Great movie, but Nolan doesn’t seem to trust his audience to be smart enough to get the theme, so he has Batman standing around talking in the third act. Trim about twenty minutes out of the back end, and the thing’s a killer. Yes, Kevin, we get it: there is both good and evil in both of us. Maggie Gyllenhaal an enormous improvement over Mrs. Cruise, and I applaud Nolan’s dropping of nearly every fantastic element from the first film, literally de-camping the movie (well, except for the tumbler and, well, Batman himself). I was sitting there thinking, y’know, lose the costumes, and this is an actual movie. Maybe the first actual movie to have super-heroes in it. I missed the monorail and the overly dramatized Gotham from Begins, but if it gets us even farther away from “comic book”-isms, so be it.
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5 Comments
Y'know, everyone raved about this, and I finally saw it, but it hasn't changed my opinion that the first Batman movie is still the best. Nicholson is still THE Joker.
scrawled by Matt Adler | August 10, 2008 7:08 PM
Right before I Am Legend they had the opening five minutes or so of Dark Knight, the scene with the bank heist. If you cut out a few lines of dialouge and taking the mask off as he stood on the bus, you'd probably have never guessed what movie it was for.
While I'm all for the Iron Man style superhero film that embraces its comic book-ness, but at the same time I really appreciate what Nolan did here. There's certainly room for both approaches.
In fact I think if Marvel and Warners and whomever else wants to continue to make superhero films they certainly need to do all they can to make the genre as broad as possible. Sure a lot of them are going to be popcorn films, but at least some of them should make the audience think or otherwise the fad will fade and it'll be five or ten years before anything of note comes out.
scrawled by JasonD | August 11, 2008 2:54 PM
My only complaint - it was no fun to watch.
scrawled by greg zywicki | August 12, 2008 7:04 AM
WoW, I can't believe you thought the movie was too long.
My vote? PERFECT.
scrawled by Blaine | August 15, 2008 3:05 PM
Matt - I agree. I think Ledger's Joker was good, but there were parts where he was obviously doing a Nicholson homage. A generic sociopath number 8 he was brilliant, but it didn't seem to be The Joker.
Greg - This may be the first and last time we ever agree on anything. For a movie that had someone saying "why so serious" every 15 minutes, there wasn't an ounce of joy in this.
scrawled by G. Edwarde Jones | August 22, 2008 5:48 AM