The Dark Knight (SPOILERS start page 5)

Yes, it's already a t-shirt, and yes I will be placing my order momentarily...

This film was fricken awesome. I've never liked any of HL's films and was completely blown away by his Joker. The movie world and the batman franchise is all the poorer for his death. This film managed to make the Joker both sadistic and hilarious- a rare feat for any movie villian. Two face looked brilliant and all performances were above and beyond my expectations.

My only regret is that we'll likely not see the Joker for a long, long time and not to the same standard as HL managed.

My bet is, with Ra's, Joker, Two Face and Scarecrow gone, the next villian will be the Riddler. He's the last really major villian that I think would fit Nolan's realistic franchise. It'd be a good finished to the trilogy and allow Nolan a graceful exit from the franchise (though I'd love it if he kept making the damn things. .

Saw it today, and even though I liked it and thought it was awesome I can't understand why is treated like if were the Citizen Kane of our generation, kinda overrated in my opinion

"please don't kill nor show me a magic trick!"


It seemed everyone in my screening except me and the gals next to me brought their kids (I saw this girl that I think it was 4 and was laughing with Joker's jokes) nobody laughed or anything, but there were some chuckles.

I saw in Spanish, so I think I need to see it in English to actually appreaciate for Ledger's acting (he was voiced by the same guy who does the voice of the Human Torch in the Fantastic 4 and James in Pokemón)

I feel like if I were retarded, austistic or just plain idiot for not seeing the greatness everyone is talking about. Where is it? Yeah, it's better than your average superhero movie but I just can't see why is on number 1 at the IMDb top list

Like I said somewhere above, fanboy favs tend to get a real bump on the IMDB list before settling to a rank that better fits people's settled feelings about it after a few weeks or so. Everyone's high on DK right now 'cause superhero films hardly ever get this good.

In terms of taste, to each his own -- no need to feel negative for feeling a certain way about a film. I thought Iron Man was a so-so film with one great performance, not nearly as great as everyone thinks it is, and I never got all the love for 'Batman Returns' (Burton's second Batman film). Different strokes.

childeroland said:

Like I said somewhere above, fanboy favs tend to get a real bump on the IMDB list before settling to a rank that better fits people's settled feelings about it after a few weeks or so. Everyone's high on DK right now 'cause superhero films hardly ever get this good.

In terms of taste, to each his own -- no need to feel negative for feeling a certain way about a film. I thought Iron Man was a so-so film with one great performance, not nearly as great as everyone thinks it is, and I never got all the love for 'Batman Returns' (Burton's second Batman film). Different strokes.

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I have noticed this trend, too, with films like 300. But have you seen how many ratings have been counted on Dark Knight? Over a hundred thousand. That's a LOT, and I think it's unlikely this one will dip much below where it is now (9.5 according to its page, 9.4 according to the Top 250 list).

Jcomp said:

Yes, it's already a t-shirt, and yes I will be placing my order momentarily...

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I've got to gets me one of them!

Danger Jane said:

I have noticed this trend, too, with films like 300. But have you seen how many ratings have been counted on Dark Knight? Over a hundred thousand. That's a LOT, and I think it's unlikely this one will dip much below where it is now (9.5 according to its page, 9.4 according to the Top 250 list).

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Yes. Dark Knight's in a different world it seems. I too don't believe it's the greatest film in history (and I loved it) but IMDB isn't really a good barometer for what's "best" anyway. Popularity doesn't necessarily equal greatness.

That said, I think the fervor for this movie stems partially from the fact that it was a fanboy movie that delivered in a way that's really, really hard for fanboy movies to do. Because fanboys (I'm a bit of one, admittedly) are just as prone to being overly critical as overenthusiastic. The worst of us can deconstruct every little thing we find wrong about a movie and convince ourselves that it's completely lousy because of it. Look at the Star Wars prequels. Huge fanbase that was, by and large, ultimately let down to the point of people badmouthing and denigrating the guy responsible for their fandom in first place--George Lucas.

With this movie, you have a ton of people going in wanting something amazing but ready and more than willing to call it junk if it gets certain things "wrong" that are precious to them. Instead, TDK paid off. Nerdy passions are at long last rewarded. And so it reigns now as the darling d'jour.

Ageless Stranger said:

This film was fricken awesome. I've never liked any of HL's films and was completely blown away by his Joker. The movie world and the batman franchise is all the poorer for his death. This film managed to make the Joker both sadistic and hilarious- a rare feat for any movie villian. Two face looked brilliant and all performances were above and beyond my expectations.

My only regret is that we'll likely not see the Joker for a long, long time and not to the same standard as HL managed.

My bet is, with Ra's, Joker, Two Face and Scarecrow gone, the next villian will be the Riddler. He's the last really major villian that I think would fit Nolan's realistic franchise. It'd be a good finished to the trilogy and allow Nolan a graceful exit from the franchise (though I'd love it if he kept making the damn things. .

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1. I wasn't crazy about Two Face's "look". It didn't look realistic enough to me. Honestly, Batman Forever's two-face actually LOOKED more realistic to me than this one. Other than that, though, the performance was brilliant.

2. Everybody thinks the Riddler will be in the next movie. I'm not so sure about that. I'm thinking that if Nolan does another one, we'll get a villain who hasn't made it to the screen yet.

IMDB rating is not a good way to judge the film's "goodness." I mean how can this be better than some of Holywood's BEST of the BEST movies? This is how it works: fanboys flood the site from the getgo and tell their friends to do the same. When you see 100,000+ votes when the movie has just opened, and you know not everyone who's seen the film logs on IMDB and votes for it, you know some vote rigging is happening here.

I remember during Oscar time the fanboys would be logging on to "competitor films" (No Country For Old Man vs. There Will Be Blood vs. Atonement) and trash the films, giving them like 1s and 2s. It happened a lot more than we think, because it's easy to do. It was especially ugly between TWBB and NCfOM because they appealed to a similar demographic.

It's not to say TDK is not awesome. It's awesomeness magnifico. But it's not the greatest film in movie history, not by a long shot IMHO.

James81 said:

Everybody thinks the Riddler will be in the next movie. I'm not so sure about that. I'm thinking that if Nolan does another one, we'll get a villain who hasn't made it to the screen yet.

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I hope so. I like the less-than cartoony portrayal of the villains so far. But to be honest, I don't know enough of Batman comic lore except from what was in previous movies and the Adam West TV incarnation. I owned one Two-face comic when I was a kid, but that was it.

Is Egghead next?

To be honest I want to see The Ventriloquist or The Mad Hatter on the big screen. I mean, yes, he is a nerdy guy with a dummy Al Capone but he could fit well into Nolan's vision and is also Mafia-related (the Ventriloquist's father was a mob boss who was murdered along with his family while the Ventriloquist saw it all)

My dad is a friend of Seymour Philip Hoffman and he told me that some people approched to him about being The Pinguin in the next one...

That was rumored years ago (about Hoffman being the Penguin).

While Hoffman would rock all kinds of shit as the Penguin, I don't think it'll happen.

I am also critical of imdb as a barometer for quality, but Jcomp kind of touched on why I still think it's a useful tool: you can judge how worthy the rating is by what kind of film it is. TDK is no doubt a fanboy film, and an extremely well done one. Of course, non-fanboys are also gushing about it, too (at least in my tiny corner of the world).

A movie like Atonement is, in my mind, too brilliant for everyone to like. So when I see that it gets only a 7.9/10, mentally I see a 5 star movie. TDK is quite intelligent and at times, subtle, too, but it has enough tightly-edited fight scenes and raw suspense to keep a short attention span glued to the screen. The deep, aching tension of Atonement wouldn't keep most 13-year-olds interested, from what I can tell, but many of the sources of conflict in Dark Knight would (and are).

Or horror movies. Normally, a rating in the 6.0 range makes me wary (unless in some cases, like small-release indie films with limited viewership). But a 6.0 horror movie might be very good at what it is. Hell, some of the movies my ex told me were classic horror movies only got around 5.5. (Forget what they were )

Granted, I tend to categorize things subconsciously and synesthetically and I'm not sure to what degree this is normal, but it's fairly easy for me to adjust the imdb rating for inflation.

James81 said:

1. I wasn't crazy about Two Face's "look". It didn't look realistic enough to me. Honestly, Batman Forever's two-face actually LOOKED more realistic to me than this one. Other than that, though, the performance was brilliant.

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Do you mean in terms of CG or that it just didn't look real, in the sense that with that kind of wound he'd quickly die?

I will admit he looked a little fake but I liked the look, it was so damaged, so wrecked that you had a feeling this guy wasn't going to make it out of the movie alive.

Yeah, I really liked TF's look too. I think it was a good analogue of the damage in his mind.

ChunkyC said:

Yeah, I really liked TF's look too. I think it was a good analogue of the damage in his mind.

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I was actually pretty impressed with how it matched up perfectly with the other half of his face as far as depth etc., and the way the mouth worked. Tommy Lee Jones was wearing a big ol' piece of rubber on his face that looked like it had been put in a deep fryer at the local Mc Donalds

I was actually pretty impressed with how it matched up perfectly with the other half of his face as far as depth etc., and the way the mouth worked. Tommy Lee Jones was wearing a big ol' piece of rubber on his face that looked like it had been put in a deep fryer at the local Mc Donalds

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That's what I was going to say. Not the fryer part, but but the fact that it looked like a realistic meld between the two sides of his face. I've seen so many other depictions that is basically a straight line divide, the other half just being a completely different color, etc. This was, even CGI'd, a pretty fair depiction of what would happen to someone. It's also helpful the went with the more gruesome than bizarre angle.

Can you belive I had a projector failure in BRAVEHEART (when he's being tortured at the end - I MISSED him shouting "FREEDOM") and in the TITANIC - Just as the iceberg collided?!!! Damn, I hate that.

The CGI on TF was really good, but I was immediately distracted by the fact that the lips DID NOT work correctly, he was able to say his consonants perfectly "P"s and "M" and the lips didn't touch - I dunno why but I noticed it immediately.

I loved the rolling eyeball though. I also liked the fact that the suit was simply burned on one side - not some sort of parti-colored get up.

{{SPOILER POST}}


Okay...

Uh...wow.

Oh wow.

Amazing wow.

This movie actually made me wonder if, at the end, Two Face was going to pull the trigger and splatter Gordon's son. The fact that for one moment, for one horrible, tense moment, I did NOT know which way the fight was going to go, is a sign of how well done this movie is.

Because, at the back of my mind, I knew it was a Superhero movie and, in the end, Superheros save the day...ususally.

I'll have more coherent thoughts later.



And I need to get that tee-shirt.

WriteKnight said:

The CGI on TF was really good, but I was immediately distracted by the fact that the lips DID NOT work correctly, he was able to say his consonants perfectly "P"s and "M" and the lips didn't touch - I dunno why but I noticed it immediately.

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In retrospect, I can see that he shouldn't have been able to pronounce his words so coherently with that much damage to his mouth, but it is a movie after all and it was important that his dialogue be understood by the audience, so I totally suspended my disbelief for that particular quibble. In truth, I was so engrossed that he could have been speaking through his left ear and I wouldn't have thought it odd.

I'll be honest, I consider it blasphemous that TDK is ahead of The Godfather in IMDB rankings, but my reaction is the natural human response to such an extreme event. In time, people will come to accept the fact that it is indeed possible (though staggeringly unlikely) to outdo one of the greatest artistic accomplishments in the history of motion picture media.

Now, for my views on the film. I'll try to make my review as....unique as I can to hold your interest, and break things up with bold text so one can browse to the section that they'd rather read.

...Eh, I'm overreacting here. This is perhaps the only forum on the entire internet where one won't be bombarded with "tl;dr" messages for typing something over 100 words, which has happened to me every single time I've tried to talk about this movie. Without further ado -

My Opinion of the Film:

For someone who is admittedly not a film connoisseur, this was one of the greatest movies I've ever seen and it holds the distinction of being the only film that I've ever bothered to watch more than once in a theater. It absolutely blows away Batman Begins which was an excellent film in it's own right, but had a tendency to drag in scenes and was rather imbalanced in pacing. Even so, the scene when Batman summons the bats to Arkham is one of my highest-rated bad ass movies moments ever.

TDK absolutely, completely, utterly mastered the feeling of suspense in almost every scene, whether it was the Joker holding a knife to one's mouth or the people stressing over the detonators on the boats. In fact, almost every scene in this film was linked by a dramatic moment of some sort. It's my uneducated opinion that the anticipation of what happens next is by far the best way to carry the audience through the story, and this film had a mastery of that concept that few other motion pictures I've seen have captured.

Observed Criticism That is Worth Mentioning:

The action scenes were poorly shot

Christopher Nolan is not an experienced action director and the action scenes featured frantic camera movement at times, but does anyone have any experience with highly physical situations like that? Participating in sports or even a fight is not like watching it on TV; your eyes are going to be all over the place just like the rest of your body, and exactly like the cinematography in TDK during scenes of hand-to-hand violence. If this is what Nolan was going after during filming, he nailed it perfectly IMO.

There was not enough character development Harvey Dent's transformation into Two-Face

Consider Dent's situation; He brought over 500 criminals into custody and the entirety of Gotham's "powers that be" were breathing down his neck, desperate to find dirt on him that could throw his character into question and set all those convicts free. Compound that with the fact that the girl he loves is reluctant to marry him and a prime target for the Joker. When he sees one of the Joker's henchmen in her uniform, he understandably loses his political correctness and leaves the man's life to a flip of a coin. When he and Rachel Dawes are about to be blown away, it's all up to chance who is rescued. He tells her that she will be rescued instead of him. Instead, right after she says she wants to marry him, she gets blown away. He gets rescued and in the process is subjected to amazing amounts of emotional and physical pain.

Now, honestly, truthfully tell me; does all of that really require additional lines in a film script for someone to understand how a politician (of all people) can be corrupted into becoming a man like Two-Face?

Two-Face's origins were explained with just enough subtlety to prevent dominance over the main plot (and less time for Heath Ledger's outstanding acting abilities). In a movie script as complicated and intelligent as this one, some things just have to be implied. Films lack literature's ability to divulge every last detail to the audience, which IMO is the primary reason why books are always better than the movie.

Heath Ledger was amazing. Christian Bale was good. Michael Cain was charming as always. Morgan Freeman had the best line in the movie.

The story was too long. The structure was a bit off. But I still liked it.

For the third one, I see perhaps the first attempt at a fully CG rendition of an actual actor even down to his voice. How else do they hope to get the Joker back on camera. Because no one else is going to touch that performance.

-MM

MelancholyMan said:

Heath Ledger was amazing. Christian Bale was good. Michael Cain was charming as always. Morgan Freeman had the best line in the movie.

The story was too long. The structure was a bit off. But I still liked it.

For the third one, I see perhaps the first attempt at a fully CG rendition of an actual actor even down to his voice. How else do they hope to get the Joker back on camera. Because no one else is going to touch that performance.

-MM

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With any luck, the Joker will never be returning. I'm almost positive that the Nolan brothers will fight the film execs tooth & nail to prevent him from coming back in a sequel. Christopher even said in interviews that the manifestation of the Joker in this film was a collaboration between him and Ledger. With half of the brains behind the character gone, I can't see the TDK rendition Joker ever being the same in future films, ever.

If there ever is a sequel, let's just hope that arrogance & greed on the part of studio executives don't destroy Batman 3 the way that it destroyed Spider-Man 3.

I just got back. I can objectively say that it was a very well done film. What I can't say is that I thoroughly enjoyed it. But -- worse things can happen than to be impressed for five hours. What? It wasn't five hours long?

Heath Ledger was tremendous. I was pleasantly surprised by Aaron Eckhart who always seems to fly under my radar. Everybody else was strong, too. There was just too much much stuff crammed in the box. Halfway through the film, I couldn't remember what had happened at the beginning.

Hehe, good vid.