Set within a year after the events of Batman Begins (2005), Batman, Lieutenant James Gordon, and new District Attorney Harvey Dent successfully begin to round up the criminals that plague Gotham City, until a mysterious and sadistic criminal mastermind known only as 'The Joker' appears in Gotham, creating a new wave of chaos. Batman's struggle against The Joker becomes deeply personal, forcing him to 'confront everything he believes' and improve his technology to stop him. A love triangle develops between Bruce Wayne, Dent, and Rachel Dawes.
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The Joker's 'now you see it, now you don't' pencil gag looks like an obvious CGI trick, but it wasn't one. Visual effects supervisor Nick Davis said the team avoided building a digital pencil because the film was shot in IMAX, and a CG element would never blend seamlessly into an image that huge and detailed.
The pencil disappearing trick was actually filmed twice: once with the pencil standing up in the table, and once with the stuntman slamming his head onto the exact same spot with nothing there at all. The two shots were then cut together in the edit to create the illusion.
Stuntman Charles Jarman took a real beating filming the pencil scene, getting genuinely knocked unconscious three separate times across roughly 22 takes over two days. In one of the takes Heath Ledger actually broke character mid-scene to check if Jarman was okay before slipping straight back into the Joker.
According to Jarman, Ledger would leave the room between takes on the pencil scene and only ever return to set already back in character as the Joker, never breaking it in front of the crew except that one moment he checked on his stunt partner.
Heath Ledger's sister Kate has said her brother had plans to return as the Joker in another Batman film before his death in January 2008. Nolan chose not to recast the role out of respect, which is part of why the Joker is never mentioned by name in Rises.
There's a neat pattern running through all three films: the main villain hides in plain sight disguised as one of their own minions at some point, Ra's al Ghul in Batman Begins, the Joker in The Dark Knight, and Bane in Rises. Easy to miss unless you're watching for it.
That final scene where Gordon hands Batman the Joker's calling card wasn't just a sequel tease. It's a direct homage to how Frank Miller's Batman: Year One graphic novel closes out, right down to the framing of the moment.
