I’ve always been a Batman fan, though never a comic book geek to any great degree. (Read some Superman and Batman as a kid, but never got invested in the characters). I of course watched the campy TV show in the '60s, and enjoyed the Tim Burton/Michael Keaton movies, though I skipped the Val Kilmer and George Clooney incarnations. I liked “Batman Begins” quite a bit, despite my lack of familiarity with the canonical background of the asylum and the villan and so forth.
So I was really looking forward to “Dark Knight,” not just because of all the buzz about Heath Ledger. Unfortunately, I thought the movie was way too long and way too incoherent – much more pitched to the comic book geeks than to a general audience. The plot, such as it was, didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, and the gadgetry driving it also went over my head – forget whether the thing with the cell phone sonar could actually work or not, I didn’t understand what the premise was that I was supposed to be suspending disbelief on. (Cell phones, something something something, locate something something something…) It didn’t make sense when they used the single cell phone to zero in on the Chinese guy, and I had no idea how that huge bank of monitors was supposed to lead Morgan Freeman to be able to find one particular group of people – who were those people, anyway, and how did he know to look for them, because none of them was the Joker, right? – out of all that buzz of data. Fine, whatever, it’s not entirely about the plot.
Aside from a plot, what’s involved in a good summer movie? The visuals, of course – and the visuals were giving me a headache. The 360 pans around a group of people – gimmicky, took me out of the movie to “how did they do that?” which isn’t a question you want your audience thinking about while they’re still in the theater. And the herky-jerky camera work in some of the action scenes – damn, it was giving me motion sickness (not something I’m usually susceptible to), and left me thanking god it wasn’t an Imax theater. There was some cool stuff – I said “whoa” out loud more than once – but there was a lot of gimmickiness for the same of gimmickiness.
Which leaves us with Heath Ledger – in a truly awe-inspiring performance. I am actually glad I saw the movie just because of what he did with that character. (Yeah, the same actor as the one in “Brokeback Mountain.” What a loss his death was.) I said to my friend after, “It’s a shame – no one will ever to be able to play the Joker again.” And no one will.
I saw it this week too, but I didn’t want to revive the main thread as a zombie. There’s nothing left to be said about Heath Ledger; they should have called this “The Joker’s Movie” and it would have been more accurate. Bale was the weakest actor in the movie, and even he’s more than competent.
I enjoyed it, but it’s easy for me to suspend disbelief with movies. The Gadget Of The Hour works, fine, whatever. There were plenty of holes in the science behind the microwave emitter in Batman Begins, but that didn’t stop it from being a good movie.
It did get a little long toward the end. I expected it to end with a To Be Continued twice, and each time the movie wound up running for another 45-30 minutes. It was a perfect setup for Two-Face to have his own movie, and I thought squeezing in that extra half hour to wrap up that storyline was too much.
I did like that the choreography was clearer. Begins suffered from too much shaky-cam; in this one we could actually see Batman kicking ass.
It was an okay movie… it makes me want to see another feature-length Bruce Timm animated feature, but with this level of adult content. Gotham Knight was also okay, but the pseudo-Japanimation style (i.e. lazily-rendered lip movements) got on my nerves.
I’m just tired of the superintelligent sociopath trope - the crazy guy who creates these incredibly intricate plans 15 steps in advance and the good guys always behave in the perfectly predicted ways to trap themselves. How did Joker rig two ferries with massive amounts of explosive? How did he know one would be filled with innocents and the other with criminals? I mean, c’mon, you’re really straining plausibility, here.
Arguably the Joker’s always been a superintelligent sociopath, just portrayed in a different way here. I did find it kind of odd that his ability to rig this stuff bordered on magical, but you can fanwank it pretty easily to say that he knew how the human mind worked and could manipulate people into doing exactly what he wanted.
I don’t think he knew that there would be prisoners on one ferry and civilians on the other. The ‘social experiment’ would have worked just as well had it been two ferries of civilians. The exact situation just happened to work out to be more interesting.
Yeah, I’m not going to see this again. It’s worth seeing once, but it’s not good enough to justify sitting through the bleak and depressing plot again.
It would have worked better, in fact. He really needed two boats full of innocent people to make his point that even decent, ordinary folk can do something terrible in the right circumstance. What he got instead was a situation where either a bunch of hardened criminals kill a bunch of innocent people, which doesn’t prove much of anything, or a bunch of innocent people kill a bunch of criminals, which, while still terrible, is easier to justify than if the other boat had been full of women and children.
Laudenum - I’m not joking at all. I found Hancock an amusing diversion. I found The Dark Knight depressing and bleak, and Heath Ledger’s toad-like tongue flicking was very distracting. Maybe it’s like enjoying Harry Potter versus Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Keep in mind that five of the six stories were completely made by Japanese animators. The sixth is made by a Korean, IIRC. It’s not pseudo-Japanese animation, it is Japanese animation.
I think the idea was that he was on drugs all the time, which makes a lot of sense for one of the world’s worst criminals. Cottonmouth, dry lips, hyperactive mouth and jaw, etc.–plus it’s just fucking creepy, which was probably the main point. I think I’m going to see it again just for Heath Ledger’s performance. It’s quite possibly the most unabashedly genius film portrayal of any character ever, and probably one of the most individual portrayals of a comic book villain in film.
Really? I thought he was just overly preoccupied with his scars, and the tongue-flicking was the equivalent of teasing a loose or broken tooth; you shouldn’t fiddle with it, but you just can’t help feeling at it.
I have to disagree (albeit agreeably) with the OP regarding the statement “No one will ever be able to play the Joker again.” I understand the sentiment, and it is a great performance, but please. They said the same thing about Elmo Lincoln and Tarzan, then six actors later Johnnny Weissmuller came along and pwned (first time I’ve ever used that word in my life) the role.
William Gillette was the ultimate Sherlock Holmes – Rathbone busted his ass back to Private. Later, Jeremy Brett put 'em all to shame.
George Reeves was Superman! Period, end of sentence, end of discussion. Then Chris Reeve was. Maybe someday they’ll make a new Superman film (:D).
There are many more examples, I’m sure.
So, assuming films continue cyclically, somewhere twenty or thirty years down the line an actor probably not born yet will become the ultimate Joker in that era’s consciousness, and on a super-duper holgraphic interface version of the SDMB someone will predict the same thing.
Or he’d been on drugs and was now off them. I don’t know if it was intentional, but Ledger’s oral tics somewhat resemble tardive dyskinesia, a side effect of long-term use of antipsychotics, even persisting after drug therapy stops.
I loved the beginning of Hancock. The ending felt way flat, but the beginning was genius. I guess I’d rather see Hancock again than the Dark Knight, too. I agree with the OP that the Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker was worth seeing, but Gotham is just such a dark and depressing place that I can’t see why anyone would want to go there, even in a movie.
Outraged? That a series of short animated stories made to wring some more money out of the Batman hypefest was made in a popular style? What did you expect them to do, make it look like Bambi? I know some of the animation xenophobes around here like that, but it doesn’t sell anymore.
Makes sense to me. Maybe the whole idea is that we’re not supposed to know what causes it, and it’s another part of a whole spectrum of creepiness that the guy can’t help but project around.
The funny thing is that I thought they did a terrible job presenting Gotham as a dark and depressing place. Certainly the fate of the major characters was dark and depressing, but Gotham looked nice when the Joker wasn’t around.
We kept being told Gotham was a cesspit, but its appearance was that of a modern city with wealthy-looking people walking around. The Joker was making life hell for the cops and mucky-mucks but it appeared as if things were fine just before he’d arrived and would be fine once he was gone.
I’ll actually have to see “The Dark Knight” again to decide how I feel about it. Much of it was brilliant, but it had significant weaknesses.
The person I went with had seen it already, but wanted to see it again because he saw the Imax version the first time. We saw the “regular” version, as stated in the OP.
That’s just what bugs me so much about it, I think–it looks like a normal city, and even a fairly prosperous city, but we keep getting beaten over the head about how horrible it is over and over and over.
Homer [at the mailbox]: Woo-hoo! A perfect day. Zero bears and one big fat hairy paycheck. [opens the envelope] Hey! How come my pay is so low? … “Bear patrol tax!” This is an outrage! It’s the biggest tax increase in history!
Lisa: Actually, Dad, it’s the smallest tax increase in history.
Homer: Let the bears pay the bear tax. I pay the Homer tax.
Lisa: That’s home-owner tax.
Homer: Well, anyway, I’m still outraged.
I just don’t like Japanese animation. I greatly prefer what Bruce Timm was doing before.
Did they ever actually include the scene fromthis movie poster? I attended the movie, but around 2 1/2 hours in my bladder hit critical mass and so I missed a few minutes.
I’m certainly not complaining about getting more movie for my money, but if Hollywood continues with the 3-plus-hour summer blockbusters, they might also want to consider reviving the concept of intermission. Although I suppose that with modern movie audiences, the logistics of such a procedure would probably necessitate cattle prods; so maybe I just need to learn to avoid the larger-magnitude snack bar sodas.
