Bat-Philosophizing: The Dark Knight

Batmania certainly gripped moviegoers the past week, making “The Dark Knight” the highest-grossing movie on its opening weekend ever. It already took in more money at the box office worldwide in just three days than it cost to make the film, and is earning high ratings from the vast majority of viewers.

Whether it can sustain public interest and surpass the overall grosses of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” “Spiderman” 1 and 3, and “Star Wars Episode III,” remains to be seen.

The good news is, Christopher Nolan’s sequel to his own “Batman Begins” is a pretty good movie, due largely to its powerhouse cast and a provocative script.

The bad news is that only about 80 theatres around the country are able to show it as the filmmakers envisioned it and it can never be converted to DVD or BluRay in a way that preserves the effect of its original format.

Hollywood has tried to impress audiences over the years by releasing versions of its major releases blown up from the standard 35mm film negative to the larger 70mm Imax film, giving somewhat greater sharpness, although the blowup fits into only about half the Imax film’s available image area and doesn’t come close to the potential sharpness of Imax film.

With “The Dark Knight,” however, the director convinced the studio to let him actually shoot portions of the film (roughly a half-hour’s worth) with genuine Imax cameras, giving some scenes an original image almost eight times the area of the 35mm anamorphic widescreen used for the rest of the movie and about sixteen times the film area used for typical “super 35” widescreen productions.

In Imax theatres, those scenes will suddenly change from the usual widescreen “movie look” to fill the gigantic Imax screen top to bottom.

In regular film theatres, those scenes won’t get bigger but will suddenly look sharper, with less visible film grain, having been cropped and reduced to 35mm from a much larger negative.

In digital theatres, the difference will be negligible if even noticeable at all, since most theatrical digital projectors have only a third the resolution of standard 35m film.

Of course an impressive story is more important to most viewers than a merely impressive image on the screen. “The Dark Knight” delivers in that category, for the most part.

It’s a good followup to Nolan’s first installment, although like most sequels, it tends to emphasize action scenes at the expense of added character development, relying on the actors to imply what the film doesn’t have time to explore.

Luckily, this cast is able to pull that off, especially the amazing performance by the late Heath Ledger as the Joker.

What Nolan and his strong cast still manage to convey amidst all the exaggerated comic-book violence, however, is a dark yet optimistic view of Western civilization.

The film depicts a society plagued with crime, corruption, and terrorism it cannot deal with because rational civilization with its values simply can’t comprehend that it is up against true insanity, something whose values are not only foreign but completely incapable of appeasement.

It also shows that the strongest and most effective forces for restoring “normality” verge on the borderline of sanity themselves, and that their inherent moral sensibilities may or may not be to their advantage in any given situation.

Nevertheless, its message is that the basic requirement for humanity, whatever someone might be confronted with, is a respect for human life. Lack of that, the film depicts, puts one in a category of pure evil, overwhelming selfishness, or mental unbalance.