Dark Knight has already had near universal praise (Denby of the New Yorker one of the few who missed the point) and is approaching the $400m mark, so it hardly needs me to add to it, but there’s been a strange note emerging consistently in the British broadsheet reviews which goes something like ‘good though it is, we wish Nolan would do something more important with his talent’.

That tragically misguided sentiment needs speaking to.
In TDK, Chris Nolan and his brother and co-writer Jonathan take one of modern culture’s greatest myths, and with the help of seven of our finest actors (now sadly, six) and an army of collaborators, re-invent it as a parable for our sad and troubled times.

Telling unvarnished and difficult truths about what America has become in its war against terror, and the corrosive consequences for all of us to have the dream of our superpower so tarnished, The Dark Knight has succeeded where a dozen more ‘worthy’ attempts have failed. In what Randy Pausch would call a ‘head fake’ it wraps a hard moral and political message about Iraq, Terror and our wars in a mythical wrapper and takes that message to a mass audience who are, in astonishing numbers, embracing it: because - not despite - of this layering, this mixing of the mythical and the specifically urgent, TDK is on the way to becoming the biggest movie of all time.

If there is more important work than this for a story teller to do, I don’t know what it is. The Nolans make me proud to be a filmmaker.

I’m sorry to have only heard of this remarkable man on the day of his death. Watch the speech that made him famous here, and learn more about his life here

Right here

And check out the teaser poster. Tell us what you think.

Oh how I love this man