THE DARK KNIGHT
- Era
- BATMAN
- Genres
- Crime / Thriller
- Released
- 2008-07-18
- Runtime
- 2h 32m
SIGNAL SUMMARY
- Released
- 2008-07-18
- Runtime
- 2h 32m
- Budget
- $185M
- Worldwide gross
- $1.01B
- IMDb
- 9.1 (3.2M votes)
- RT critics
- 94%
- Metacritic
- 85
- Oscars
- 2 wins / 8 noms
THE MACHINE ITSELF
Everything on this site — the black-blue field, the phosphor traces, the wall of panels you arrived through — is borrowed from one sequence in this film: the sonar room, where every phone in the city becomes a transmitter and the whole skyline resolves into point-cloud light. It is surveillance rendered as cinema's most seductive interface, and the film immediately puts it on trial: Lucius Fox agrees to run the machine once, then takes it apart. This dossier is that machine switched back on and pointed at the film that built it.
DESIGN NOTE: this page's accent color is the site's own phosphor blue — the only film page whose color IS the interface. The machine, looking at itself.
ESCALATION
The Dark Knight is the biggest hit of Nolan's career by almost every measure. Its structure — "Linear, but cross-cut into relentless parallel-action escalation." — describes the numbers just as well: the highest IMDb rating of any Nolan film, the most votes cast for one, and the first to cross the billion-dollar line.
FORMAT: First major feature to shoot sequences on IMAX 65mm cameras (~28 minutes). The image escalated along with everything else.
THE POSTHUMOUS OSCAR
Heath Ledger, billed at position 2 in the cast as the Joker, did not live to see the film released. His posthumous Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor anchored a night the Academy rarely gives films like this one, and the nomination count below shows how far the film reached beyond that one performance.