The Dark Knight

I'm sitting in front of an 8 storey high screen. It's formatted for a 1.34:1 display - I'm watching a television the size of an office building. It swamps my vision. I can barely see anything but it. A blue glass building bursts into view, filling every inch of the canvas. We hurtle towards it. I'm crashing into it. Windows shatter and clowns take flight. I feel dizzy. IMAX.

Unlike it's hero, The Dark Knight is a film that seems utterly without restraint. People die, buildings burn, and whole sequences are scored with nothing but a buzzing electronic reverb - a giant mechanical fly struggling to get out of a jar, twitching and clawing as a world implodes. Heath Ledger's one-man Al Qa'eda piloting Gotham into extinction. Events steer down dark alleys into dangerous, upsetting territory. All this, despite the usual Summer baggage: July release date. 12A rated.

Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan and Christian Bale's Batman catches a glimpse of light at the end of his tunnel - rising lawyer Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) is cleaning up Gotham within the confines of the law, one swaggering disarmament at a time. Gangsters squabble and cower while Batman brutally ties up a loose-end from his previous outing. He's close. He's grasping at having a relationship with childhood sweet-heart Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal). It's nearly over. He can step down as The Batman. He can make himself a life. Then all fucking hell breaks lose.

The Dark Knight is almost a half-billion dollar remake of Dirty Harry, a maverick law-man shedding rules and process to track a killer that exists in a vacuum. Like Scorpio, Heath Ledger's Joker is in it for the kicks, not the cash. He kills and cackles indiscriminately, holding an entire city to ransom. At that films' conclusion Callahan tracks and murders Scorpio, blowing a fist sized hole clean through him. Batman allows himself no such luxury. He will allow himself to punish, break and maim his foes, but not kill them. This is what carries The Dark Knight out of a summer sweet-shifter funk, through a diminished returns policer ghetto, and off into a fraught, rootless identity splitter. Reflection termination as three scarred men clash and battle in a boiled hell-city.

Unlike Batman Begins, were this code is callously jettisoned for a punish finale, The Dark Knight portrays Wayne's promise, and what it implies. It's his only stake in the society / sanity he's fighting for. It becomes an Achilles Heel to be exploited, ruthlessly stripped apart and used to undermine the potency of a giant man-bat fright figure. Nolan makes text of the most basic (rational?) objection to costumed superheroics - why don't they just kill their quarry? Why would Superman suffer Lex Luthor? Why wouldn't Batman erase Joker?

After decades of muscled-up man-glands exterminating anything that raises an objection in cinema, and proxy war oil grabs looming large outside, how do you examine the make-up of a hero? You give him a pledge, something he'd rather die than betray, then you dangle every single reason imaginable for him to break it. You make him into a monster. You tell lies about him. And in the end you chase his battered, fleeing body screaming and shooting.

Then, hopefully, you make another.