This is the second Batman film from director Christopher Nolan, who has carried over his major players from the first installment, Batman Begins. Christian Bale again stars as Batman, playing him as originally written for the comics: as a vigilante haunted by the past while trying to protect innocent people in the present. Bruce Wayne (Batman) has never fully accepted the deaths of his parents at the hands of a criminal, and is driven by a need to see that such an event never happens again. But in making himself responsible for the welfare of everyone, he sets himself a goal that even his superstrong persona cannot meet all of the time. Garbed in an armored suit, Bale is a formidable yet human presence, his Batman all too mortal -- in an early, shirtless view of his back, we see scars atop scars, all earned in his battles to keep the citizens of Gotham City safe.

Batman is partly defined by his villains, and none is more formidable than the Joker, a clown-faced man thoroughly at ease in a world of evil. The Joker doesn’t seek revenge, or justification for his crimes -- he just piles one bad deed atop another, usually with visible glee. The late Heath Ledger plays the Joker as a manifestation of Batman’s own dark side. This talented actor wears makeup that renders him nearly unrecognizable -- it looks as if it was applied with a crayon, then hosed down. His mouth is sunken in, as if he sucks on internal sores caused by a childhood event of unfathomable terror. In short, he is evil incarnate. This incarnation of the Joker provides no "fun" moments, as did those of Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson. In The Dark Knight, the only one who laughs at the Joker’s jokes is the Joker himself. Ledger’s performance is Oscar-worthy; the fact that it was one of his final roles (his last was as Tony in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, to be released in 2009) is liable to incline the Academy to not only nominate him for the Best Actor award, but to posthumously award it as well.

The other roles are impeccably cast and acted. As the supportive Police Commissioner Gordon, who sweeps Batman’s above-the-law vigilante tactics under the table, Gary Oldman has a lot more to do here than he did in Batman Begins. Michael Caine is again pitch-perfect as Alfred, the butler who has served Bruce Wayne/Batman from the beginning, and who knows when to defer to his employer, and when to rise to the level of friend. Aaron Eckhart seems totally at home as DA Harvey Dent, the public crusader for good who discovers his own dark side as Two-Face.

Though there’s a lot of psychological study going on, there’s also a lot of action. The chase and fight sequences are brilliantly breathless. Nolan and editor Lee Smith use quick cutting to heighten the action and propel it to a conclusion. The special effects are flawless; more important, they’re believable. I had the feeling that everything portrayed in this movie is actually possible. A friend tells me that nothing in it breaks the laws of physics; I don’t know about that, but I never felt that anything was false, or stood out merely as a special effect for a special effect’s sake. The Batmobile still rocks as the coolest, leanest, meanest vehicle on the road, and when it survives a crash that would do in any other automobile, the solution is both unique and believable. Grappling hooks and engineered capes make it possible for The Bat to fly, and those scenes, too, are thrilling. And the pounding music by James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer helps.

The overall color scheme is gray and steel-blue. In this Gotham City -- more a disguised Chicago than a stand-in for New York City -- almost everything looks menacing and a haven for criminals. The costumes are appropriately dark and subdued, with none of the camp brightness of earlier versions. There’s no comic-book feel here, but the tone of a dark graphic novel. I looked at some of the DC Comics strips and covers in Mark Cota Vaz’s Tales of the Dark Knight, and believe that the set and costume designers for this film have come closer than any others to realizing the look of the original drawings. Earlier efforts seem almost like satires by comparison.

There are some flaws. The action doesn’t always progress with ultimate logic, and requires the viewer to fill in some blanks: When the Joker escapes, we see the setup and the aftermath, but not the escape itself. Perhaps a director’s cut down the line will smooth things out a bit, but a longer version might lose some of the edge that this film has in such abundance. The Dark Knight is long at two-and-a-half hours, but only seems so at one or two places -- and then is immediately kick-started again by some new action sequence.

So far, this is the best live-action film of the summer, and perhaps the best film of the year in any category -- after the animated wonder of Pixar’s Wall-E. The Dark Knight is a pulse-pounding action-adventure movie, and an epic discourse on the nature of good and evil that engages body, mind, heart, and soul. When you leave the theater, you’ll know that you’ve experienced something profound.

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