Through circumstances entirely within my control, I found myself in Cork this past weekend where I finally, mercifully, got to see the Dark Knight. Through a combination of the trek from Dublin to Cork, the frenzy I had whipped myself into about the movie and my subsequent delay in seeing it, I found myself physically and mentally spent in advance of the screening. The fact that this was the first movie since the Return of the King that I had actually to queue outside for didn’t help and I was actually worried about my capability to fully appreciate the movie given everything.

Boy, was it worth the wait. The Dark Knight is simply stunning.

I don’t want to get into hyperbole but not only is the Dark Knight the best superhero movie of all time, it is mankind’s single greatest achievement since we faked the moon landings.

Christopher Nolan clearly respects his audience and the material. As a result he is liberated to deliver a dark, complex and gripping crime saga that just so happens to have a caped vigilante and psychotic clown as its hero and villain. He has delivered a comic book movie, grounded in reality, that transcends the comic book movie genre.

This is a movie about humanity. It’s about man’s corruptibility, about what happens when people are forced to choose between a set of horrible choices. Nobody is safe, nobody escapes unscarred because with every action there are consequence. There is no easy fix, no reset button. Batman is just a man in a suit doing his best to stem a tide of misery that’s been unleashed on his city. We find him dealing with the consequences and indeed the merits of his very existence.

Of course at the heart of all the misery is the Joker a.k.a pure evil. Everything he does in the movie is part of a sick social experiment. His creed is chaos and fear and he believes that in an environment bereft of society’s comforts and conventions (law, order, hope etc.), humanity’s core will reveal itself to be festering and rotten. His quest is to achieve this and the tension and chaos he creates is palpitable as its ratcheted up and up and up. As I sat there, the sense that anything and everything could happen at any moment gripped me by the throat and would not let me go.

On the performances, Ledger’s work is everything we were lead to believe and then some. However this is an ensemble movie and all involved deliver the goods, especially Aaron Eckhart who’s journey as Harvey Dent is a cornerstone of the entire film.

The Dark Knight has not only saved Summer 2008 it may just save Hollywood as well. My great hope is that Hollywood sits up and takes notice of the lesson to be learned here. The Dark Knight is a great film. It’s complex, intelligent, story driven movie making. It knows that audiences won’t drift into a coma out of boredom if there isn’t some slow motion physics defying stunt every 2 minutes. And audiences are lapping it up. (It made $300m in 10 days in the US. That’s 6 days faster than the next fastest to reach that mark).

And so there we have it. The Dark Knight resets the bar in terms of what we can and should expect from our summer blockbusters.

It is art in blockbuster’s clothing.