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the dark knight (a friggin' movie review)
so i finally saw "the dark knight" this weekend.
after a week of hearing almost universally good reviews (even from people who don't usually go to superhero movies, or movies in general, which was weird), i had pretty high expectations for this movie. did it live up to them?
pretty much, yeah.
granted, i didn't like batman begins that much, but i love the old tim burton interpretations (tim buton is a *very* strange man). overall, i have to say tdk was probably the best recent batman movie of the 3. (i know there are 5, but the ones with val kilmer and george clooney as batman officially don't exist. like fredo corleone, they are dead to me). here's what i liked/didn't like about it.
action
the action in this movie is definitely bumped up a notch. the car chases and explosions keep things moving along quickly without taking away from the characters too much. the fight scenes have improved a lot too since "begins", although i thought they were still kind of choppy and it was hard to see who was hitting who (okay, obviously in a batman movie, batman's hitting everybody, but still...)
story
they weren't kidding when they named this movie "the dark knight". without giving too much away, the main characters all face moral dilemmas at various points in the movie, and the battle isn't just being fought over the lives of innocents, but over the very soul of gotham city.
acting
not much to say here. all the main actors turn in good performances:
morgan freeman (lucius fox) gets a little more do do this time around.
michael caine is alfred-y as alfred and plays his role as true to life as any of us would be if we were charged with babysitting a crazy, venge-filled billionaire who spends his nights running around fighting crime dressed as a giant bat (in other words, pretty much the way us new yorkers feel about mayor bloomberg).
maggie gyllenhaal (sp?) is decent as rachel dawes, although her character seems sort of bleh to begin with.
arron eckhart does an excellent job with district attorney harvey dent, all the more props-worthy considering he's the only major actor in the movie who has to go through a pretty abrupt character change partway through.
and christian bale is pathos-y and torn as batman, making you wonder if the afforementioned billionaire in a giant bat-suit is really such a great idea after all.
oh and of course there's.....
the joker!
what can i say? heath ledger created a new iconic character with the joker. great acting, all the way. i wouldn't say his joker is *better* than jack nicholson's...just different. the creepy, nasally voice. the weird, lurching walk. the knives. whereas nicholson's joker seemed like the kind of guy you probably wouldn't mind having drinks with if he weren't so crazy, ledger's joker seems like the kind of guy you wouln't want anything to do with, ever, if you know what's good for you. which i guess is what a supervillian is supposed to be.
so that's my review. overall, i liked it. i give it four out of five disappearing pencils.
| Posted by starlorsummers on 07/28/2008 8:52 PM | Visits: 65 |
RE: choppy action scenes- I re-watched Batman Begins the other day and the special features, and Christopher Nolan said that he wanted it to be like that, because he was trying to do the fight scenes more from the p.o.v. of the criminals that Bats was fighting. I don't know, it bothers me too, but he's the man in charge....
RE: Maggie Gyllenhaal (yes you spelled it right!) - I agree that the Rachel Dawes character is very blargh, but I thought Maggie did a better job than Katie Holmes in the first one. Maybe I'm just partial to the Gyllenhaal family, but I thought she made the character tougher and sexier, more grown-up.
I liked Val Kilmer's Batman, but mostly just because he was sexy back then ;D As for the Batman and Robin...well...the less said the better. I just wish Poison Ivy could have been in a better movie, because I think she's a cool character!