Villains Rule in 'The Dark Knight'...But 'Batman Begins' Still Drools

If you're still waiting to see The Dark Knight on the IMAX screen, join the club. After another weekend of sold-out screenings and rapacious scalpers, it seems enough hasn't been said about Christopher Nolan's latest work that's breaking records and causing a frenzy among moviegoers.

[The Dark Knight] is a superior sequel to his Batman Begins because it is, in many ways, more of a comic book film than the first. As in Batman Begins, Knight's villains either dabble with the mob or further plumb the depths of Batman's psyche. However, this time they do so by playing games that steadily escalate in consequence. Their crimes have a kind of dreadful playfulness to them that is not only essential to a good villain but a good comic book, because you can't have a really good guy without a few good bad ones. Like Tim Burton's Batman Returns, The Dark Knight is a film where villains and supporting characters rule. As a film about becoming a symbol or more accurately performing as one, it handily turns its spotlight on Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and the Joker (Heath Ledger) for some much needed expansion on Batman Begins' premise of Batman's highfalutin psychological war on crime. To keep Batman's struggle interesting, you have to give him more than he can possibly handle and the most direct way to do that is to throw more villains at him than he can possibly handle.

To make The Dark Knight a real success, director/co-writer Christopher Nolan made his villains more colorful, humorous and aggressive than in Batman Begins. He traded up for super villains with showy modus operandi instead of mobsters and a masked psychotic in a suit. Here, they are more like brash attention-seekers than the purposeful schemers that populated Batman Begins. "This city deserves a better class of criminal," the Joker proselytizes, "and I'm going to give it to them." Truer words from a mouthy baddy were never spoken.

If you were to look at the Joker and Two-Face in The Dark Knight, you would see antagonists that preach the necessity of structured chaos, but really practice malevolent sideshow tricks on a grand scale. Their philosophy may provide a compelling reason for their evil deeds but are ultimately only secondary to their stunts' immediate shock value. They defy functional purposes and don't "work" for anybody but their own need to be seen and feared. They don't have origin stories-they do not seriously attempt to justify their pain by claiming that their [rubber duckies] were taken away as children-just a few pronounced leftover scars that they wear with pride and the anger that they convey.

At the same time, Nolan is still somewhat resistant to the notion of putting the super into either his supervillains or his superhero. The film's very title removes "Batman" from the equation for the sake of giving him a more metaphorical, high-minded nickname for our caped crusader. By film's end he may indeed have become the symbol Nolan intended him to be in Batman Begins but not because of any declarations of intent but because of a great pair of malevolent foils.