The Dark Knight

published on Aug 05th, 2008 // 2 Comments

I must admit I had seen the 6 minute introduction to the Joker before seeing the movie. It succeeded in only making my anticipation greater.

While I liked previous batman movies except for the goddamn awful Batman Forever. I wasn’t a big fan of the camped up, staged sets of the earlier Tim Burton ones. My viewing of that 6 minute trailer made me a fan of the movie before I had seen the full version.

The movie was fast paced and delivered all the time. The stunts were ambitious and worked really well. The film is full of unforgettable surprises and you forgive the lack attention to the plot at various points. The production design and the whole dark and real elements of this film bring it all together.

You can believe the hype with Heath Ledger’s performance because it was first class. It gets my back up when I hear people comparing it to Jack Nicholson’s performance as the Joker in the earlier movie. It is not comparable and was completely different direction. In the Dark Knight you actually believe the Joker is mentally insane in a highly disturbing manner.

Harvey Dent was a great character and to be honest I didn’t even know he was a character in the film with all the Joker hype. I didn’t find Two Face convincing at all. The CGI technique on his face made his character look completely out of place.

Batman himself played second fiddle in this movie.It is hard to define one particular reason why. Maybe Christian Bale as an actor felt a little overwhelmed and tried to overact the part slightly. What was with his Batman voice? That was just dire. Freeman, Caine and Oldman were flawless and their characters were great and from the comic book fronts I hear they did their detective work. Batman just takes a backseat in this film.

In short Christopher Nolan did a fantastic job with this Batman and I look forward to the sequel(s). I would love to see Nolan working on something original at this point in his career rather than digging up old franchises as this is his most accomplished and mature work to date.