Christian Bale returns as Batman, above, riding his Batpod to the rescue of Gotham City, which has fallen into the clutches of The Joker in The Dark Knight.

Warner Bros.

Following the rousing international success of director Christopher Nolan’s new, darker take on the Batman legend three years ago in Batman Begins, he’s back with much of the holdover cast from the first film for the slightly less somber The Dark Knight.

This Batman film is more akin to the comic book stories that spawned the series in the first place, but with the late Heath Ledger making a bravura grandstand performance as The Joker that will make you forget such previous incarnations of the character as Cesar Romero in the TV series and Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. Early magazine writers have already suggested a posthumous Oscar nomination for Ledger, whose performance is by turns creepy, criminally insane and coquettishly fey, but always memorable with his mouth curled up in a perpetual smile. Once you see Ledger’s flamboyantly eerie Joker, you most likely will second the nomination call.

Certainly Ledger, whose Joker shocks us early on with his trick of how to make a pencil disappear, has taken the spotlight off Christian Bale. Bale has the film’s title role again as multi-millionaire playboy and industrialist Bruce Wayne, who dons the black cape to mete out vigilante justice. Bale is a much more internal actor than Ledger, who captivates with his wise-guy comic’s delivery — “I just DO things,” he says coyly. As written, Bale’s Bruce instead mirrors the moody darkness of The Dark Knight.

The main characters from Batman Begins are back again, too. But Michael Caine has surprisingly little to do this time as faithful butler Alfred, although Gary Oldman has lots more to do as Police Lt. Jim Gordon, who depends on Batman to save the day when the criminal elements have become too brazen. Morgan Freeman returns as Batman’s right-hand man and gadgetmeister Lucius Fox, and in typical Freeman fashion knows more about the intricacies of love and crime than anyone else. However, Katie Holmes has cruised on to other interests and has been replaced as Batman’s girlfriend, Rachel Dawes, by Maggie Gyllenhaal.

But what’s this? Rachel is now seen around town on the arm of dashing new crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), something that clearly troubles Bruce. It’s established that while Rachel still loves Bruce and vice-versa, she couldn’t find room in her love life to accommodate Batman’s frequent nighttime sallies against evildoers trying to take over Gotham City (this time played by Chicago). The handsome, straight-arrow Harvey seems to fill the bill. But, in one of the film’s few comic turns, Bruce gets his revenge by arriving at social functions he knows Rachel and Harvey will attend on the arm of some — or even two — lovely woman in hopes of making Rachel jealous.

Besides the usual Mob influence in the corrupt doings of Gotham City comes The Joker. Cleverly, insistently, he bullies his way into working for the mobsters, while also plotting his own control of Gotham through his own terror brigade. Curiously, The Joker manages to pick up an ever-changing gang of faithful followers of his own, even though, like Al-Qaida leaders who manage to recruit an unending string of suicide bombers, one wonders why anyone would follow The Joker, as he usually winds up dead … and at The Joker’s own hand. That’s driven home in the smashingly thrilling, violence-filled opening sequence in which The Joker leads a gang of clown-masked robbers in a major heist of a Mob-owned bank.

And yet, unlike the mobsters he both works for and increasingly controls, money isn’t the most important thing in The Joker’s life. It marks the major difference between The Dark Knight and other comics-based action films of the summer.

Yes, The Dark Knight has terrific special effects, such as when Batman makes an amazing escape from a Hong Kong high-rise or smashes through a line of cars in the new armor-plated Batmobile. It has larger-than-life villains, just like Iron Man, Hellboy II and Indiana Jones.

But it also has conflicted characters, such as the attraction-dismissal that’s going on between Bruce and Rachel, as well as an overwhelming sense of the struggle between good and evil going on in every human. That’s really what the whole second half of The Dark Knight revolves around, as one major character, torn by grief and anger, does a 180-degree swing; another character makes a split-second life-altering decision; many characters are tested on their sense of human compassion — the choice of whether to save themselves by killing innocent people.

The ultimate goal of The Joker, who tells a different story about the scars that have left his face in a perpetual grin, is to demonstrate man’s inhumanity to man. He bets his twisted schemes will find resonance with others. Or as Harvey says with such foresight near the start of the film, “You either die a hero or live long enough to be the villain.”

It’s a grandiose, complex question that most big-scale action films boil down to a simple equation of good versus evil. Here, it’s not always clear who the good guy is or if the “good guy” will remain good to the end. Nolan, and co-writer brother Jonathan Nolan, use their large canvas to ask subtle, delicate questions of self-sacrifice, giving the audience something to ponder afterward beyond the usual exploding scenery.

****The Dark Knight

Starring: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman.

Rated: PG-13, contains intense violence.

mjanuson@projo.com