The Dark Knight: A Modern Classic

Review by Danny del Mazo

Let’s get down to it, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is nothing short of a MASTERWORK, a lightning strike, a modern classic, a new treasure in the deep and often bleak caves of modern cinema. I can only begin my review of this film by paraphrasing the opening line of many of the nation’s top critics: “How can you describe something that is just so damn good?” I have to agree with that sentiment. I sat in the theatre at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood and saw the very first showing at 12:01 AM Thursday night, a day before the film’s release, and I was literally blown away. I walked out into the streets that night and was amazed at the amount of people, many of them dressed in Batman attire and faces painted as an homage to the great Clown himself, all excited to see this film. Every beat of this movie is EPIC, every performance a tour de force, most notable of which is the definitive version of The Joker.

Batman has always been one of my favorite literary characters. In his vast history, three of my all-time favorite Batman stories, which incidentally happen to be three of my favorite graphic novels, are Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, the last of which is a graphic novel dedicated to one of the greatest antagonists ever created, The Joker. I love the Batman mythology, and I believe that what makes it so unique is the volume of interesting and intricate characters within the realm of Gotham City. Each of them as quirky and obsessed as Batman himself is and exemplify what Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud described as the archetypal figures and shades of the human psyche. As the Joker himself says in the movie, “What doesn’t Kill you, only makes you Stranger"

It would be an injustice to reveal plot points within this review. Thus, rather than discuss the story, I’ll simply point out what the top critics have said about the film: Cont... The Dark Knight : A Modern Classic