The Dark Knight - Opening Scene Analysis

The opening scene of The Dark Knight goes straight into action and shows a skyscraper window being smashed by two characters wearing clown masks covering their faces. This immediately creates an enigma and captures the audiences full attention, making them want to find out what the need for the masks are, and why they just smashed a skyscraper window.

In the next shot we see a man with his back facing the camera carrying a holdall over his shoulder, and carrying the same clown mask seen earlier. His pose looks very threatening as he stands still in a busy junction, while the camera pans and zooms in on clown mask being carried.

Suddenly, the background music begins to speed up and the character walks up to a vehicle passing him while placing on his mask. Just as the character enters the vehicle we go back the skyscraper shot, and now see the two characters glide across a zip wire, over a busy road, and onto the roof of a building.

Just from these shots so far, it is obvious that the genre for this film would be action. This can be inferred by the many genre indicators already seen. For example, the fast background music, the variation of long and close up shots, and also by the things that the characters are doing, for example, breaking through a window.

The next shot we now move to shows the van which we earlier saw one of the characters enter. Inside of the van the characters are discussing how many shares each person will get. This answers the first enigma, as it indicates to the viewer that the reason they may be wearing the masks is they are about to break into somewhere, this can be inferred from the characters discussing their shares. Another enigma is immediately created as to what they will be breaking in to, and what they will be sharing between each other.

The viewer isn't left in the dark for long however, as we now see the characters from the van entering a bank and threatening the staff and customers, which now makes it obvious that the characters were discussing what share they would each get from money they are about to steal.

We next see two of the characters on the roof of the bank disabling the banks alarm system. One of the men says "That's funny it didn't dial out to 911, it was trying to reach a private number.", the other man asks if that's a problem to which the response is "No". The man who asked if it was a problem then immediately shoots his accomplice, this shows that he cared more about what was in the robbery for him, than the other characters and was even willing to use his accomplice for his skill, and then kill him to make sure that he wouldn't be able to take a cut of the profits.

We can also tell from the opening that the characters are not new to crime, as even when faced with one of the bank's employees with a shot gun, they still retaliate and don't forget why they're there.

Overall I feel that this is a very effective opening scene as it is full of action and enigmas. This helps to keep the viewer interested in the film and not lose interest due to a boring plot. There are also elements of humour in the scene, for example, one of the gunmen says to a teller at the bank "Let's go pal, I'm making a withdrawal here." as he drags him over the counter. Including small jokes like this in the opening scene has helped to make it a very strong scene which completely entices and immerses the viewer into the rest of the film.