The Dark Knight at the End of the World

Up for Mashing:

Batman: The Dark Knight

Encounters at the End of the World


The Dark Knight, the latest Batman installment, is probably the most anticipated film of the summer. Health Ledger’s final performance no doubt fueled the furor, but it was going to be the biggest blockbuster this summer anyway. Clocking in at nearly three hours, it aims to give viewers their money’s worth, in raw dollars per minute at least.


So I’m just going to say this up front: it disappointed me. The plot was hugely overcomplicated, the characters were often sketchy, and the mood of the film wasn’t half as dark as Batman Begins (and compared to say, The Crow, it feels like Mamma Mia). Director Christopher Nolan filmed the fights scenes in freakin’ IMAX, and I caught myself checking my watch. Just sayin’.


Encounters at the End of the World is a documentary about Antarctica, both the continent and the people living there. Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, Little Dieter Needs to Fly) filmed the piece during the five-month long summer, meaning that virtually every frame is suffused in sunlight. Even the underwater shots are colored by the sun, filtering through layers of ice until the scene looks more like outer space and anywhere on earth.


Encounters sort of wanders from spot to spot, casually strolling past researchers on various projects (seals, penguins, single-celled organisms, active volcanoes). In each place, Herzog shows as much (or more) interest in the folks doing the research as in the research itself. He wants to know what type of person ends up at the end of the world. Who chooses to come to this strange, inhospitable desert where a day lasts half a year?


Gotham City has no truck with sunlight, of course. Nolan tries to make Gotham as grey and moody as possible, to reflect the burned out nature of the city as well as Batman’s troubled soul. Unfortunately, Nolan has a penchant for realism. He filmed many scenes in Chicago, and the result feels too much like Chicago or New York – not like Gotham. The easy references to the “bridge and tunnel crowd” and such only make city feel more mundane. Bruce Wayne’s penthouse is also so smoothly minimalist that it lacks character. The Gotham of Tim Burton’s movies had a lovely but distressed art deco feel to it, evoking the sense of a time long gone while hinting at how far the city had fallen from its greatness. Even Nolan’s previous effort captured something of a decaying city, encapsulated in the shots of Bruce Wayne riding a new city train as a boy, and again in the present day, where the train is worn, graffiti-covered, and clearly unmaintained. The Dark Knight tosses little touches like that out the window.


Herzog also has a few words about architecture. He decries the ugly, mining camp look of Antarctica’s only permanent settlement, wondering how alien archeologists will view these nasty, brutalist structures if they ever visit earth in the future. The mundane has crept into Antarctica too – there’s an ATM, for Zog’s sake. Who needs an ATM at the end of the world? It’s not the only off-beat question Herzog has. He asks an ornithologist down there if there is such a thing as insanity among penguins. Well, Werner, Batman could answer that question for you. But as Herzog’s camera lingers on a lone penguin trudging unrelentingly toward the interior of the continent, the answer seems clear enough.


Encounters, for all its meanderings, benefits from a simple and direct objective. Interview the folks in Antarctica; get shots of spectacular, otherworldly landscapes. Dark Knight, by contrast, is weighed down by Nolan’s efforts to stuff as many characters, plots, and references into the movie as he can. Much has been written about Heath Ledger’s anarchic Joker. It’s a shame, then, that his villain is not allowed to dominate the story. Instead, Nolan hands the audience yet another storyline – that of D.A. Harvey Dent, who also happens to be dating the love of Batman’s life. At first, I thought Nolan was merely laying the groundwork for events in a later film. Ah, coin-flipping Harvey, Gotham’s white knight. Good one, Nolan. However, Nolan kept coming back to Dent, seemingly hell-bent on pushing his storyline to some kind of conclusion. And all the while, the Joker – the real villain of the piece – hovers in the background, coming up with ever more insane, disturbing stunts to get Batman’s (and perhaps Nolan’s) attention.


It doesn’t help that the movie is also chock-full of dozens of minor characters, such as a whole crime syndicate, a few accountants-on-a-mission (yeah, I said accountants), and even a cameo by the Scarecrow. All these characters eat up precious minutes of screen time, and for barely any payoff (I actually forgot who a few of them were from one scene to another –it’s that long and involuted). And Nolan breaks the cardinal rule of storytelling: a scarecrow that appears in the first act has to go off in the third.

Anyhoo, I’m not going to go further, because I know what movie will get seen.


Final tally-

Encounters at the End of the World: an unexpected party.

Dark Knight: my junior high school prom.