It must be at least 18 months since the hype machine was started up for The Dark Knight. It may not have appeared on the average movie goer’s radar until a couple of months before the movie was actually released but for people who spend half their life on the Internet this was followed meticulously from photograph to photograph, new trailer to new trailer, and it got to a point where it seemed no matter how good the movie was, it wouldn’t live up to the hype and expectations.

Well, I’m here to tell you, like so many others before me, that The Dark Knight lives up to all of that, delivering the quality that everyone wanted and a plethora of unexpected aspects thrown in for good measure. This is expansive yet meticulous filmmaking; an epic, all-enveloping crime tale hidden under the disguise of a comic book movie.

Carrying directly on from Batman Begins, The Dark Knight sees Batman and Lieutenant Gordon join forces with newly appointed DA Harvey Dent to take on a psychopathic criminal known as The Joker. Simultaneously they have to combat other forces, such as the mob, which are still persisting as the core problem within Gotham City, whilst The Joker’s crimes grow more and more deadly.

With Batman Begins, director Christopher Nolan took a pretty much dead franchise and breathed fresh life into it. He managed to make people forgive the movie making industry for the atrocity that was Batman & Robin and we were free to have faith in the character and all it has to offer once again. It was gritty, realistic, and showed the true, dark nature of the character with none of the colourful candy layered on top that some of the previous films had. However, Nolan and company have done what I didn’t think was possible — they have surpassed the quality set by the predecessor and made not only the best comic book movie ever made, but a film that transcends the genre and could more accurately be described as an epic, expansive crime story that just happens to have a comic book character in it.

The Dark Knight could be compared to Ang Lee’s take on the Hulk; it disguises itself as a regular comic book movie but it heads in such directions that it doesn’t feel at all like one. It is so much more than that, there’s so much detail in there, so much going on and just so many unexpected elements working simultaneously that it’s surprising it’s been welcomed as much as it has. It doesn’t function as expected — it’s almost as if it takes the expectations of the audience and twists and contorts them into only a mild resemblance of what they formerly were. But the key to this gamble is that what we get, although it’s different from what we might have expected, is all so good that it’s not just accepted but completely embraced. This is an example of the fact that you can take risks and do something different with a well-trodden genre and still make the fans feel satisfied with the result.