The Dark Knight

Dark knight is a hero film directed by Christofer Norlan. This film is based on the DC comics character Batman.

In the film, Bruce Wayne/Batman, Police Lieutenant James Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent form an alliance to dismantle organized crime in Gotham City, but are threatened by an anarchistic mastermind known as the Joker, who seeks to undermine Batman’s influence and turn the city to chaos. 

That thinking generates the Joker’s largest experiment, loosely based on the “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” a fundamental scenario in the study of game theory. He rigs two ferry boats leaving the city with explosives, and gives the passengers on each boat the trigger for the other. One boat contains average civilians, but the other contains prisoners, and therein lies the moral quandary, he informs them that one of the boats must blow up the other before midnight, or he will detonate both, killing them all. The Joker assumes it’s inevitable that one of the boats will blow up the other, because he believes that most people are like him, only out for themselves.

Instead, the boat sequence steers the nihilistic story of The Dark Knight toward a somewhat happy ending. Not happy in circumstance, necessarily, but happy in that it posits humanity as more than just self-servicing blight on the planet. Though it looks, for a moment, like the passengers will turn on another, a prisoner, played by actor Tom Lister, takes the detonator from the prison warden and throws it out the window. He doesn’t flinch or think it over for a moment, only telling the warden before throwing it, “I’ll do what you should’ve did 10 minutes ago.” Likewise, a civilian on the other boat who was about to pull the trigger decides against it. As Batman tells the Joker, “This city just proved that it’s full of people ready to believe in good.”

The various lighting techniques that cinematographers use in film play a huge role in setting the tone and successfully portraying the story to the audience. Also the use of  lighting helped show what the joker was doing and how he always had control over the situation.

In the boat scene when joker had caught by Batman, the viewer can only see the character at some points and cannot see the surroundings. This high level of darkness creates atmosphere for the ending of the film and also emphasizes the evil surrounding Harvey Dent, having the scene in darkness a tense atmosphere to end the film. 

Further on in the scene, Nolan uses point of view shots from both the Joker and Batman’s perspectives to show the audience what each character is seeing and as a result the audience gets a ‘feel’ for what the characters’ are experiencing. For example, there is a sequence of shots involving both a low-angled Joker’s POV(point of view) shot on Batman and a high angle Batman POV shot on Joker. In the first shot, the effect Nolan creates is that Batman is a very powerful and menacing character because the camera angle makes him look so big because it is low down. We as the audience empathize with the Joker because we can see from his perspective how he is being stood over like a naughty child by this menacing ‘bigger’ person. In the second of the two shots, the audience are presented with the Batman’s perspective. The high angle allows Nolan to create the effect that Joker is insignificant and small and the Batman POV part of the shot shows the audience how he is seemingly in control of the situation because his enemy is so unassuming.