Just when you think Batman: The Dark Knight can't get darker - or more twisted - Christopher Nolan takes the audience deeper into the abyss.
"What doesn't kill you makes you stranger," muses The Joker, the film's maniacal villain with a cracked, painted-on clown smile that covers his facial scars.
The line, which occurs early in the film - a play on Nietzsche's overquoted axiom - doesn't just apply to the psycho bad guy, though, but, as we learn, to Batman himself.
"It was a question of how to follow on from Batman Begins with this idea of escalation," says director/writer Nolan of his widely acclaimed first film on the Gotham City superhero.
"Batman's created himself as this extraordinary presence to stand against crime in Gotham, but it's warped into a withering response from the criminal element, particularly manifested in The Joker," referring to the role played by the late Heath Ledger, whose frighteningly intense performance is already drawing talk of an Oscar nomination.
But Ledger's performance is hardly the only impressive thing about The Dark Knight. Like Batman Begins, it is filled with spectacular stunts to get the juices flowing in action fans, (but even better - they flipped an actual 18-wheel semi for one of many insane automotive sequences) and six major sequences shot with IMAX cameras, a first for any Hollywood feature film.
Still, the most wowing thing of all might be what a rich, multifaceted story The Dark Knight tells. More than any other comic-book movie ever made - and more than most big-studio productions of any type these days - the Bat-sequel offers great character work, thoughtful underlying themes, a true sense of realism for this kind of thing and multiple plot threads that dovetail beautifully in its edge-of-your-seat final act.
"I started from the end of the film; I knew exactly what I wanted the story process to lead up to," the London- and Chicago-raised Nolan explains in an erudite English accent.
Christian Bale reprises the dual role of playboy billionaire Bruce Wayne and Batman from the last movie. The film follows the vigilante's efforts to clean up corruption-prone Gotham City once and for all with the help of stalwart police Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman again) and crusading new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart).
But then the anarchic Joker ("I choose chaos") appears out of nowhere. And with seemingly limitless resources and imagination, he throws the whole city into pandemonium, testing even Gotham's best commitment to its cherished ethics.
"Bruce Wayne is no longer the angry, naive young man" he was in Begins, says Bale. "We've seen that journey of his hardening, his toughening-up, delving into the underbelly of the world and understanding desperation and need. Now he's more mature and has the burden of responsibility of power, vs his attempts to attain power, to do good; he's not abusing that power. But we have somebody who really deserves credit and is getting none. In fact, he's been accused of being responsible for the rise in a different quality of crime, hence the attraction of freaks to Gotham, with the ultimate freak being The Joker."
And the late Ledger played him to the max, as a far more demented and terrifying force than Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman or Cesar Romero on the campy 1960s TV show did.
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