We will never see a movie like The Dark Knight again

By Matt Patches | @misterpatches | Jul 16, 2018, 8:43am EDT

On the occasion of The Dark Knight’s 10th anniversary, Polygon is spending the week investigating the comic-book blockbuster’s legacy. Why so serious? Because Christopher Nolan’s Bat-sequel gave us lots to talk about. This is the retrospective you deserve and the one you need right now.

Smacking his lips from across the interrogation table, makeup smearing his face like acid wash, The Joker takes an existential swipe at Batman halfway through Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, and leaves a scar. “I know the truth,” he blabbers. “There’s no going back. You’ve changed things ... forever.”

Shrouded by an iconic cowl, The Dark Knight’s version of Batman fights the blight eroding his world, Gotham City, by breaking the laws he vowed to protect. The Joker catches him in the paradox, and paints a picture of a world still festering. There are violent Batman imitators. There are “freaks” spawning each day. There’s the establishment, supposedly on his side, but righteous and ready to stab him in the back. Batman can try to be above it all, but in the end, his actions will have consequences.

At the time of the film’s release, Nolan told the L.A. Times that the interrogation scene was “so important and so central” to his vision, and one of the first scenes he and his co-writer/brother Jonathan Nolan needed to crack to understand how the rest of the movie should play out. Today the scene plays like a self-reflexive confession: As Batman and the Joker’s clash over the transformative power of extremism, Nolan seems aware of what he’s getting away with, and what impact his finished film could have on Hollywood. Nolan came to IP-driven blockbustering as a Batman, a determined defender of The Good Ol’ Days who had the fancy toys and symbolic mask to fly high. The Dark Knight challenged expectations, and as we know now, 10 years later, changed things ... forever. But could it help the industry revert to normalcy? Could anything ever replace The Dark Knight?

Speaking at a BAFTA event last fall, Nolan admitted that the conditions under which he made The Dark Knight, even more controlled on The Dark Knight Rises after his sequel grossed over $1 billion worldwide, were abnormal, and unlikely to be replicated down the road. The director insists he never even planned on sequelizing that foray into comic-book cinema, Batman Begins’ playing card Easter egg be damned. When he pounced on screenwriter David S. Goyer’s Joker-led sequel treatment (prepped before the release of Begins, just in case), he did so at his own pace, and with his own priorities. Reflecting on it, the distance between then and now sounds more like five decades instead of one.

”That’s a privilege and a luxury that filmmakers aren’t afforded anymore,” Nolan told the BAFTA members. “There’s too much pressure on release schedules to let people do that now, but creatively it’s a huge advantage. We had the privilege and advantage to develop as people and as storytellers and then bring the family back together.”

Nolan doesn’t exactly need to tell us this; after years of buildup toward a convoluted Justice League, “Release the Snyder Cut” conspiracy theories and continued plans for an extended DC universe, we know what Warner Bros. Pictures’ protection and investment looks like. The Dark Knight, released just two months after Marvel Studios’ breakout film Iron Man, is in debt to Batman without pandering to any single image or comic arc. There is little world-building outside the logic of the immediate narrative. Nolan’s Batman isn’t a superhero in the gleeful, laws-of-physics-defying, action-figure sense, instead burdened by ethical rhetoric and villain complications. The movie is not “for the fans,” and yet it’s held as a blockbuster pinnacle by those who’d self-identify as such. Quality notwithstanding, The Dark Knight is singular.

The director and his collaborators, Olympians of their crafts, seize the opportunity to push the limits of what movies can do. The Dark Knight is elegantly excessive, a confluence of Nolan’s film-tech obsessions, philosophical puzzles and wealth of popcorn movie knowledge. Everything that can be explored — architecture, performance, film chemistry, noir tropes, screenwriting “rules,” practical special effects, Ethics 101, action geography, orchestral sound, the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale, pragmatic costuming, the spectrum of humor, truck mechanics — is explored. The DNA of The Dark Knight is geek in nearly every way, except for the fulfillment of page-to-screen recreation. Nolan co-opts Batman like so many revolutionaries have over the character’s 75-plus-year history, and burns cash like he’s The Clown Prince of Crime.

Despite monetary evidence to be argued otherwise, it’s hard to imagine any director in the future having the same indulgent opportunity as Nolan had on The Dark Knight. This is not for a lack of a talent pool; only now, under immense pressure, are studios waking up to the fact that directors of various genders, races and other marginalized factors possess Nolan’s ability to project their collective knowledge onto the canvas of a $185 million blockbuster. But in 2018, the “auteur” director has been replaced by the masterminding producer and committees that ensure there’s a game plan for the next five installments in the megafranchise. The films will be shot, and reshot, whether planned in advance — which is often is the case, and wisely so — or abruptly interjected into the proceedings, in case, say, a Star Wars movie needs to be “more Star Wars” than the director was able to deliver. In theory.