Release Year: 2008

Genre: Action, Crime, Drama

Director: Christopher Nolan

Writer: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer

Stars: Heath Ledger, Christian Bale

After finding his mojo in 2005's Batman Begins, the Caped Crusader now tangles with his greatest adversary: the Joker.

But this is no ordinary comic-book clown. With his greasy hair, hangman's smile and make-up that may or may not contain traces of human organs, Heath Ledger looks less like a comic-book supervillain than a pagan god waiting for his sacrifice. Add that to Christian Bale's already successful Batman and Aaron Eckhart's noble-but-doomed Harvey Dent and you have a blockbuster that helped usher in the current Golden Age of Superhero Movies.

But wait.

While blockbusters come and go, this one had a little something extra that captured the vibe of the time. Things were dark in 2008 America, with wars and natural disasters on people's minds and a massive economic collapse just a few short months away. And while movies that directly addressed the angst tended to crash and burn at the box office (seriously, who wanted to spend two hours talking about torture?), we still had some serious psychological issues to collectively vent.

And like the hero that he is, Batman stepped up to help.

The Dark Knight let us look the Gorgon in the face—talking about things like terrorism, government corruption, and the fact that even the good guys lose sometimes—without having to deal with the sheer overwhelming awfulness of it all. It stayed in the realm of comic books, set in a city that never existed and featuring characters that five-year-olds dressed up as for Halloween. That let us approach these tough subjects in ways that were safe, and that let our psyches deal with them in ways that didn't make us curl up and whimper under the bed.

It did that while also doing all the good things popcorn movies do: presenting iconic characters locked in a compelling conflict, with a thick helping of razzle-dazzle to keep it all crackling. Nolan insisted on practical effects whenever possible, which gave his set pieces a package of reality unseen in our CGI-cluttered multiplexes. When you tie those things in with that dark current of a subtext, it's not hard to see why the movie grossed over $1 billion in global box office revenue, gathered 8 Oscar nominations (2 wins), and landed on almost every critic's list of best films of 2008.

Since then, DC Comics (who created Batman) have seen themselves getting lapped by their rivals over at Marvel Comics, as the Marvel Universe throws out blockbusters like candy and DC struggles to keep the pace. But back in 2008, things looked a lot different in a number of ways, and The Dark Knight found a way to ride the prevailing wave right past its Marvel rival (the original Iron Man, which didn't exactly bomb) and into the pages of cinematic history.

All that and the Batmobile too? Anything that awesome has to be a crime.

The smart aleck answer goes like this: "because you get to study BATMAN and still wow your sociology teacher."

But a better answer might be: "because it combines pop-culture immortality with some timely political issues."

A character like Batman tends to reflect the mood of the times, which is why he can get rebooted every ten years or so and nobody bats an eye. In the '40s, for instance, Batman fought the Japanese in a series of unspeakably racist movie serials. During the conformist '50s, he lost all that brooding angsty stuff and became a colorful father figure. The '60s were all pop art and bright colors, and Batman moved with the times thanks to the camptastic stylings of Adam West. Denny O'Neil helmed the comics in the '70s, where Vietnam put a serious whammy on the national psyche, and Bats returned to his grim and gritty roots. The '80s were larger than life, with heroes and villains exhibiting rock-star excess (Rambo, anyone?). Enter Tim Burton, whose comic-book sensibilities put the Super in this goth-noir superhero.

Flash-forward to 2008.

The U.S. (we're gonna get America-centric for a bit) was struggling with the trauma of 9/11 and two difficult wars. Osama bin Laden remained at large, Hurricane Katrina put New Orleans underwater, and the economy was getting ready to swan dive into an empty swimming pool. "Bummed" isn't the right word: we were flat-out despairing.

It was then that Christopher Nolan, having delivered what some considered the definitive Batman story with 2005's Batman Begins, found a way to up his game and give us a Caped Crusader that aptly reflected the national mood.

In the first case, it was almost despairingly grim. There was nothing silly here: no Biffs! and Pows! to remind us all to lighten up. The blood is real, the madness is eerily plausible, and when the Joker promises to reduce the entire city to anarchy, we can see exactly, precisely, how it might work. In the wake of 9/11, we all knew what a panicking metropolis looked like, and The Dark Knight wanted us to remember that feeling.

It also did away with anything—anything—you wouldn't find in the real world. The Adam West show featured giant clams and dinosaurs, and even the Tim Burton movie involved things like cathedrals taller than the Sears Tower. Not so here. Everything was grounded and real, even the Joker's make-up (which according to comic-book canon is actually his real face). Here, it's the mundane variety, stressing the fact that this is what Gotham City and its denizens might look like in our world.

Why do all of that? Besides making Batman all brooding and cool, it connected us to the battle between good and evil in a surprisingly intimate way. Director Christopher Nolan forced us to ask what we might do in these circumstances. Would we blow up a ferry full of people to save ourselves? Would we let fear consume us like it consumed Harvey Dent, or would we rise above it and make the right choice the way Batman did?

If his drama takes place in a brightly colored world, it becomes easier to dismiss. But this way, with knowledge of 9/11 and a lot of its uglier questions still shaking out in our minds, we could understand how these characters reflect our own psyche, and why we might ultimately fail the way Two-Face does. Other people have done that, of course, and done it quite well, but no one thought to do it with such beloved and popular figures. The Dark Knight brought Batman into our world and us into his. The only question was whether we'd take his example to heart like we're supposed to.

The jury's still out on that, and probably will be for a while. But individually, we can make the choice between right and wrong every day. This film's grit, its intensity, its almost unbearable ability to show us how nasty our dark sides can be… all of it showed us that Batman has to make a tough call sometimes too, then quietly urged us to follow his example when it was our turn.

We're willing to give up the odd Biff! or Pow! to see a lesson like that written on letters forty feet tall.