[1] The visuals.

Like most people, I've always just thought of "Gotham" as New York City. One appealing aspect of "Batman Begins" is that it managed to make "Gotham" a city all its own; not New York, but a place all its own. Dark Knight is different, (neither better nor worse, just different) in that it was very clearly filmed in Chicago. It's one of those cities that you can't fake: the river, the Sears tower, the look of the Chicago police department. (I noticed this when we went to Chicago for DEC this year; despite never having been to the city, I felt like I already knew the place.) As recognizable cities go, it was an excellent choice – the architecture and structure of the city made for some interesting scenery to chew on, and if you're going to pay homage to a tradition of a great and dedicated police force, CPD and NYPD probably come in at a statistical tie. And the shots of Batman overlooking the city from atop the Sears tower are to die for. I'm going to see this a 2^nd time on IMAX when I get back to PHL, just so that I can gawk over the fantastic visuals again.

[2] The music.

Hans Zimmer has never written a bad score in his life, I think, and this is no exception. Most successful was the just-loud-enough-to-be-noticed (if you were looking for it) tribal pulse that happens through most of the film. It's a known fact that the human heart will, within reason, synchronize itself to the beat of music, and I imagine that the Zimmer soundtrack was timed to physically draw the audience in. It certainly worked on me – I walked out of the movie with both my heart rate and breathing faster higher than normal. (Though the latter might have been because I was holding my breath by the end.)

[3] A layered film.

So if you want to, Dark Knight can be just another a Bond movie: gadgets and some funny lines and Christian Bale in an Armani suit and chase scenes and stuff blowing up real good. Or if you want, you can get into the underlying conflicts that inform the entire movie:

·         Making the "right" choice versus the "easy" choice, and the difficulty in determining what that "right" choice actually is. Situational morality versus absolute, etc.

·         Being the thing that someone "wants" versus being the thing that someone "needs", whether what you are to yourself, what you are to your family or to someone you love, or extrapolating it out to the larger question of what you are (or what a hero is) to society, and when it's "right" (again with the discussion of "right") to be one instead of the other.

·         Making choices that we don't want to make, and admitting things that we don't even want to admit to ourselves. Most notably, Gordon being "forced" to choose who he loved the most out of his wife and his two children, which is the kind of thing that no parent would ever want to admit to.

[4] The Joker.

A lot of the buzz in the Dark Knight reviews has been about Heath Ledger being a dark horse for an Oscar as the Joker. Were Ledger not dead, I unfortunately think that the Oscar people wouldn't consider the performance of what is, in effect, a Bond villain. And that would've been a great shame. He's mesmerizing every second that he's on-screen, and probably the best comic-book villain I've ever seen in a live performance. He's pure chaos (though for a discussion in honor of the late Gary Gygax…The Joker: Chaotic Evil or Chaotic Neutral? Discuss.) Worthy of an Oscar win? That will depend on who he's up against, but he's certainly worth being in the running.

[5] Moving through cliché and coming straight out the other side.

So there's the part where newly-appointed Commissioner Gordon fakes his own death. Anyone who's even remotely familiar with the Batman universe was of course sat there saying "No, not possible, no way did they kill Commissioner Gordon." And if they'd done the thing where he re-emerged 3 scenes later, I think it would've cheapened the movie, because it would've been so trite and so…expected. But instead, Christopher Nolan committed to the bluff for something like 20 minutes of screen time, for so long that even I bit down on it. By the time the "hero shot" happened, where the door flew open and there was Gary Oldman on the other side, I honestly had this gleeful moment of "OMFG-he's-not-DEAD-YAHOO!!!!!" (Quickly followed, of course, by "See, I knew he wasn't dead, I just knew it. Didn't doubt it for a second, nope, I wasn't fooled, not me." Only…I was. Totally.) With The Joker acting as an agent of pure chaos, Christopher Nolan even managed to create a few plot twists or reveals that even I didn't see coming. (And I always see them coming – I called the ending to Se7en 45 minutes before it happened, which completely freaked out the guy I was watching it with if I recall.) I think I realized what the ending was going to be, about 60 seconds before it happened. It was just long enough for me to say (literally out loud) "Oh god, please no." And that, my friends, is how good this movie was: I forgot I was watching a damned movie and just plain didn't want the thing that happened…to have happened.

Maybe it says something about my overall taste in movies, but the middle installments of trilogies almost always end up being my favorite parts of them: ESB, The Two Towers, The Matrix: Reloaded (that was the name of the 2^nd one, right?). Assuming this is setting up a 3^rd installment, Dark Knight absolutely follows the Empire Strikes Back model of surpassing the original, in both quality and utter darkness.