When I was lying in bed thinking about this article last night, I really couldn’t believe what I was saying. Home at 1 a.m. after a showing of The Dark Knight, I was frankly moved. Not by the tremendous action, not by Heath Ledger’s brilliant performance, but by “it.”

That “it” in this movie is indescribable. The best way I can attempt to articulate my thoughts are as such. This film added emotion to a cut-and-dry series. It added realism to a fantasy, comic book-like set of films. It added evil that to the best of my recollection has been unparalleled in film.

Now I am not one of these schmoes that thinks every new movie is pure gold. I hated 300, thought Napoleon Dynamite was a B-movie as it was meant to be, and thought that Failure to Launch, which I was dragged along to on a lazy summer day two years ago, was quite possibly the biggest pile of manure the silver screen has ever taken a woft of.

I am not even a Batman fan. He ranks number three on my list behind Superman at one, for obvious reasons, and Aquaman at two because I can’t help but pity him for a complete lack of power.

But this movie changed all that. Every other superhero movie you have seen has the basic hero’s journey path, they struggle at first, then fight a little bit but still can’t take the cake until eventually they do. Look at Spider-man from three years ago: he first gets his powers and can only defeat the commoners in cage wrestling matches, until he hones his craft and eventually takes down the Green Goblin. It is all the same.

The Dark Knight has some similarities, but very few would put this in the same basic genre of the superhero series.

But the true thing that pushed this movie over the edge was the directing, and the acting. Though Christian Bale, who plays Bruce Wayne/Batman, was average, he wasn’t the star of this movie. There were two: Heath Ledger in the role of the Joker and Aaron Eckhart who played Harvey Dent/Two-Face.

Let’s start with the less-stated praise of Eckhart, who took his character to life and became the star of the good guy show. He was exactly who he needed to be (and who Dent was in the comics), and though the writers took some liberty in the way he became Two-Face, Eckhart surely did not. If not up against Ledger, Eckhart should win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar this year. I hate the Oscars.

Ledger pushed it over the edge. His character embodied the evil that the other movies had missed. Sure Mr. Freeze wanted to ice Gotham, but he wasn’t killing innocent civilians for the fun of it. The best part of his character was the aura he presented. The Joker is insane, and we would be as well if Ledger wasn’t commended for his work.

This movie is just so much different than anything else I have ever seen. A good different, certainly. And here is the kicker:

This movie should end the Batman series. It would be like going out with a World Series ring after hitting a walk-off homerun in the bottom of the ninth, game seven. This movie was just so good; it raised the playing field for superhero movies.

Nobody, myself included, wants this series to end, but if it did it would definitely make it a candidate for AMC’s Top 100 Movies of All Time. Every second of the movie is compelling and the directors left no plot flaws. Oh, and then there was Ledger, who obviously won’t be able to participate in another film.

If Batman goes out on this, it would be a great decision for the franchise. Don’t pull at Brett Favre, coming back again and again just to do the bare average. The character should come back in 20 years iwth a new director, as the new generation needs a new Batman. But, there is a minuscule chance another Batman movie would ever top this, and I don’t see why the creators would even try (except for the financial benefits, of course).