10 Reasons The Dark Knight Is Still The Best Comic-Book Movie Ever

3. The Use Of Music To Define Character

It's not often we get a truly memorable score in a comic-book film. Because these movies are all interconnected nowadays, a lot of the same music is used and it all starts to blur together. The Dark Knight's composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton-Howard did something very different with their score, however. They started making it before they'd seen a single frame of the film, and that meant The Dark Knight's characters were completely defined by their sound.

The Joker's - a raw, uncompromising, razor-sharp string note - raised the hairs on the back of your neck, even when he wasn't on-screen. It reminded you that he was a force of nature, that he was relentless, and that he could be around every corner. Elsewhere, Batman's bombastic, thundering drums plowed through a scene, drowning out any other noise unfortunate enough to get in its way.

Very rarely does music provide an accurate auditory representation of a character, and what's more, these two sounds are literally polar opposites - just as Batman and Joker are in the movie. It was a clever parallel, and it meant that story permeated every aspect of the film; even its score.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!