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I caught the midnight showing of the Dark Knight. Here are my thoughts:
A downfall of the movie going geek is they go into a screening lofty expectations about any comic book film. I can’t say I’ve ever gone and seen a movie and had it meet every preconceived notions I planned on harshly and unfairly judging it by. That is until I saw the Dark Knight.
First lets address the 800lb gorilla of the film. Everything you’ve heard is correct. Heath Ledger perfected the joker in a way no one has ever been able to before. He’s not just the slap-sticky counterpoint to Batman’s deadly serious persona. He is a villain in the truest sense of the word. A frightening anarchist that is at the same time random and calculated.
Harvey Dent was constructed as an admirable character. Aaron Eckhart performed it adequately. Though once he made his fall towards Two-Face, I really couldn’t shake his good guy demeanor. However it was unnecessary. Its often a mistake to rely on special effects instead of proper character acting. To see the walking dead look they came up with I’m convinced you could’ve taken a blind/deaf/mute, spun him around, and pushed him in the direction of the camera, I would’ve believed he was Two-Face.
Watching the film I kept thinking back to Batman: The Animated Series. Considered by some in fandom to be the definitive motion picture Batman, it was TV’s first good serious take on the character since the campy 60’s edition. Some of the most satisfying parts of the Dark Knight had the exact same feel as the cartoon, with the following exceptions: 1) It was of course live action. 2) They didn’t plan on it being watched by an audience that just got back from school and doing homework.
If you were going to twist my arm and make me pick something bad about the movie, I can only think of two technological impossibilities that, as a geek, bothered me. One being that Batman, with his infinite technological resources managed to pull a fingerprint off a bullet shot into a concrete wall. I’m pretty sure that physics would say “No!”. A bullet nearly liquefies when being fired and I don’t see any conceivable way a fingerprint would stay intact.
The second unbelievable techno nitpick of mine is when Batman creates a uses the cellphone network to have a real-time view of Gotham City in its entirety. Though the real function of this system is simply to point out the moral ambiguities of how Batman operates. And both of the points I’ve mentioned here really just served as plot devices to move the film along. Movies have been breaking the laws of physics in far worse and inconceivable ways before the Dark Knight came along. So I’ll forgive and forget.
Incidentally the one gadget I was worried that was going to bother me in the film was the “batpod”. I expected that this goofy looking was going to somehow carry the film with its gadgetry coolness. Not really the case. The batpod is really nothing more than a functional mode of alternate transportation after a mishap with the batmobile.
All in all, the movie focused on plot and story, not additions to the Sharper Image catalog. I couldn’t have been more pleased. Good luck on the next film. They’ll be a victim of their own success with the expectations I’m going to have for part three.