Realism and the Dark Knight

This summer's pop culture cornerstone seems to be, without much doubt, Christopher Nolan's new Batman film, The Dark Knight. Along with the usual (and surprisingly favourable) mainstream reviews, it's shot to the top of IMDB's customer ratings, and has inspired musings on the Joker's grasp of game theory.

So here's my little observation: The Dark Knight is possibly the first superhero sequel that actually gets more realistic, and less bombastic, than its predecessor.

Let's look at the usual trajectory of a superhero series (this may apply to other sequels, in fact, but the only major series I can think of is Pirates of the Carribean, and I valued my time far too much to watch that nonsense). Start with Tim Burton's Batman, which was dark, and had a vague attempt at realism, although the presence of a bat-shaped aircraft (seemingly inserted mainly so that Burton could put it against a full moon, recreating the iconic signal) shows that it's not allowed to trump artistic needs. Follow that up with his still mainly monochrome, but far camper, Batman Returns, which asks the viewer to accept an army of remote-controlled missile-toting penguins and the resurrection of a murder victim by a herd of cats¹.

When Burton lost the reins of the franchise, things got even worse. Batman Forever saw Joel Schumacher turn up the saturation, with Jim Carrey gurning manically as the Riddler. Let's not even mention the horror that was Batman and Robin, although it provides a useful rule of thumb: the sidekick showing up is usually the end of the road.

You can plot a similar curve for the recent Spider-Man films, which go from a man with an exoskeleton (ok, kind of plausible) to an alien parasite bodysuit (er), and, although in a slightly different way, the Superman films of the '70s and '80s, which finally reached a series-ending nadir with our Kryptonian protagonist trying to end the Cold War single-handed. Enough said, I suspect.

Nolan has [made] plausibility his watchword. Every aspect of the crime-fighter’s milieu has been granted as believable and realistic an explanation as possible (the hero’s cape becomes a glider, his car an urban tank appropriated from the US military and his arch-enemy the Joker’s horrifically distinctive features the result of scars and make-up, “war-paint” designed to intimidate). The world of the film is necessarily fantastic but it feels closer to ours – uncomfortably, distressingly closer – than any previous version.

I'm certainly happy to see this, especially as it makes the intellectual meat of the film (and yes, there is some) much easier to relate to the real world. As Barnes says in his conclusion, the film holds out the promise of its own sequel (as, to be honest, all works in this genre have to), and if it can maintain the path of even-increasing realism, I'm really looking forward to it.

¹ For all its nonsense, this is probably still my favourite of the '90s Batman films. Go figure, as they say in America.
² I dislike paging in web sites usually, but cleverly the entire Dark Knight review is on that page; the second page is a review of Wall-E, which I saw a couple of days earlier, and which, to be honest, I thought was even better, although it's hard to compare such dissimilar works.