DVD: The Dark Knight

By: Eli Turner Posted: January 11, 2009

I know, I know, everyone has already seen The Dark Knight thrice and then saw it again with their mom and then they downloaded it and got sued and paid the $2500 fine but thought it was worth it until their mom decided to take that out of my allowance. So it's established already that The Dark Knight rules your balls, so I'm just going to spend the next few paragraphs nit-picking issues out of the film just to be original.

Oh, what the hell. I'm just foolin'. The Dark Knight wasn't quite perfect, but it was pretty dern close to it. If I were a woman, or if Prop 8 hadn't passed, I would like to marry Christopher Nolan. Nolan is one of the finest directors working in the film industry (not fine like your mom, but fine like... I don't know, something good. So NOT your mom), and we all owe him a debt of gratitude for raising the bar of the genre movie to the level The Dark Knight attained. The amount of detail and depth Nolan puts into his films is incredible, and he uses psychologically moving filmmaking to orchestrate magnificent works of cinema.

Batman Begins was already my favorite comic book movie adaptation, but The Dark Knight has surpassed even that. When I saw the first full trailer at the beginning of I Am Legend, I was shaking and whooping involuntarily and I squeezed my wife's arm so hard that she had to wear long-sleeves for a week so I wouldn't get arrested. Okay, that last part was a bit exaggerated, but I really did all that shaking and yelping and squeezing. Usually when I get my hopes up that high, however, I am crushed by the weight of my expectations, along with the pile of excrement that is Spider-Man 3, but I was vindicated by Dark Knight.

Everything about The Dark Knight works: the performances, the action to drama ratio, the story, the direction, the plot, the script... everything. Graphic novels and comic books, like the animation mode of filmmaking, has tragically been relegated to the kid's table of film. This is tragic because animation is a brilliant film storytelling mode, and graphic novels have legitimate literary merit. Novels like The Watchmen and films like Akira demonstrate this. Hopefully, The Dark Knight will be a touchstone for comic book adaptations to come. In the hands of genius, the most overlooked sources of materials can be constructed into surprising masterpieces. Chris Nolan could make a movie version of Blue's Clues that would blow your mind. I know I'm taking coal to Newcastle when I say this, but I am exercising my shaking, gripping, and yelping muscles already in anticipation of the next Nolan Batman film.

Special Features:

• 6 action-packed IMAX Scenes
• Batman Tech: The Incredible Gadgets and Tools
• Batman Unmasked: The Psychology of The Dark Knight
• 6 episodes of Gotham Cable's Premier News Program
• Galleries
• Trailers and TV spots