The Dark Knight.

[Scott]

Holy Moly! Batman's a big noise - but loses the plot.

The Dark Night deserves part of its hype. Heath Ledger makes The joker a memorably creepy, deranged villan. He may well win a posthumous Oscar Nomination. Most of the stunts are spectacular, the new "batbike" looks cool, and Batman does a neat trick of lassoing a truck so that it does a back flip. Jails and hospitals blow up on an impressive, if preposterous scale. and Batman even carries out a daring kidnap in Hong Kong.
Some of the best scenes in British Director Christopher Nolan's film are the small, still ones, such as when one of Bruce Wayne's accountants threatens to expose his identity as Batman unless he is paid $10 million a year for life and Wayne's tame scientist (Morgan Freeman) suavely suggests he may be unwise to blackmail a zillionare who's ruthlessly ultra-violent.
There's more than enough eye candy and entertainment to make this a hit so why don't I rate it more highly?

My most heartfelt complaint would be about the noise. The film has the worst sound balance I have ever heard. Poor diction, a bombastic score(Even when nothing exciting is happening) and over-enthusiastic effects made much of the dialogue inaudible.
The plot is often impossible to follow. And the film, though dark, isn't as deep as some have claimed. It's pretentious and overblown, and its unwarranted length of more than two and a half hours left me more fidgety than exhillarated.
At the start of The Dark Night Batman (Christian Bale) is in trouble. Copycat vigikantes with guns are ruining his reputation. He muses that the time may have come for him to hang up his cape so that the girl of his dreams (Maggie Gyllenhaal a distinct improvement on Katie Holmes in the last Batman film but still saddled with a poorly written role) will marry him.

"Gotham needs a hero with a face" Batman announces. The replacement hero he chooses is clean-cut district attourney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and they set out to destroy organised crime in Gotham, with the help of honest police lieutenant Jim Gordon (a seriously under-energised Gary Oldman),
But they are reckoning without The Joker (Heath Ledger) a maniacal arch-criminal whose motovation is not so much greed as anarchy. As Batman's faithful butler (Michael Caine) puts it: "Some men just want to watch the world burn".

Ledger plays The Joker as a terrorist with no redeeming features, who gets a sexual thrill from threatning people with his knife and savouring their fear - an all-too-topical-quirk. He's as implaceable as Javier Bardem's killer in No Country For Old Men, but with smudged clown make-up, a flickering reptillian tongue and the same macabre malevolence that Malcom McDowell brought to A Clockwork Orange. Ledger is subtler and scarier than Jack Nicholson's Jpker was in Tim Burton's first Batman film, but his character has nowhere to go except madder and madder.
And this succes makes little sence. When a villain kills his own associates as readily as this one murders the forces of law and order, it's difficult to see how he ever attracts the multitude of helpers he would need. Also for an anarchist, he's ridiculously well organised.

So, although the joker is an aresting presence you don't belive in him for an instant. Some of the plot twists too, left me unconvinced - especially the transformation of Harvey Dent, which seems too sudden and melodramatic. One reason Batman Begins impressed me was that you could follow the logic of the characters' actions and enjoy the explanation of how and why a damaged parentless child came to be a superhero. In The Dark Night, Batman has become a bore.
Christian Bale is handsome and can be a fine actor, but here he's monotonous, dull and lugubrious. When The Joker tells him ' I wont kill you because you're just too much fun!'. It's impossible to see what he is on about. Nolan and his co-writer brother Jonathan evidently think Batman is a figure whose tragic qualities have Shakespearean depth. But he isn't - mainly because his problems aren't universal enough. How many of us face the problem of having a split personality, or unlimited wealth, or the responsibility of being solely able to fight the worst kinds of crime?.
You can take a character out of a comic strip, but you can't take the comic-strip out of the character. Batman is not a tragic hero at all, but an adolescent action-figure with the kind of problems most of us can only dream of having. This may make him good box office - especially amoung males who feel ineffectual, impoverished and lacking in even onw personality - but it doesn't give him the depth of Hamlet.

This summer blockbuster explores grand themes: whether it can be right to use torture on terrorists: the conflict between public and private morality: and whether the public prefers to be told lies rather than deal with the truth.
The Nolan brothers are clearly determined not to be confused with the Nolan sisters. I appreciate their ambition but they have over reached and lost their sence of humour. Their film is compromised by the perceived demands of its audience. It's grimly sadistic. It doesn't fight terror, it embraces it. Ledger becomes, in a curiously twisted way, the moral center of the film, and this makes The Dark Night an unintentionally sick spectacle, pretending to justify law and justice, but in reality celebrating violence and chaos.
There's plenty in this blockbuster to admire, but I can't honestly say I enjoyed it. Incidentally, although it's been allocated a 12A certificate, it's completely unsuitable for children, who will find it murky, incomprehensible and frightning. In a sane universe where film industry- financed Jokers were not running and ruining film classification, this would be a 15.


Verdict: Overlong and pretentious - but a hit.
2/5.

[EpsilonX]

Man. The Dark Knight*

This is on my list to see.

[Trunks]

Did you even write this? How did you remember all the quotes from the movies? Good Review I guess.

[Scott]

Did you even write this? How did you remember all the quotes from the movies? Good Review I guess.

Y'know you can find quotes on IMDB And I went to see it yesterday it's not like it was a while ago.

[rukisuto]

You have some good info, but it's a really long review.

[LemonRising]

Cant say I agree with you on this XD

There are a few things I was a little upset about, but in general I would give the movie a high rating, no doubt. Also my main focus was the joker (batman has NEVER impressed me. He's a boring twat, in my opinion >:U Plus his weird batsuit voice had to grow on me throughout the movie) and the Joker delivered fo sho. The Joker, however, made the movie, and I'm going to see it again next week, IMAX style.

Also
Explosions are sweet.
They make up for everything.

[rukisuto]

I agree :]
Heath Ledger made that role HAPPEN.
It was amazing.

The movie deserves a way higher rating than that.

[LemonRising]

He did!
First time I've been attracted to the villan.
That's probably a lie.
I like psychopaths, dont ask.

HE SHOULD GET AN OSCAR. But not cause he's dead. I should mention that casue some people are like "pfff it's only cause he's dead."
NO ITS CAUSE HE'S AWESOME.

[rukisuto]

DOUBLE AGREE.

I had such a conflict of interests when I was laughing at some of his dialogue during the movie.
I was like 'Oh no, he's dead. That's horrible.'

My favorite scene was when he blew up the hospital.
lol.

[Iceskater101]

I disagree with your score scott.
I think that the batman movie deserves a 4/5 in my opinion sure the movie was long but it was interesting to watch. and i love the hospitals and how he convinced Harvey Dent and he became bad but heath ledger was AWESOME in this movie
but still I liked it and I would definitly own it.