constantly upstaged by Ledger’s “sinister and frightening” performance, which he says is the film’s one element of success. Denby concludes that Ledger is “mesmerising” in every scene. The vocalisation of Christian Bale’s Batman (which was partly altered during post-production) was the subject of particular criticism by some commentators, with David Edelstein from NPR describing Bale delivering his performance with “a voice that’s deeper and hammier than ever.” Alonso Duralde at MSNBC, however, referred to Bale’s voice in The Dark Knight as an “eerie rasp,” as opposed to the voice used in the Batman Begins, which according to Duralde “sounded absurdly deep, like a 10-year-old putting on an ‘adult’ voice to make prank phone calls.”
In 2018, Bilge Ebiri of The Village Voice wrote, “Its politics have been discussed ad infinitum. Its stylistic influence has become ubiquitous, then passé, then somehow aspirational . The Dark Knight is perhaps the most powerful exploration of guilt the modern American blockbuster has given us.”