Jul 28 2008
Batman! I mean, The Dark Knight!
Saturday night was horrendously warm and muggy, and the air-conditioning in the cinema was not operating. And as The Dark Knight had only been out for a couple of days the room was full. Argh!
Luckily the film turned out to be pretty good, though not up to Batman Begins standards. Still immeasurably better than Batman Forever and Batman and Robin though. Spoilers below the cut.
If anything, it was just too long and not focused enough. It probably would have been fine to finish at the point they captured the Joker the first time. On reflection, that’s actually the point where all the flaws started to jump into the foreground. I wonder if that was the seam where they joined two ideas together?
Yes, it definitely got a bit strange at the point where the Joker is captured. For a start, they used the trope of getting the good guys (Harvey Dent, Rachel Dawes) abducted after the baddie has been captured. Didn’t we just see that at the end of the last Bond film?
The Prisoner’s Dilemma with the two boats was very silly too. I hate to say this, but what honestly made them think they would have the trigger for the other ship? He’s the Joker! He’s not gonna tell the truth! He hasn’t told the truth to anyone in the rest of the movie! “Do you know how I got these scars?”…
(Talking of which, when the Joker crashes the fundraising party in search of Harvey Dent, and he’s telling one of those scar stories, and then Batman and Rachel go flying out the window — what happens to the Joker and his henchmen? Do they just hoover up a few more nibbles and then make their apologies? Or do they maybe search the place and find Dent locked in a cupboard? Uh, yeah, apparently it was the first option.)
It was good to see Cillian Murphy again, if all too briefly. Christian Bale needed a much better part too. He spent too much time in the bat suit, even though we saw from Batman Begins how good he is out of it. Heath Ledger was pretty good (though I have seen people say he was only playing Heath Ledger; his accent was quite obvious) but he wasn’t playing the Joker as far as I could see. But it’s really hard to best Jack Nicholson’s performance in the role.
It seems very odd they introduced and killed off Two-Face within half an hour. But maybe he’s just not a convincing character if you want to play it reasonably straight — because let’s be serious, Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey were not “playing it straight”. Looking at Two-Face’s roving eyeball was a bit silly though. Surely he’s going to need eye drops soon?
Still, for all my grouchy complaining, I did enjoy it. Probably would have enjoyed it more if the room hadn’t been so uncomfortably hot. But you should definitely see it.
I actually disagree with most of your comments. In order:
Yes, we did see it in Casino Royale, and in the first Spider-Man. But this time they outright killed the love interest.
What else would they assume?
(Okay, this one I agree with)
I think he was playing the Joker. I also think that we’ve never actually seen anyone else playing the Joker before (with the possible exception of Mark Hamill). I certainly don’t think Jack Nicolson was. He was playing Jack Nicolson in a clown suit. The main problem with JN’s version (for me) is that we just plain knew too much about him. The character has been in the comics for over 60 years, and his real identity has never been definitively revealed (“Do you wanna know how I got these scars?”). I think Heath Ledger went back to the source for his interpretation, most notably Alan Moore’s “The Killing Joke”. I agree it was cool to see Cillian Murphy again, and that Bruce Wayne was a little too sidelined.
I remain unconvinced that two face is actually dead. Far more interesting if they simply spirited him away to Arkam and buried him there, so to speak. I mostly thought the eyeball was really, really freaky.
I think it was better than Begins, being as it actually had a third act, and lacked a lot of the silly Sci-Fi stuff which pissed my off in the first one (the microwave laser thing which explosively evaporates all water… except that in the human body, for instance). I liked that it focused on the crime drama part of the story. Roll on the third film, I say.
I was also quite impressed with the script (except, frustratingly, the first couple of lines of dialogue), and it seems that co-writer Jonathan Nolan wrote the new terminator film, which also has a fairly impressive cast. Might not be as shit as I first feared…
Hey Nick, I knew I could rely on you for an argument! :-)
I think more than anything Heath Ledger felt too much of a cookie-cutter psycho rather than a proper adversary for Batman. But incidentally he also was more than anyone else’s match. The two don’t really tie together.
Well, I thought the boat scene was outrageously silly and (between holding my head in my hands) was willing someone to stand up and point out that they’re being played for fools by someone who’s already blown up a hospital today, and maybe they shouldn’t take his word for how the bombs are rigged.
Also, you’ll find that the leading lady died in James Bond too! ;-)