Right.  First of all everybody out there needs to stop referring to The Dark Knight as Heath Ledger's final film.  Because it isn't.  That honour (?) belongs to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the new slice of oddity from mad genius Terry Gilliam, which Ledger was filming when he died.  And now that that's out of the way everyone - and I do mean absolutely everyone - who is now or ever was a fan of Batman needs to pause for a moment and whisper a word of thanks to the departed actor, wherever he may be.  Because he is absolutely brilliant as The Joker in The Dark Knight, bringing the iconic character to fully fleshed, utterly astounding life.  That early possible Oscar hype?  It aint hype.  He really is that good and would totally deserve the award should the powers that be deign to give it to him. If only the rest of the film were as good ...

Now, don't get me wrong. Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the Batman universe  is still BY FAR the most compelling version ever captured on screen and you can still make a pretty good case that Nolan has created two of the very best comic book movies ever.  The legacy is in no danger.  But The Dark Knight suffers from a bit of bloat, the Batman character doesn't really develop at all, the support characters develop even less and Ledger's performance is so clearly superior to everyone else's in the picture that you can't much help but count down the seconds until he re-appears whenever the story goes elsewhere.

The story? The Batman seems to have the upper hand in the ongoing war against crime in Gotham and is planning a major move against the mobsters who control the city.  He's established a solid working relationship with Lieutenant Gordon and the major crime squad and the duo seem to have a significant new ally in freshly elected DA Harvey Dent.  But, of course, things always go nasty just when they seem to be under control and it is at this juncture that a deranged genius arrives to bring chaos to the city ...

I leave the synopsis there because the film gets just a wee bit over plotted at this point - a surprising thing, indeed, considering how lean Nolan's scripts usually are.  Let's just say that the core of the film is the triangle of obsession that occupies its core in the bodies of Bruce Wayne, Harvey Dent and The Joker himself.  Wayne we're well familiar with at this point, the man driven to an obsessive pursuit of justice thanks to childhood tragedy.  As for Dent, well he begins essentially as a lighter version of Wayne - a man driven to the pursuit of justice above all else until tragedy breaks him with the knowledge that the world simply is not a just place, transforming him into the vengeful Two Face in the process.

Wayne and Dent are fairly standard comic book creations but The Joker, The Joker is a true icon because The Joker is unique.  The Joker understands that the step from 'sanity' to 'madness' is a tiny one, that everybody is capable of doing horrible things in the right circumstances.  It's hard to even call The Joker evil, per se.  He wants nothing for himself.  He's not seeking any personal gain.  He has no plan for advancement.  He doesn't even seem to consciously wish any ill on anyone in particular.  The Joker, more than anything else, is an educator.  He is an evangelist.  He has understood the darkness of the human soul and, unable to turn away from it, he simply wants everyone else to acknowledge that they are really no different from him.  That if you push anyone hard enough, in just the right way, they will follow the exact same path that he has chosen for himself.  There's an odd sort of purity to The Joker - in his own way he is as incorruptible as Batman - and a sort of childlike joy that he takes in creating chaos and it is that purity that Ledger instinctively latches on to in his performance and brings to full blooded life on screen.

So, yeah.  I wish they'd cut about twenty minutes out of it and tightened things up a bit.  I wish they'd given Alfred and Lucius something, anything at all, worthwhile to do.  I wish they'd continued to develop the psychology of the Batman character.  I wish the political commentary hadn't been quite so clumsy.  But, really, I feel kind of petty dwelling on those things because even with its bumps and warts The Dark Knight remains an elegaic, noir based crime epic on a scale seldom seen driven by an absolutely jaw dropping performance from a talented actor taken away far too young.