It is not a one-to-one comparison, though I do think The Odyssey is his most Dark Knight-ish film since The Dark Knight. (Yes, even more than Rises.) Above all other thoughts and reactions, The Odyssey made me nostalgic and appreciative of a director who has been remarkably sturdy in his brand of epic, quasi-cerebral blockbuster filmmaking, grounded in practical production and an unceasing fascination with the grit that makes us human, dirty and flawed, set against operatic themes of light and dark locked in eternal, cyclical struggle with each other. Christopher Nolan, the biggest name in Hollywood, has evolved, and I’d even say matured, but what a blessing for movie lovers that he is still doing his thing and doing it well. Though I’ll never love his films as much as I did when I was 20, I am grateful for him.

What’s interesting is that you could come up with strong parallels between The Odyssey and all of Nolan’s films; I could have written the opening paragraph of this review in a similar style about literally any of Nolan’s pictures that I’ve seen dating back to Memento. (I promise I’ll see Following one of these days.) Heck, this is at least the fifth Nolan movie I’ve seen at Airbus IMAX, the biggest screen in Virginia. Put another way, The Odyssey feels like a summation of Nolan’s career even as it is very obviously doing some things no Christopher Nolan movie has ever done before.

For example, The Odyssey is the first time any of Nolan’s movies have been set in ancient times, which gives the director some tremendous new playgrounds for crafting his world-class spectacle: ancient burning cities, boats adrift at sea, giant mythical monsters, slaughter by sword blades and arrows. He also constructs a certain horse near the city of Troy that you may have heard of. All of this grandeur is as great and overpowering as you would hope, especially in the much-ballyhooed all-IMAX format. And this, I suppose, is the reason we still show up in droves: whatever Christopher Nolan makes is going to be huge and exhaustingly, triumphantly rewarding as cinema of scope.

But between the new stuff Nolan is trying and the way his telling of the story threads through all of his thematic preoccupations, I couldn’t help but feel that The Odyssey is a bit of an indecisive film. Look no further than the opening title card, which reads “an age of apparent magic.” That is as close to a point-blank confession as we’re going to get that he couldn’t quite wrap his filmmaking arms around the entire mythical scope of the Odyssey while still tying it into his own schema. We all wondered what a fantasy Christopher Nolan film would look like; it turns out that he was wondering that, too, and none of us really got clear answers.

And that leads me to the wobbliest part of the movie: the episodic opening hour. It’s almost as if Nolan had little patience for the most iconic bits of the Odyssey, because they feel the most askew with what the second half of the movie chooses to focus upon. Christopher Nolan has to pay the Homer tax of showing us a cyclops if he wants to investigate the complicated morality of Trojan War hero Odysseus (Matt Damon). And so we end up with some really impressively staged, but not quite right, sequences on various islands. They inevitably end with lots of death and the surviving soldiers sprinting to the coastline while they shout “run away!” like they’re in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

On their own, each of these early encounters is an achievement of production and vision. The cyclops is not quite so verbal as you might remember him, and indeed the well-known part of the story where Odysseus becomes a trickster and tells the cyclops that his name is Nobody is nowhere to be found. But that largely animatronic and puppet-based design of the cyclops is a triumph, uncanny and alien, and always shot to look impossibly large. And it says something about Nolan’s priorities that the man he cast as Polyphemus is Bill Irwin, a stage clown physical performers alive: this is a monster conceived for the body rather than the mouth. Meanwhile, the encounter with the witch Circe (Samantha Morton) treads into horror territory. Nolan can’t quite nail the Robert Eggers effect of transporting you into the mind and soul of a lost culture, but he’s at least trying to make it feel like these misadventures are out of a legend.

The problem with these early episodes is that they don’t track with the overall arc Nolan is ultimately sending Odysseus on. The attempts to connect each episode to the way Odysseus is processing his spiritual burden about his treachery and violent destruction of Troy end up very thin. Of course, as Homer wrote them, those episodes truly are standalone stories that are only loosely tied together in the larger epic poem framework. But Nolan has clearly latched onto telling the Odyssey in modern terms and narrative structures and values as the key thrust of his story, an approach that only intermittently works. So these episodes, these encounters with monsters and ghosts on one-off islands, end up neither fish nor fowl: they are individually memorable scenes in a movie where what is most memorable is, in fact, nothing individual, but the overall sweep of the story that these episodes don’t quite fit into, and thus they actually reduce the arc Odysseus goes through rather than deepening it.

This brings me to the overall structure of The Odyssey. For a while, I thought Nolan was going to use Citizen Kane as a model, where we get an external overview of the story followed by in-depth tellings and reframings of key moments through the eyes of other characters, mainly ones that Telemachus (Tom Holland) talks to or hears from. But that only really lasts through Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) telling him the story of the Trojan horse. After that, Nolan just goes kind of freeform with the structure, mixing various flashbacks with the present-day ordeals on Ithaca.

The film ratchets up quite a bit in the second half, and it’s better to go out strong like The Odyssey than to go out slow and drawn out like Oppenheimer, though I ultimately put the two of them in a similar tier, and the pair are astonishingly thematically linked despite “sword-and-sandals epic” and “biopic” being two genres on opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum. Both are about complicated men reckoning with the violence they hath wrought, the destroyer of worlds they have become.

The entire final hour of The Odyssey has hardly a wrong note, though it does have at least one: the double-whammy fakeout of Odysseus’s possible death is a stinker of a beat. Nolan couldn’t quite steer the ship into port without a collision, but it’s a mere scuff on the hull in the grand scheme of a great ending, a slow-pedaled emotional payoff eventually full of righteous vengeance.

“In the grand scheme” is the operative term because The Odyssey is the kind of movie that asks you to submit to its sweep, details be damned. It is a movie infinitely susceptible to “deconstruction”  as Mitch, the host of The Movie Call Podcast, likes to say (i.e. seeking out flaws and contradictions). Any movie that takes as broad of a swing as The Odyssey does, with so many goals and ideas, is vulnerable to pointing out, e.g. “Why the hell did Odysseus shoot the cyclops one last time after he’d made it out alive?” “Why did he not plug his own ears with wax?” “Why do these monsters look like Power Ranger villains?” “Is it just me or is that whirlpool not actually that big?”

But Nolan’s “grand scheme” approach to the material also highlights the ways in which he is one of cinema’s great writers. His dialogue occasionally clanks, his vision might be blurry on the intricate curvature of gods and guilt in “an age of bronze,” but he is writing a script to match the ambition of his own camera, and it’s a perfect fit. He captures the massive, unsinkable, operatic struggles he’s long been fascinated with, and does so with muscle and confidence, if not grace. Nolan sees his concepts and his cinema interlocking, sometimes in unison and sometimes in tension, like a boat in the sea, swept along but battered.

And the modernity that Nolan injects into the story does goose the tale in a way that a textbook adaptation wouldn’t. It results in a mirror of current headlines and struggles. The movie opens in Penelope’s court with a rapper as a bard (Travis Scott) performing the legend, suggesting a lineage between oral history and modern hip hop. Generally, though, the echoes are grimmer. I don’t think it’s too much of a projection to see Nolan grappling, in a world-weary way, with greedy political firebrands picking at an institution already scarred by violence and grief. The first victim of the Ithaca massacre takes a puncture wound to the neck, an unmistakable echo of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The rest of the violence in Ithaca reads an inverse January 6, where the angry political upstarts invading the governing hall get mowed down by the legitimate power. The film’s populace, meanwhile, cries out about “sea people” arriving to ruin their people and their culture: when Odysseus and his men are, of course, the “sea people.” This is America’s relationship with immigration discourse in a nutshell.

One simply cannot discuss this Odyssey without the requisite salutes to its cinematic achievements: We can start with acting. This is the starriest movie cast since The Departed, almost all doing a good version of what the story asks of them. Holland is the most replacement-level performance, but mostly because Telemachus is a replacement-level protagonist as the prince of Ithaca. Damon is great, very obviously up to the task of carrying all the weird responsibilities the story lays upon him in a way that had me thinking of Christian Bale’s performance as Batman. Anne Hathaway is tremendous as Penelope, as are many of the supporting turns, with my favorites off the top of my head being Bernthal and John Leguizamo, though I don’t really have any stinkers. And I haven’t even gotten to Robert Pattinson as Antinous, chief among the suitors and the closest thing this movie has to a proper villain. The closest I have to a complaint is, sadly, Zendaya as Athena; she has the statuesque poise and beauty but doesn’t convey any Olympian grace and authority (and given that we ultimately see her as the imagined reflection of an ordinary casualty of war, that could be an intentional tension by Nolan).

Another of the “requisite salutes” is the IMAX cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema, shooting his fifth straight film for Nolan, though I will hedge a little here. I have a strong hunch that the limitations of the IMAX camera caused some challenges in shooting even for a cinematographer of van Hoytema’s caliber: the visual focus of a shot sometimes stumbles around like a seasick sailor, with characters and props going blurry at odd moments. The vertical IMAX framing does work well, vacuuming you into the screen and marveling at the hugeness of buildings and boats and machines of war, though I wonder if an enveloping widescreen depiction of the wine-dark sea might have been lost in the IMAX full frame.

I have far fewer reservations about the score and the sound design, though. (Except, maybe, that it’s very loud and aggressive; but this is a loud and aggressive movie.) Ludwig Göransson, my boy from Community, once again delivers a candidate for the score of the year, a blend of ancient instrumentation and modern epic cinematic flair. It’s a rousing, aching achievement. The theme that soars when Odysseus plucks his bow elicits chills every single damn time.

The editing is likewise outstanding by Jennifer Lame, at least within the framework of IMAX film’s three-hour projection limit. The pace is propulsive and rhythmic, giving you that maelstrom of portent and the surging toward climaxes that Oppenheimer also had (which, indeed, Lame also edited and won an Oscar for; she is surely one of several odds-on Academy Award favorites from this movie). And yet I think the three-hour constraint is a bit of a problem: part of the trouble with the opening hour of this film is that the seafaring and its various episodes have been cut to the bone, so the sensation of time passage and grueling distance is lost. It’s a rare movie that I think might be better if it were 10 to 15 minutes longer, not shorter, if only to expand the “epic” feeling of the story.

So The Odyssey is great, and it is also messy and funky in the way a lot of great movies are. Nolan makes his own Ten Commandments here: an unrestrained, blank-check piece of spectacle following his Best Picture win, the same move Cecil B. DeMille made when he cashed his Greatest Show on Earth Oscar. And if Nolan’s attempt to lasso this ancient epic into a character study in his own voice doesn’t always work, I’d still rather watch him use all his magisterial blockbuster powers on it than any other living filmmaker. I walked out of that Chantilly Airbus IMAX the same way I did in 2008: rattled, a little deafened, and already thinking about when I could go back.

Incredibly, the Dark Knight trilogy proved not to be the peak of the mountain for Nolan’s career in any metric: he proceeded to do the impossible, make beloved and profit-generating big-budget originals. In 2024, his atomic biopic Oppenheimer won 7 Oscars. Nolan personally pocketed Best Picture and Best Director trophies. As of this writing, he’s the most coveted director in Hollywood.

Chronological

• Memento (2000) (Very Good)
• Batman Begins (2005) (Exceptionally Good)
• The Prestige (2006) (Exceptionally Good)
• The Dark Knight (2008) (Masterpiece: Tour De Good)
• The Dark Knight Rises (2012) (Very Good)
• Oppenheimer (2023) (Very Good)

By Rating

Masterpiece: Tour De Good (8/8)

• The Dark Knight (2008)

Exceptionally Good (7/8)

• Batman Begins (2005)
• The Prestige (2006)

Very Good (6/8)

• Memento (2000)
• The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
• Oppenheimer (2023)

Not Seen / Not Rated

• Following (1998)
• Insomnia (2002)
• Inception (2010)
• Interstellar (2014)
• Dunkirk (2017)
• Tenet (2020)

Last Updated

• 10/12/2024

Review Index

And after the Big Bang, the movie chugs along for another hour of film that’s not exactly bad, but is certainly anticlimactic. A bunch of people argue in a hearing rooms, constantly stating at face value movie’s themes and moral dilemmas, as if the sheer repetition of “Was Oppenheimer a moral person? Was he insufficiently loyal to his cause? Did his communist sympathies compromise his work?” makes the questions poignant. The answer: It’s subjective and unanswerable, ya dinguses. And yet, Nolan doesn’t even really lean into the subjectivity — there are two legitimately great scenes that do (one a rally that turns into an apocalyptic horror; the other a hallucinated sex scene), but Nolan is too clockwork and orderly in his thinking to make the film elliptical or blurry-edged.

The film’s structure is a tough sell for me. Two hours of greatness followed by a fine but brutally extended hour-long coda makes for a slog. The movie is still a hell of a triumph — one of the best of the year so far, for sure. And maybe it will play better on replay when I have a roadmap for the story in my head. Every person I know who’s seen it two or more times has said they liked it more the second time than the first. But Oppenheimer seems to me like Nolan was one aggressive revision away from a masterpiece, and so I feel the tiniest twinge of disappointment along with my enthusiasm for its achievement.

Oppenheimer is a work of astonishing cinematic craft, almost to the point of exhaustion. It’s a movie that begs to be admired. Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema do things with an IMAX camera never done before. I mean this literally — Nolan’s team invented black-and-white film stock for the IMAX equipment. I watched the movie on an 85-foot screen at the 1.43 ratio on a dual-laser projection system, and the precision of focus and richness of picture were entrancing.

But I think I sound design tops the visual design. The theater where I saw the film has, in addition to its hi-def IMAX projector, bone-rattling audio making every thrum of the score and boom of the bass hit with a wallop. This is a bravura use of sound in a movie: an incessant, hypnotic score by Ludwig Göransson raising and raising and raising the tension until we experience the temporary relief of silent absolution at the Trinity test. Nolan and his team cleverly introduce a time delay between explosions first seen in video and then heard in audio — which, of course, is what you’d experience in real life when viewing an explosion from a safe distance. But it feels novel and disorienting in a film, and brings an extra layer of tension bordering on suspense to all of the explosion scenes.

The film spans three timelines. The first covers the titular scientist’s young adulthood in 1926 through his leadership of the Manhattan Project ending in 1945, shot in color. The second and third timelines are two prongs in the future: 1954 while Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is interrogated about his messy past and his work on the bomb; and then 1959 during the confirmation hearing for prospective Secretary of Commerce Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.). If the last one of those threads feels the least connected to Oppenheimer’s story, it’s not a coincidence: it’s the material that Nolan stretches hardest to connect to the core narrative of Oppneheimer’s life. In the spirit of Memento, the alternating color and black-and-white serves two purposes: It offers a visual key to telling when we are in the story; but it also adds some thematic layers onto the story — the black-and-white later sequences are the more elliptical and murky segments. The nuts-and-bolts bomb-building has resolved, and the shadowy human fallout of the project gets center frame.

The cast is an epic sprawl of talent depicting an enormous roster of historical figures. Murphy is a no-duh contender for Best Actor, putting the entire movie on his shoulders with precision and vulnerability. Downey, Jr. is second on the totem pole here, giving a terrific take on a politician whose integrity and self-serving impulses clash until the “bombshell” at the end of the film. Murphy is so central that the rest of the huge cast occasionally feels a bit underserved: Emily Blunt lingers in the background then gets one great scene; Florence Pugh strips down naked three times and half-whispers in a sultry voice; Rami Malek gets about 15 seconds of screentime; and that’s not even mentioning about 20 terrific supporting and bit roles.

On top of being stacked, the cast is also just very weird. Lots of left-field actors. Alex Wolff and Josh Peck? Was Nolan’s casting director John Papsidera watching a lot of Nickelodeon in 2007? Alden Ehrlenrich, Olivia Thirlby, and Josh Hartnett are solid here, but why them? They’re all more famous for dud performances than great ones prior to this. David Krumholtz, the comedian best known for 10 Things I Hate About You and making out with Lindsay Cardellini on Freaks and Geeks, gives a performance suggesting he has a long career as a character actor ahead of him. Over and over while watching this movie I thought “is that really who I think it is?” And I was usually right.

Oppenheimer has been the beneficiary of the quirky Barbenheimer viral sensation and will end up a very profitable film. This is a major coup — it’s hard to imagine an R-rated period drama with a 9-figure budget making real money in most circumstances. (Poor Babylon.) I suspect it will be in play for Best Picture and double-digit Academy Award nominations, too. I won’t begrudge it any of that: This is the reason we go see movies in premium formats, a real film-snob, for-love-of-the-art accomplishment. It’s got some narrative slackness in its final hour and some bumpy edges, but it’s one of the year’s must-watch films.

The Dark Knight’s ending saw Batman taking the fall for Harvey Dent’s descent to two-faced villainy so that Dent could remain an icon of virtuous justice for Gotham. The symbolic Dent would become the city’s cure for its decay, a rallying point for institutions and voters, while Batman could become the symbol of the dark impulse of violence of the common people, even though the truth was quite the opposite.

It turns out that this plan has worked, at least on the surface. We pick up several years in the future where Gotham is at the tail end of a golden age. Crime is down, but the police force is bigger and more authoritarian than ever. The old vanguards, including Police Chief Gordon (Gary Oldman), are on their way out. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has retired the caped crusader and become a decrepit hermit who needs a cane to walk as a result of the toll being Batman took on his body.

Chaos is just around the corner, though. Bane (Tom Hardy), a former member of The League of Shadows, which was the driving antagonistic force of Batman Begins, seeks to upturn the status quo and empower the chaotic whims of the labor class. Meanwhile, Batman is pulled back into the game following a robbery by Selina Kyle aka Catwoman (Anne Hathaway), and he’s helped by a rookie cop who is definitely not Robin (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

The plot is a lot of cheese, barely coherent, instead a servant to themes and images and moments. The story is mainly driven from two big ideas mashed together: One is the breaking of Bruce Wayne by Bane so that Batman may emerge from a pit, reborn. The second is the bedlam of the masses: Gotham’s golden age turns into the French Revolution when Bane upends the city’s power structures.

There are some recurring motifs that tie the film together — for example, three characters independently deduce the identity of Batman to very different ends — but there’s still not a clear enough story with proper structure to make The Dark Knight Rises flow as a compelling whole. The narrative is sloppy and full of plot holes and barely explained threads that come and go. The story is scattered enough that almost seems an intentional flaw, like Nolan is making an homage to hardboiled detective stories in which the the chaotic motion and unknowability of the plot is more satisfying than any internal logic.

This is the most political of the Nolan Batman movies. There’s frankly no avoiding it, as much as I wish I could. Unlike The Dark Knight and Batman Begins, which both used their political stories as lenses on the mythic properties of the Caped Crusader, this is explicitly about “the people.” Specifically, it’s about society’s downfall due to extremism. Nolan’s position seems to be a right-leaning centrism tinted with libertarianism, though it’s messy. He rejects populism as bloodthirty and depraved, but also has no use for fascistic police or pork barrel. Righteousness comes at the hand of a small, empowered few.

You can read “rejection of extreme political populists” and “trust the mainstream institutional heroes” as either right- or left-wing. Using politics a decade later, it’s not too much of a stretch see it as either: perhaps anti-Black Lives Matter, or perhaps anti-Jan 6 (and it was similarly easy to see it as an anti-Tea Party piece in 2012). But I think most of the coding here leans anti-left. Bane — the villain — talks all about bringing communal power to the “people” and away from the corporations and rotted institutions in an exaggerated Marxist sort of way. Regardless your leaning, it’s an exhaustingly cynical and anti-humanitarian political view, and I don’t like it.

Back on track to the movie itself… The action here is par for the course for the trilogy. That is to say: it is good, but not consistently great. There is once again a brilliant vehicle chase scene, which is has been consistent of all of Nolan’s Batman films. The hand-to-hand action is weaker, with the obvious highlight being Bane and Batman’s showdown in the sewer. It’s a slow, methodical fight — not a barn-burner like the vehicle chases are, but effective in conveying the sense of physical devastation.

Another of the series’ bugaboos — and, honestly, Nolan’s bugaboos — is having a hard time writing women. Hathaway turns on the charisma, but Selina Kyle is drastically underwritten; meanwhile Marion Cotillard’s Miranda Tate makes no sense and plays on some bad stereotypes about duplicitous women; there’s just not enough meat for Cotillard to turn it into something interesting.

On the positive side, I am strongly pro-Bane. Hardy’s performance is terrific. The sound mixing of his modulated voice is a bit disorienting, at least on the version I watched, like it was piped directly into my ears instead of the space he was speaking. But the voice itself and Hardy’s swaggering menace are incredible. It’s very comic book-y but also genuinely cinematic. He’s no Ledger’s Joker, but I think he’s closer than most people admit.

I also continue to love the score of this series. It remains astonishing how much turbulent drama that Hans Zimmer is able to wring again and again from the same simple two-chord progression.

What ultimately leaves me feeling good about The Dark Knight Rises is that it has an outstanding final few minutes (the silly Joseph Gordon-Levitt name joke notwithstanding). It ties the trilogy together with an image of lingering hope that conveys belief in the transformative power of self-sacrifice, a much more optimistic theme than the rest of the movie, but still earned. The final few shots of Alfred’s vision, ambiguously real or imagined, are a perfect conclusion for Wayne’s arc, too. He found peace or he died trying. Either way, Batman won.

The Prestige is the story of two competing magicians who sacrifice themselves in different, but mirrored ways. Both are obsessed creators who can only achieve their vision by conquering the impossible. Both find a way, but only at great loss of the self. Through this, Nolan pays scathing tribute to his perfectionist muse: What he creates costs him his soul, but the result is true magic. In many ways, it’s Nolan’s Mulholland Drive: part angry screed against the soul-sucking Hollywood machine; part recognition of its all-consuming power. In short, there will never be a more self-reflective film in Nolan’s canon than The Prestige.

Above all other concerns, The Prestige is a terrific and gripping piece of storytelling, though. Through a fractured timeline we see Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) become nemeses after Borden screws up a magic trick that results in the death of Angier’s wife. They each develop tricks the other cannot decode; each finds success but devastating personal loss.

The film opens near the end of the nonlinear timeline with the death of Angier, plunging into a tank and drowning, with Borden taking the blame for the murder despite apparently having nothing to do with it. And thus Borden is sentenced to death; the escalating feud reaching its apex: a death traded for a death. The movie then hops back in time to show us how we got there.

This framing device sets up a terrific series of connected dualities between the two magicians: Failures and successes and fixations that all provide breadcrumbs for one of the most narratively satisfying conclusions to any film you’ll ever watch. It’s the best possible version of a puzzle box story — the clues really were right in front of us and really do point to paradigm-shifting surprises. Almost like a magic trick! To quote my good friend and podcast co-host Brian who declared it his #3 favorite movie of all time back in 2013:

The first time I saw this movie, I immediately wanted to watch it again as soon as it ended – a feeling I’ve never experienced with any other film. And indeed, The Prestige rewards repeated viewings. Every time you watch it, you catch on to more and more hints dropped throughout the film, pointing toward the key secrets behind Angier and Borden’s charade.

Perhaps strangest and most poignant of all is that Borden and Angier, despite the film opening with their deaths, both ultimately achieve their own kind of immortality as they each invent “the perfect trick” as a result of their tireless work — but, for each, it comes at a cost they do not willingly pay. I believe this is what Nolan sees when he looks in the mirror: A creator who lost some of himself, but made art that will be cherished forevermore. His own story ties to Borden and Angier in different ways, both heroic and villainous, both self-destructive as they search for the soul in their art.

There’s a lot to love in The Prestige. In addition to the self-destructive creator concept, some smaller themes get dissection, like the intersection between science and entertainment, and acts of deception as expressions of love, and a handful of others. It’s a rich film, as thoughtful as it is entertaining.

With the loaded cast it has (Bale, Jackman, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, and more), it’s little surprise that the acting is fantastic. Bale in particular channels a hungry artist willing to stop at nothing to climb the summit. Jackman and Caine are moreso playing themselves, but well, while Johansson doesn’t leave a huge impression relative to some of her other performances

The Prestige is an easy to film to look at, too: As with all Nolan works, the production is superior, with some great steampunk-esque period details and a tactile representation of 1890s London. In fact, that might be the secret ingredient that makes the whole thing work: the immersive, cobbled-together, gaslamp-lit Victorian look by production designer Nathan Crowley and cinematographer Wally Pfister, two regular Nolan collaborators.

I ultimately rank The Prestige just a hair below The Dark Knight among Nolan’s filmography in part because I think Nolan does operatic myth-building better than introspection; as personal a piece as this is, I would never go so far as to call it an intimate film. In other directorial hands, some smallness and quietness could have deepened the film’s emotional impact. But Nolan, as mentioned, is a skyscraper architect; smallness is not in his toolkit.

The Prestige is pretty damn close to a masterpiece, a sublime story that rewards careful observation. “Are you watching closely?”

I think this is the core reason why The Dark Knight is such a potent piece of cinema. Beyond the overbearing grimness and great performances and the bone-crushing set pieces and the comic book pulpiness and myth-building (all of which are terrific and omnipresent), this movie has an obsession with duality. There are “two faces” to the basic Batman scenario — Bruce Wayne and the Caped Crusader. And there are “two faces” to this film in particular: hero vs. villain, cop vs. robber, chaos vs. order, corrupt vs. principled, life vs. death, unstoppable force vs. immovable object, etc. All are raised to operatic levels in The Dark Knight. Batman vs. Joker. That fundamental tug-of-war between our discrepant instincts is why we are drawn to vigilante justice, especially via fantastical superheroes. A struggle for balance and justice in an uncontainably messy and dark world. That tension has never been better explored in a blockbuster than here by Christopher Nolan.

Nolan’s vision of Gotham City has evolved since Batman Begins, and mostly for the better. Gone is the sense that Nolan is trying to ape Tim Burton’s expressionistic vision of an urban nightmare. It didn’t quite fit with Nolan’s fascination with institutions gone sour; e.g. corrupt cops, greedy corporation board members, and organized criminals that operate like colluding businessmen. Instead, The Dark Knight’s Gotham feels like a slightly heightened version of a real decaying American city — specifically, Chicago. This new, more realistic look does wonders to amplify the sense that every twist, every jaw-dropping set piece, every bit of fire and destruction, is happening in the real world… is happening to us.

What people best remember about The Dark Knight is Heath Ledger as The Joker, and it’s not hard to see why. Ledger brings to life a psychopathic criminal savant. It’s a performance of almost mythological proportions due, in part, to Ledger’s untimely death following the filming, as if he traded his soul for this Joker to come to life. He makes every moment on screen count with so many little gestures and expressions and line readings that add up to something electrifying. You never doubt for a moment that this is the real and true Joker incarnate on celluloid.

But the movie really belongs to Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart. Dent’s rise and fall provide the narrative spine for the film and also its thematic crux – that society loves to see a hero rise and a hero fall in equal measure. Dark and light, chaos and order, ever in balance. Eckhart is fine, though I really wish he had one extra gear of acting intensity to elevate this central role. At least his CGI makeup as Two-Face remains unnerving and horrifying, almost a piece of body horror.

As vigorous as the movie is, its narrative and script swerve in and out of coherency. Plenty of stuff happens with little buildup or consequence, like Commissioner Gordon faking his own death. Some of the movie’s most famous lines are better at sounding profound than providing actual thematic or character insight. (One nut I’ve never cracked: “Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough; sometimes people deserve more; sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded”). Although, it’s always a bit more cogent than the climax of Batman Begins.

As with its predecessor, many of the best action scenes involve vehicles. The opener with the “tumbler” Batmobile is outstanding, but the real showstopper, a pantheon action set piece of the 21st century, is an extended chase halfway through the movie when Batman catches Joker. These car chases have a great sense of danger and thrilling speed. By contrast, the hand to hand combat scenes remain frustratingly staid: Nolan films them too dark and jittery so that they’re tough to follow and, thus, even a little bit boring.

But this is not a movie designed to deliver a polished, flawless experience; it is, instead, a monumental and excessive creation whose sweep and power result in perhaps the greatest blockbuster of the 21st century to date.

On the one hand, we get to see all of the totems of Batman — the cave, the car, the suit, the weapons — introduced fairly naturally, stripped of their iconography. The movie does a great job of making it feel like Bruce Wayne is a real guy — albeit a traumatized billionaire — slowly inventing the concept of Batman in a semi-plausible manner.

On the other hand, Nolan builds the entire arc of Batman around Bruce Wayne’s struggle with ideas in the abstract: fear and justice and the destruction of one’s self in the name of public service. The Bat as a mythic force. The script is drowning in babble that’s part psychological, part philosophical, as Wayne ponders the meaning and value of his name, of turning his symbol of fear against his opponents, of reclaiming Gotham (a symbol of rot) versus burning it to the ground.

Where the movie struggles is when that second impulse, mythmaking, overpowers the first, gritty storytelling. Everything involving the League of Shadows feels like it belongs in a different universe from the rest of the movie; it frankly feels a bit silly. This is especially true in the film’s climax, which is narratively obtuse, almost incoherent. It’s all about symbols: Dominating the populace with radical fear by turning their institutions and machinery against them.

This is where I’ll point out that Batman Begins has a slight conservative bent to it: It worships the altruistic billionaire and the righteous cop and sees the anti-corruption revolutionaries as the hypocritical villains. But the film is not overtly political; most characters and plot threads are primarily symbolic in the quest of Bruce Wayne and Batman’s self-definition rather than social commentary.

Nolan builds on the visual schema for Batman defined by Tim Burton in Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992) by making Gotham an Expressionist horror city, a la Metropolis; all creepy alleys and horrifying skyscrapers. It honestly doesn’t suit the material that well: The more realistic take on Batman, with its emphasis on real, rotting institutions practically begs for something more grounded and dingy (which Nolan would give us in future Batman outings).

The film’s action is hit or miss; the one major vehicle chase scene is pretty terrific. The hand-to-hand action scenes, however, are marred with choppy editing and poor lighting. It’s impossible to follow. But all of the action has a visceral physicality to it. Nolan’s visual instincts really grip you.

The cast is pretty great all around, but especially Christian Bale in the lead role: For the movie to work, you need a Bruce Wayne who can hit every note in Nolan’s complex characterization, from the big operatic stuff to the gritty physical stuff to the dark intensity. Bale is up for it all, and it’s hard to imagine someone else with the proper tone and range and screen presence to pull it off.

The rest of the acting is excellent as well. Gary Oldman is perfect as the half-jaded, half-idealistic Commissioner Gordon. By casting Liam Neeson in the villain role, Nolan strikes an interesting tone; Neeson is more heroic than, say, Willem Dafoe in the first Spider-Man, giving Ra’s Al Ghul a tragic, lost soul angle rather than unhinged villainy. And Katie Holmes’ performance lacks some depth, but she’s charismatic enough as Rachel.

Batman Begins coalesces into a special sort of “cape opera” that merges all sorts of competing ideas into a very serious, sweeping portrait of Batman. It works exceptionally well on its own, but it was thankfully just an appetizer for Christopher Nolan’s larger-than-life vision of the Caped Crusader.

It doesn’t help that the dialogue is so clunky and expository, telling us its themes at face value.

The film’s final act is its strongest. Not because of the “oh SHIT” revelations, but because we finally get to see the film develop its themes: the connection between memory and identity, the use of self-delusion as a mechanism for coping with grief, and the way we humans will inevitably exploit people who can’t hold it against us.

Nolan’s direction is solid, occasionally bracing (like the scary home invasion flashback), but of course nowhere near as adventurous and cinematic as he’d deploy a few years later. I particularly enjoyed a black-and-white segment towards the end as he walks through a warehouse hallway. Most of the black-and-white segments are still, medium shots, so seeing the neo-noir promise come to life for a bit was great.