The Dark Knight
After so many years since I've watched this one with my full undivided attention and not just seeing scenes here and there, I have to praise this movie for how well it holds up and if anything feels a little more relevant today. Not just with its prediction of cell phones being used as mass surveillance technology but also on a deeper level of how the truth is used and distorted to promote a narrative. Today it feels that it's more obvious than ever how the truth is treated as a trivial thing where politicians and others in power blatantly lie because they know their base either won't catch their lie or frankly won't care whether that be because the source who presents them the lie will distort the truth to dress up the lie even further or will just claim it's misunderstood.
And of course with this there's the topic of AI and the dead internet, which at this point feels like dead information in general, not just on the internet where nothing seems real anymore. But the Dark Knight shows a way in which the lie is actually being used for good, to prevent chaos from erupting and the symbols people believe in is the one thing keeping them together. When it comes to the concept of symbols keeping people in check, that exists today but it feels more of what symbols are being used to control the masses aren't used to prevent overall anarchy but rather just keep the status quo so the few who profit and benefit of how things are being run can keep doing that while everyone else pays for their profits.
I felt sad while watching this, remembering when I first watched it with my family almost twenty years ago, my late father commented on how dark it got when Two Face was telling Gordon to lie to his son about everything being alright before he was going to punish them. This scene is of course very sad and dark but the narrative just feels even darker to me with how blatant the film is in this exploration of mass manipulation and propaganda, in which the film itself debates the ethics of this as well as the ethics of mass surveillance but in reality we are expected to just accept all this and that we are in the wrong for questioning it and nowadays gaslit into oblivion for just sharing simple truths. Not hard truths but simple truths of what we clearly see in front of us but being told what we are supposed to think.
The fact of the darkness of our world being held to the mirror in this story is what makes it so much more depressing than I ever thought possible, especially for a Batman film, but maybe it's par for the course seeing as that's usually the Batman vibe in general, except for Adam West's Batman. This amongst the other continuous improvement in Nolan's craft with his filmmaking is what makes this film deserving of the legendary status it has garnered over the years. This is still my favorite Batman film but it is much more than just a great superhero film, it is a great suspense crime procedural and journey into the question of morality in asking how far is too far to stop evil and keep it from rearing its head again. I don't think there's much else to say, especially anything that hasn't already been said about this film except that it definitely retains its spot as being in my top five favorite films of all time and my favorite Christopher Nolan film. Interstellar is a close number two but I'll explore that more soon enough as we continue watching the Nolan filmography.