The Dark Knight -- Opening Heist

A great intro scene, character intro and bank heist all in one.

This opening of The Dark Knight is simultaneously one of the greatest intro scenes, greatest character introductions and one of the greatest heist scenes ever filmed. Why? And more importantly, how?

In a word, expectations.

Right from the opening shot, this scene keeps the audience off-balance across multiple dimensions. You never know what is going to happen and the minute you think your expectation is correct, it is subverted. Nothing in this scene is allowed to resolve until the very end.

Taking the Curse off a Bank Robbery Scene

Before I get into the details, I’d like to take a moment to appreciate the challenge here. Consider how many times you’ve seen a bank robbery in film or tv? Is there any moment of a bank robbery scene that you haven't seen so many times you're bored with it?? There are two traditional strategies for counteracting this in overexposed scenes.

1. Make it shorter.

2. Focus on the characters and an interesting moment of dialog.

An example of the first one would be not have any dialog at all. We all know what a bank robbery means and what happens. So maybe we can just skip all of it?

Tyler Sheridan faced the bank robbery scene problem when he wrote Hell or High Water. It’s a story about two brothers who rob a series of banks.

Here’s a scene that takes the first strategy to the extreme. The robbery is in the background of another scene. In a 4:24 scene we get 15 seconds of actual bank robbery.

And in the same movie, there’s another robbery scene that uses the second strategy.

The same strategy is used by my favorite comedic bank robbery scene from Raising Arizona.

It starts with a tone

It starts with a tone and a low end rumble reminiscent of far off thunder.  

The opening shot, a helicopter shot pushing into a downtown is a shot you’ve seen a million times. It seems like a cliche of lazy filmmaking. What we have been trained to expect is a cut to that office building. But we don’t get that. The window explodes outward. We’ve just been put on notice.

Next, a guy fires the grappling gun, but we don’t see it land. Did it hold? What’s going on? No time. Off-balance, the camera pushes in on a figure standing on a corner, holding a clown mask and a duffle bag. But the bag has structure, so we can’t know what’s inside it.

A car stops to pick up him. Inside, we get a key piece of information.

CHUCKLES: Six shares. Don't forget the guy who planned the job.

GRUMPY: Yeah? He thinks he can sit it out and still take a slice then I get why they call him the Joker.

Okay, the Joker is the mastermind but he’s not on the robbery.

Inside the Bank

The curse is taken off the “this is a robbery moment” with speed and uncertainty. We have a lot of stuff coming at us. What are the guys on the roof doing? And who is the guy in the office who backs up calmly as the robbers take control? What’s he going to do?

All of this is spackled over with a dynamic camera movement that puts us in the action and the unexpected action of one of the clowns dragging a teller over the counter. In the real world this action is dumb and unlikely, but in the context of this movie, it’s interesting because we haven’t seen that physicality before. You can see the same thing in the second bank robbery scene from Hell or High Water where one of the robbers jumps on the counter. It wouldn’t make sense if we were actually robbing a bank, but it does create visual interest.

Jump back to the roof where the call is intercepted. Then a bit of the lobby where we see that one of the robbers has a bag full of grenades. What’s that about? Then back to the roof. First twist: the alarm didn’t dial out to 911. Immediately we get the second twist: As soon as the guy deals with the silent alarm call, he is murdered by his fellow robber.

It’s a kind of resolution. The action on the roof is complete, but this betrayal pushes us farther off balance. One guy is up to no good. How far does this betrayal go?

The scene speeds up here, the editor intercutting action so we never get a chance to settle. The bank manager comes out blasting with a shotgun and the guy drilling into the safe gets electrocuted.

We have fun and games for a while: a fantastic, “Where did you learn to count!” gag. And the “No, I kill the bus driver“ with a bus backing through the wall. Again this is a magical movie moment. There is no possible way that would work in real life, but for the logic of the story it’s perfect. And it sets up us the fantastic tag, “What happened to the rest of the guys?’

The Theme Stated

Then, as the last man standing is about to get away with it, the Bank Manager says,

Think you're smart, huh? Well, the guy who hired you's just do the same to you… Sure he will. Criminals in this town used to believe in things... Honor. Respect. What do you believe, huh?

"Criminals in this town used to believe in things," is a very important line. It states the theme of the entire movie. It’s the Joker’s chaos and nihilism against Batman trying to create/maintain order in Gotham. This ’statement of the theme’ generally comes in the first five minutes of every movie and it’s stated by a secondary character. Just like this.

The Joker slides a grenade into the Bank Manager’s mouth, and answers his question with, “I believe that what doesn't kill you, simply makes you stranger.” The line is a riff on Nietzsche’s famous “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The sound design and score are fantastic throughout this scene, but the change in the Joker’s voice is powerful.

Throughout theis entire opening, we have been trained to hear the robber’s voices as mostly treble. But the exact moment we realize that this robber is the Joker and that all this chaos has been his genius, dropping the bass back into the vocal track makes the word 'stranger' feel like a bomb going off.

And just to drive the chaotic point home, the grenade is a smoke grenade. Purple, the Joker’s signature color.

The Joker drives away, his school bus blending into a line of them. His masterplan and character introduction are complete in the same stroke. We know he is a terrifyingly unstable genius who lives to create chaos in the world. This, ladies and gentlemen, is your villain. And you *like* him. Sure, you’re eager for Batman to ultimately prevail in the end, but you’re all-in for whatever crazy, terrifying shit this Joker is going to do. You know it’s going to be great and you are going to enjoy this villain, enjoying himself as he does horrible things.