This month marks the tenth anniversary of one of the best films of the 21st Century, and easily the best Batman film ever made, The Dark Knight. It's hard to believe ten years have passed since that summer, when blockbusters, superhero films and action cinema were all changed forever with the lightning-in-a-bottle combination of a killer screenplay by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, the former's assured direction, and a top team of professionals both in front of (Christian Bale, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Aaron Eckhart, Heath Ledger) and behind the camera (legendary cinematographer Wally Pfister, longtime Nolan editor Lee Smith, composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton-Howard).

Dark Knight set out to cement Nolan's unique vision of Batman, and upend notions of what a superhero movie could be. We know it succeeded on both counts, because we're still talking about it ten years later, even though it came out two months after Iron Man birthed the Marvel Cinematic Universe and kickstarted the modern, culture-enveloping wave of superhero movies that Batman Begins birthed three years prior, and even though some of the film's most ardent fans proved themselves the forerunners of Gamergate and the alt-right with their harassment and death threats towards critics ambivalent towards The Dark Knight Rises four years later.

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But why The Dark Knight? Why did this film set such a high watermark that no DC Comics film (except for Wonder Woman) has ever been able to live up to?

Dark Knight sad Batman

To answer that, let's talk about the 1978 Superman for a second. Now, that movie didn't arrive in a vacuum; Superman was already a longstanding cultural icon by then, after all. But the movie's genius (and it is a form of genius) is that it synthesizes not only just about every archetype of Superman, it also synthesizes decades of popular cinema in service of said archetypes (the Silent Running-ish Krypton stuff, the Bringing Up Baby banter of Clark and Lois, etc.).

Similarly, The Dark Knight arrived in a world where everyone already knew and loved Batman. Its own predecessor had succeeded by marrying Nolan's personal aesthetics to a screenplay that's probably the most note-for-note adaptation of a comic to the screen outside of the pilot for The Walking Dead (seriously, go back and reread Batman: Year One then go back to Batman Begins; the similarities astound). But rather than absorb all kinds of movie genres, Nolan and co. doubled down on just one: the crime movie.

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As an example, the opening bank heist scene brings to mind movies like Inside Man and Heat. (If you're a gamer, you might also note that this essentially served as reference for a lot of the stuff in Payday 2.) Like those, the opening to Dark Knight is tense, filled with swerves, and just goes nonstop on action as a way of defining character. It's all brisk, well-paced stuff. And that's before we get to the Joker's iconic reveal.

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With that, let's talk about the real reason many still talk about this movie: the Joker. Heath Ledger's Oscar-winning performance and the characterization the Nolans came up with, taking the surreal creepiness of the Joker's two very first appearances and updating them for the modern day, is the standard by which all movie villains (supervillains in particular, but movie villains as a whole) are now judged. The MCU's Loki, Thanos and Killmonger are the only ones that even come close to it. Even then, Loki eventually journeyed to anti-hero, Thanos' full character scope hasn't really been seen yet, and Killmonger's motivations are largely born out of such righteous fury, a big chunk of analyzing Black Panther boiled down to asking "Was Killmonger right?" On the other hand, Joker's complete amorality and indifference to everything except destruction for its own sake ("I'm an agent of chaos;" "See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve.") all delivered with Ledger's intense, bizarre, inhuman performance, is still utterly mesmerizing.

As for the DCEU (whose future seemed kaput after Justice League's failure, but is poised to be reinvented as the Worlds of DC by Aquaman and Shazam), well, here's the thing. You know how many of the decisions that came to define the Iron/Dark Age of comics -- Superman's death, Batman's crippling, Green Lantern turning into a mass murderer -- were born out of creators and publishers fundamentally misunderstanding the points at the heart of both Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, and focusing on the surface-level aspects of superheroes being mean and aloof? The Dark Knight is that, but for movies.

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When Christopher Nolan was brought aboard to shepherd a new cinematic Superman into existence--an effort that'd result in 2013's handsome-looking but morose, dour and character-failing Man of Steel--it was with the implicit understanding on Warner Brothers' part that he'd bring that same gravitas and somberness of his Dark Knight Trilogy to Superman, and hopefully bring the acclaim and Oscars along with it.

Never mind that such an approach is completely at odds with the superhero. A character who, as Grant Morrison wrote in his book Supergods and demonstrated in All-Star Superman, humanity created in its darkest night as a champion who would never let us down. The final product--delivered with the same  drab colors, rapturous thrall towards violence, and brooding men that characterizes Zack Snyder's entire filmography--is not only a near-total misunderstanding of Superman but shows what happens when you try to take aesthetics and tone that only work for Batman and try to wield it onto characters that aren't him.

RELATED: Christopher Nolan Recalls Heath Ledger’s ‘Terrifying’ Joker

Now, I love Wonder Woman and enjoy Justice League quite a bit, but that's because those movies work best to what make these characters themselves, not hearken back to a seminal take on one superhero as envisioned by one particular superhero. In the end, The Dark Knight is still a charge to  watch--I'll never forget being in the theatre on opening weekend when the reveal of Gordon's survival caused mass applause.

But perhaps the one thing Knight can't overcome is its own large shadow.