Gamertell Review: The Dark Knight the movie
FROM GAMERTELL - Title: The Dark Knight (aka Batman: The Dark Knight, Batman Begins 2, The Dark Knight: The IMAX Experience) Release Date: July 18, 2008 Company: Warner Bros. Rating: PG-13 Length: 142 min (2 hours, 22 minutes) Pros: A lot of great acting, a well-woven story and plenty of psychological creepiness. The… MORE »
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When I saw Iron Man, I said to anybody who would listen, “Best Comic Book Movie Ever Made.” And for two months I stuck to that story, but now after seeing Bale and Ledger’s performances, hands down this movie is the BEST.
on July 18, 2008 at 05:13 AM - LINKThis film was over-hyped to me, and it is NOT better than the first one by far. Arguably, Heath’s performance of the Joker was great, but that was really the only thing I noticed in the film that’s worth mentioning.
The story alone confused me, as they went away from any originality to the comic book. They didn’t explain anything about what happened to the Joker. Also, what they did with two face confused me as well. The story was just garbage compared to the first one.
The portrayal of the city, was also very wrong. They filmed it in Chicago, that much is obvious due to the Illinois license plates you see on the cars in the movie. The gritty fictional city that was in the first one should’ve stayed. That whole “it’s more realistic” term does not fit this story at all.
One thing that seemed to irritate me as well in this film was the voice of Batman. He goes into this really low cheesy voice whenever he talks. Yes, he did that in the first one but it didn’t seem as bad, or in fact...he just didn’t have as much dialogue.
“A word for the soundtrack buffs: German composer Hans Zimmer does a wonderful and often subtly appropriate job, neither trying to outdo Danny Elfman’s work nor leave it forgotten. His minimalist approach to the score is also appropriately echoed in several of the film’s settings, including a sparsely filled Bat-Office, which may indicate a pretty good directorial decision.”
Except the fact that it was not just Hans Zimmer that created the score, but also James Newton Howard. Also, the second film will full of recycled work from the first movie, except for a few scenes. Score wise, there was nothing new to me that is worth mentioning.
on July 20, 2008 at 09:15 PM - LINKI’ll very much agree with you on Bale’s voice as Batman. I didn’t like it in the first movie and it was even less comprehensible in this one. It seems the filmmakers addressed/solved that since pretty much any line he said with overt gruffness was immediately repeated.
Misdirection was certainly a part of the story and it was all eventually explained in the film, albeit without straight up exposition. Even the Joker’s origin was essentially explained (although not in step-by-step scenes) through his own creepy recollections of his past and current behaviours. The end route they took with Dent was certainly their own but was still much in character.
Nolan’s take on Batman is not a hard-line comic book-based myhos. If you read the many, many Batman titles, writers and artists create their own interpretations and toy with his history. Continuity is rarely an absolute in comics (and there’s not always a need to tell a character’s origin story). Gotham, for example, is usually considered to be a renamed NYC but Nolan loves Chicago.
Ah, yes, I did overlook Howard on the score. Even so, I’ll stand by my like of the score and its film-appropriate differences. Sequels often have repeated musical themes which are more an element of continuity than a flaw. I haven’t done a full, at-length critical listen to both scores so if there was grand repetition - as I’m sure a composer as yourself will supremely notice - it was certainly not deterring from the film’s overall enjoyability and goodness..
on July 20, 2008 at 10:52 PM - LINK