The Dark Knight vs. Iron Man

Having seen about a half-dozen movies in the theater this year, I'm obviously qualified to critique the Wall Street Journal's year-end film criticism. Joe Morgenstern put Iron Man on his 2008 top-10 list, and left The Dark Knight off. It's not so much that I want to split hairs on which of the two is a better movie. Both were excellent, although both clunked similarly to the endings with villain characters (Jeff Bridges' bad-guy Iron Man, and the post-face burning Harvey Dent) who just sort of went crazy without any further explanation.

What made me think about Dark Knight while reading the Iron Man review was Morgernstern's comment that the former "expands the notion of a mainstream summer action adventure," mostly with the depth and intelligence of the story. I thought Dark Knight did so much more for the expansion of, specifically, the comic book movie. Think about how many little stories there were in sequence in the movie. Just off the top of my head, six months after seeing the movie:

• The Joker is robbing banks to get in with the Gotham mafia community.
• Batman goes and roughs up the Chinese mafia impresario.
• The Joker kidnaps and sets fire to Maggie Gyllenhaal and Harvey Dent.
• The Joker threatens to and then does blow up a hospital to spook people.
  
• The Joker sets bombs on two ferries and tries to get the passengers to blow each other up.
• Harvey Dent/Two-Face kidnaps Inspector Gordon's family and Batman has to save them.

And there are others that I left out because I couldn't remember just how they went, including the big car chase and the Joker getting himself arrested and Batman interrogating him. The film is like a half-dozen episodes of a TV show, woven together not by the usual story arc of good triumphing over evil, but by Batman's impossible struggle and ultimate repudiation of the attempt to be a perfect superhero. In that regard, it represents a step forward both stylistically and thematically.

It's hard to argue that Iron Man really took either of those steps. The plot is much more linear, following the invention of the Iron Man character and the transformation of Tony Stark into a good guy, and his fight with Jeff Bridges that culminates with an actual Iron Man on Iron Man brawl. In other words, it basically follows the script of a big budget comic book movie, albeit improved with everything Marvel has learned from its mostly successful X-Men and Spider-Man ventures, and the less successful older Batman movies. It's true that it's better written, better acted, and better effected than what we're used to, but that just means it's the same thing done better. The Dark Knight actually did it differently, and did it very well. Which is the better movie is a more subjective question, but Dark Knight is the one that really expanded the genre.