'Will the real Batman please stand up?' - The Chronicles of The Dark Knight

I am famous for joining the band wagons late, but I believe it's better late than never. A had planned to watch The Dark Knight a long time before it was released. But somehow during the initial days of screening I could not make it to the theaters. But finally when I did, it was 3 hours of magic.

Although this movie is titled The Dark Knight, I would not dare to say that it could as well have been titled Why So Serious? Because believe it or not, this movie is all about the madness named Heath Ledger who played The Joker. Set in the offset of Gotham and partly in Hong Kong, this is a chronicle of the darkness that reigns the heart of a human being.

This movie shows how thin the line between good and evil is where the once most honorable Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart, does not take a minute to join hands with The Joker when his love interest dies in the hands of The Joker. And then there is The Joker himself. This is supposed to be Heath Ledger's finest performance before he died. And although it never got an Oscar, mostly because the Oscar committee does not have any affinities towards presenting posthumous awards, that too for the Best Actor category, yet nearly all of us expected to see him get the Oscar. He portrayed the role of The Joker brilliantly and is more than a worthy successor for Jack Nicholson. Heath had outperformed Jack Nicholson. He had stayed in a hotel room for more than a month just to get a feel of the character. The Joker is a madness, pure chaos, pure anarchy, who does not stop for anything. At one point of time in the movie, The Joker tells him that the two of them are destined to fight forever, and how Batman really IS incorruptible. The Joker reveals to him, however, that his real plan was to engineer the fall of Gotham's White Knight, Harvey Dent, since that would introduce much more chaos when a good man like Dent is shown descending into chaos and evil.

No doubt about it that The Joker is the deserving nemesis of the Batman. But now it would be difficult to find someone, anyone, who would outperform Heath Ledger. After all it was a Heath Ledger movie all way through. And maybe when the Directors and Producers of the next Batman movie would be sitting, thinking who might be able to to be a worthy successor of The Joker as played by Heath Ledger, The Joker would come and stand in front of them. Then he would say, "Why so serious?".