The Dark Knight - Far too much a product of its time

The Dark Knight (2008), in its visual construction, is an immaculate piece of work. The choreography of the action is meticulous and impactful and the film is beautifully shot by Wally Pfister and scored with epic conviction by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. However, its greatest downfall is in how much the film is a product of modern commercial cinema in the worst possible way. It, along with Christopher Nolan’s follow-up, Inception (2010), is one of the greatest advocates for the notion that more is not always more. The Dark Knight, as with the sub-plot involving Cobb’s wife in Inception, has segments that are do not merit the plot in any manner and this often makes the entire effect of the film feel garbled and convoluted. Furthermore, the most devaluing facet of the film is how much it is clearly a product of post-Saw cinema and of a modern paranoid America. This is optimised in one of the latter scenes involving the two ships and one moral dilemma too many. The predicament that the participants of the “social experiment” that has been thrust upon them by The Joker boils down to a more elaborate and a more glorified envisioning of the question of ‘would one kill x to save oneself?’.  This philosophy all too closely resembles those found in the modern sub-genre of ‘torture porn’ with the likes of Saw and more crucially Tom Shankland’s W Delta Z A.K.A The Killing Gene (2007).               
    The problem with the film is how many ideas, characters, politics and ethics it tries to cram into its far outstayed running time, being just shy of two and a half hours. Intrinsically, the problem The Dark Knight faces is in its desire to be so much. The amount of ‘bang for your buck’ and intelligent ambition is no justification for chronic overwriting and far too many characters removing all focus from the title character, the dark knight himself. On the terms of being a Batman film it is very much a regression brought about by its time and the ambition that its time promotes. Unlike Nolan’s previous Batman outing, Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight, in its focus on Batman’s villains primarily, harks back more to Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997) than the undeniably far more appropriate and admirable in its interpretation of its subject matter, Batman Begins. The Dark Knight’s place is far better suited beside the likes of crime epics such as Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) than where it should of sat surpassing one of the finest pieces of big-budget movie-making of the last decade, Batman Begins.