FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE: The Dark Knight Changed Hollywood Movies Forever.

While Batman Begins had one foot firmly planted in the pulpier side of the character, The Dark Knight was filmed like a gritty, atmospheric crime movie, with Nolan taking visual cues from Michael Mann’s bank-robber epic Heat. Rather than heightening Gotham City to the point that a man dressed as a bat makes sense as its public defender, Nolan turns Batman (Christian Bale) and the Joker (Heath Ledger) into jarring archetypes who are incongruous to the world of gangsters and cops around them, and symptoms of an increasingly polarized society of heroes and villains.

Part of Batman’s quest in The Dark Knight is to push the attorney general Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) as Gotham’s hero of the future, an effort that implodes when the Joker attacks and scars Dent, turning him into the monstrous villain Two-Face. Most comic-book antagonists have specific motives of world domination or personal revenge. But Nolan presents the Joker more as an elemental agent of chaos—one who’s interested only in upsetting the natural order of things wherever he goes, and who’s fascinated with Batman because he represents the opposite extreme. It’s a vision of evil as something trollish, amoral, and anarchic. “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” says Batman’s reliable butler, Alfred (Michael Caine)—a line that became an online refrain in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Nolan got to make The Dark Knight exactly as he wanted, focusing on smaller, more practical stunts (the film’s biggest set piece involves a truck flipping over). He didn’t have to worry about setting up future sequels, shooting in 3-D, or doubling down on CGI spectacle to make for a more epic trailer. The film’s colossal success with both critics and audiences meant that almost every future superhero movie had to be more than just a fringe project for its studio. Couple that with the franchise potential of Iron Man, and a film as single-minded as The Dark Knight just couldn’t be made again.

A shame, that.