*UK EXCLUSIVE* [Movie Review] THE DARK KNIGHT
Think of this as less of a “review” per se and more just ‘musings’ (spoiler-free, I assure you as all ‘considered’ spoilers are given their own heavily labelled section at the very end, after the rating, that is easily avoidable!) on a viewing experience that hit me hard in a lot of ways. I learnt my lesson with Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (see here then here for more on that!) but I feel a lot safer with what I’m about to say with this film. Even so, I can’t really ‘review’ the film without discussing “certain aspects” and I don’t want to go there out of respect for Wyv, Kris and the rest of you who haven’t been blessed by this cinematic joy just yet. So, treat this as nothing more than an “Ode De Joy” or a love letter of sorts without anything that can ruin your enjoyment OPENLY cropping up along the way. I’m taking a road-trip to see this at the nearest IMAX (which isn’t near at all) and I have opening day tickets booked also for the standard showing! Let’s meet back up post-release and all jump around together with spoiler-rific delight over The Dark Knight.
In the meantime…
In Off The Shelf Issue # 34, I described Batman Begins thusly:
… The greatest comic book movie adaptation ever made, in my humble opinion. A stunning, intelligent and fantastically well-made hybrid of a revenge, conspiracy, super-hero action, fantasy drama. There was nothing in this world that could have suggested that this film would have been as flawless as it was. It’s a comic-book movie for people who hate comic-book movies and the presence of such a high-calibre cast of talented actors goes someway to exemplify the quality it possesses. Role on The Dark Knight!
Batman Begins blew my proverbial socks off because I went into it expecting nothing. In fact, if anything, I was probably a little bit sniffy about the whole thing. I couldn’t work out why the likes of Christian Bale, Gary Oldman and Ken Watanabe were lowering themselves into such a project (the likes of Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are exempted because they’ll star in anything as long as the money is right!) and especially why Christopher Nolan was involved. How wrong could I be? They were ALL involved because they thought they could do something great, something special, something unique with a franchise all but brutally murdered thanks to Bat-Credit Cards, Bat-Girls, an over-abundance of neon, a tsunami of camp and… well… the cinematic marriage of Akiva Goldsman and Joel Schmuacher. And they did. Batman Begins was a modern classic in every sense of the word, to me, within the realms of the comic book movie subgenre.
Its sequel, The Dark Knight, could not have secured more of an opposite state of mind within me. I’ve been aching to see this movie like you wouldn’t believe. I poured over every single second of footage in the trailers. I found myself - as a die hard Indiana Jones fan - kind of muttering away, in the lead up to a new Indy movie, that I wish it was time for The Dark Knight and that Indy was moved back to July. There could not have been a bigger level of anticipation about seeing this movie. To the point that in the movie’s opening moments I started trying to mentally lower my expectations as best I could. “The hype on this is just too much!” I told myself. “It can’t live up to what you want it to be. Just hope that it comes close to making you feel what you felt after seeing Batman Begins and leave it at that!”
The Dark Knight blew me away. Seriously. I didn’t need to LOWER my expectations in anyway whatsoever. It is every bit as majestic as you have been led to believe. It’s not perfect but it damn well feels it, let me tell you. There’s some pacing issues in and around the end of the first act, there’s some huge jumps of logic (and more then you’d imagine in a movie about a man fighting crime dressed as a bat), Rachel Dawes is still kind of under-written (but not altogether unnecessary as a character like many a review suggests!) although much better peformed this time out and the entire third act confrontation feels considerably rushed (rumour has it that there’s twenty five minutes filleted out of this and I’m willing to bet that they’re all scenes relating to Harvey ‘Two-Face’/Batman/Lt. Gordon!) but none, and I mean NONE of this, will hit you whilst you within the film’s grasp. These thoughts only come afterwards when you can’t shake the sense of utter perfection that you feel that this film posesses so you go kind of looking for gripes or nit-picks within your mind.
Just like in Batman Begins, the cast is postively sublime. I could wax lyrical about Heath Ledger’s performance but nothing I say would be anything not already well documented on millions upon millions of other movie websites. His is most definitely a defining performance though. There’s real depth and raw, unfiltered expression on show from his first scene to his last. Here is a villain, perhaps one of the best on-screen portrayals of villainry in the history of cinema (I shit ye not, but then again I’d put Dennis Farina in Midnight Run pretty high up on the same list so my opinion counts for shit!), that takes you through the full gauntlet of emotions - he will terrify you, he will make you laugh, he will make you think, he will - in parts - all most make you come to understand his relentless campaign of terror upon the city of Gotham.
Ledger’s performance is so unique and so interesting that it is almost beyond compliment. Nothing you say does it justice. I’m not going to lie, after seeing this way ahead of its UK release, I found myself rather upset but unable to talk to anyone because the things I wanted to explain that had upset me were within the realms of a film that no one had seen yet and they wouldn’t have been as overcome with the same feeling that I’d had if they went in with things telegraphed. So I sat alone, out in the sun, after seeing The Dark Knight. I smoked a few cigarettes, drank a bottle of Corona and thought about the choices Heath Ledger had made for this character, the little physical expressions, the bravery of his performance and never allowing it to once feel “cartoonish”. I thought about the talent that it takes to do something like that. I mentally compared it to Ledger’s work in the first film I ever saw him in - the Aussie crime caper Two Hands - and I realised that not only would he never better it but we’d never even see him get the chance (I’m discounting Terry Gilliam’s next project! Excuse my prejudices!) and, strangely, that got me a little overcome.
However, Aaron Eckhart’s work in the film is just as interesting and just as complex but - for obvious tragic reasons - he’s completely over-shadowed critically. In time I think just as much conversation will be given over to the work Eckhart does here as the performance delivered by the late, great Heath Ledger.
Then again, the cast as a whole all deserve enormous kudos and it wouldn’t be out of order, in my opinion, if The Dark Knight “broke through” and secured a raft of performance-related nominations. It most certainly should be openly and honestly considered for Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture and if it isn’t it is for no other reason then the ’stigma’ attached to “comic book movies”. Seriously though, when you think about what these actors are actually portraying and within the boundaries of what subgenre then you wouldn’t necessarily expect for any of them, let alone all of them, to commit to making each and every character feel so real and so fully formed. Gary Oldman does excellent work, genuinely coming into his own to almost claim the movie within the film’s final scenes, and both Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman perform with real zest. By rights, Christian Bale should be fighting to find space within his own movie but it is testament to the brilliance of Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay and Bale’s committed, grounded performance that this is very much not the case.
This script deserves to not only win an Academy Award but to also be studied in Film Classes. I’m not joking. They do some unbelievable work in terms of tight, structured plotting and characterisation. The phenomenal script, coupled with those unbelievable performances, make you give a real shit about all involved. Name another blockbuster, of recent years, which has made you care about the characters so much that you start to feel a tighteness in you chest, a sense of anxiety, a welling in your eyes and a yearning for them to suceed in their plans even though if we take ourselves out of the film for at least a second we’ll be reminded that lore dictates they cannot. That is EXACTLY what power Christopher and Jonathan Nolan wield with their screenplay when it comes, partnered with Aaron Eckhart’s performance, to the character of Harvey ‘Two-Face’ Dent. His rise? His fall? It’ll break your friggin’ heart man!
Those who struggled with Nolan’s choppy style of action-directing in Batman Begins will find no safe-haven with its sequel. Nolan’s shooting style remains. I for one wasn’t particularly offended by a single moment in the first movie and thought Nolan did a flawless job, but that’s not to say I couldn’t understand a lot of people’s complaints. What no one can argue with though is that Nolan is very much a director who can envisage and bring to life blockbuster theatrics with a sense of passion, scale and pace that is above refreshing. Over-turned lorries, jaunts to Hong Kong, car chases…
… To put it simply, you would think that with the depth of characterisation and the many spinning plates of plot, that Nolan would push the action beats off to the sidelines (especially after getting a kicking from many a film fan over the first film’s high octane speeding monorail finale!) but, and I might be wrong on this (I need to see it again - and soon!), it felt that Nolan had very much stuck to the “bigger, bolder” ethos of sequel-making because The Dark Knight felt much more action-heavy then the first outing.
I’m going to be using this phrase a lot over the next few reviews I publish but… The Dark Knight had no need to be this good. I read the allegedly leaked three-movie treatment that Nolan was meant to have planned prior to Batman Begins (Part two would have seen Batman chase The Joker, capture him and Harvey Dent try him only to get scarred in court by acid thrown by The Joker. Part Three would have seen the rise of Harvey “Two Face” Dent from the attack and Batman having to come to terms with taking down his best friend!) and whilst I’m well-aware that it turned out to be a complete fake, as ropey as it sounds, if Nolan had gone with something so trite but shot it with the same level of gusto that he did with Batman Begins whilst all ‘contracted players’ phoned their performances in for the pay cheque then I probably still would have got suckered in by it and threw “Four Popcorns” in it’s direction and put it in my end of year’s Top Five.
But that didn’t happen. All involved sat down and decided to make a movie of real weight, with something to say and put out a product that mattered. So fuck if it happens to be within the comic book movie subgenre? So what if it’s lead character is a millionaire playboy who dresses up as a Bat whilst his man-servant holds down the fort at home? This isn’t Daredevil people. This isn’t even Spider-Man or any of its sequels. This is a movie that wants to lure you in with the pretence of ”another Batman movie” but then hit you up with a detailed study and discussion of doing the right thing and how sometimes what you feel could’ve been the right thing at a given time may not well be anymore but you’re too trapped to turn back, of choices and the pain that comes from having them forced upon you in the most savage and unpredictable of ways, of - in some ways - the current ’War on Terror’ over in Iraq, of fate, of sacrifice, of trying to find order within chaos when the odds are so ridiculously stacked against you. This isn’t a film that just throws itself out there as “The New and Continuing Adventures of Batman”. This is a film of real integrity and intelligence.
I’ve read many a review for The Dark Knight that whilst putting it, justifiably in my opinion (hell, I did it already within the talkbacks of Kris’ Hellboy II review), up there with The Godfather Part II and The Empire Strikes Back, they talk of comparisons to Michael Mann’s Heat. I can see where they’re coming from with the duelling fates of Batman and The Joker but I think in looking at the film that narrowly they’re squeezing out the power that Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent brings to proceedings. With that in mind I’d say The Dark Knight, for me, is closer to Curtis Hanson’s magnificent LA Confidential - it’s a sprawling crim epic with three central characters, intertwined, ambition and scope over-flowing from every single inch of it’s celluloid reel that, in turn, compacts itself tight with multiple-characters, story strands and never falters or loses focus for one second.
Whatever you hoped to get from The Dark Knight it will give to you. It most certainly won’t disappoint you. If Batman Begins was a hybrid of a revenge, conspiracy, super-hero action, fantasy drama then The Dark Knight takes those ingredients and throws them into an even bigger pot to mix in with some even fresher stock; this is a comic-book movie by way of a police procedural movie, a detective noir, a raging terror-themed thriller, a cascading multi-character drama and a balls-to-the-walls action blockbuster extravaganza.
Christopher Nolan hasn’t made a wrong step as a director thus far. The Dark Knight is not only a fresh niche on his directorial belt (the man joins a very select club of directors - Coppola, Cameron, Raimi to name but a few - who have made superior sequels to acclaimed movies) but quite possibly … for the UK anyway, as Hellboy II will open AFTER this… the first true five-star experience within this year’s Summer Season. They could have threw this one out there. They could have rushed something together. They could have done fuckin nothing at all post-Batman Begins…
They didn’t! They made a flat out, unarguable blockbuster masterpiece that betters the first outing in every way shape and form and would do well to not just be considered the best blockbuster of this year but, quite reasonably, since we entered a new millenium.
Believe it! Embrace it! The Dark Knight is the movie event of the year and more than worthy of being considered as such!
Okay, Okay. I’ve tried to be as professional as possible and I just can’t do it. Fuck it, by now alot of our US readers will have seen this so… jump in between the spoiler-warnings if you want to indulge my ecstatic rant about all the unbelievably cool things about The Dark Knight that just blew me away:
Spoilers Start:
... The capture of The Scarecrow, the not-as-naff-as-you’d-thought-it’d-be morphing of the Bat-Mobile into the Bat-Pod, The Joker doing ‘that’ thing with the pencil, Eric Roberts bringing his A-game for the first time in a looooooong time, that brilliant aspect of wrong-footing the audience with the assumptions we’ve carried over from the trailers (we know a “major character” gets offed - the trailer would have us believe it’s Rachel Dawes as a result of The Joker pushing her off the roof but it turns out not to be the case in that instance so you immediately breathe a sigh of relief and thinkg “Oh, well it’s not her!” only for it to be very much so in another instance!) most pertinently and fantastically in the creation of Two-Face, the over-turning lorry chase sequence and what about that almost majestic, dark but strangely beautifully captured final scene involving Gary Oldman’s Lt. Gordon?
OH MY GOD I YEARN FOR ANOTHER SEQUEL AND WHAT POTENTIAL DIRECTIONS IT COULD TAKE US!!!
Spoilers End!
Popcorn Ratings Explained Related Posts:
28 Responses to “*UK EXCLUSIVE* [Movie Review] THE DARK KNIGHT”
Wow. Great summary, Gazz. This is probably the best description I have read on the internet yet. No gushing fanboy cliches…just your honest opinion and spot on musings.
As for sequels, The Dark Knight Returns with Frank Miller having a producer credit is a must.
It was very good, I wouldn’t say 5 popcorns though. The China stuff should have been cut, the bat-sonar was very far fetched.
But Ledger was great, what I loved most about his performance were the little bits of sick humor (the pencil trick, the hospital). It was a character defining performance.
The Godfather Part II comparison is still bullshit, but the movie is more of a crime film than anything.
Also, “I don’t wear hockey pants” is the line of the movie.
What the ****? I’m an ass, with the Al after Grundy.
Thanks very much Wesley. Your compliment means a lot because this was a difficult one to write for the same reason that I found myself unable to intelligently put something down about BATMAN BEGINS and why my ‘five popcorn’ reviews are always a bit… well… naff; I always just end up turning them into the review equivilent of Chris Farley in The Chris Farley Show on SNL - just fawning in the most irritating of ways.
So, cheers for thinking to the contrary!
By the way Grundy, the bat-sonar WAS very far fetched. I agree.
Don’t you tend to find though that because Nolan et all are doing there best to ground this whole franchise in some sort of “semi-reality” that when they bring forth the more “fantastical” elements they kind of… clunk a little?
Sorry, I cut off the rest of that last post by mistake. Let me continue…
“… clunk a little? Not in a bad way, of course. I would still regard both of Nolan’s visions of Batman as flawless, in my own opinion, but those fantastical elements don’t necessarily gel in with the rest of the movie as all involved probably would have hoped.”
Another thing I had a bit of a problem with was the whole Batman beating up the SWAT members. I mean, he has to have some way of communicating with Gordon, so why didn’t he just call him.
I just saw it in IMAX, and once my head stops spinning, I’ll post a review. Holy crap.
Is there 3-D sequences in the IMAX version Kris? Me and a mate are taking a road trip to Bradford to see it but I’m getting mixed info about it. One friend says there is action sequences down in IMAX 3-D. Another said that there’s no 3-D sequences, just a picture clarity you wouldn’t believe.
Can you advise?
I haven’t seen the IMAX version, but I know there isn’t any 3D. All I can assume is that it looks a whole **** lot bigger.
No 3-D, but about twenty minutes were shot with IMAX cameras, so some shots will fill the entire screen, while the shots filmed with regular cameras will have the letterbox format. Wish the whole thing was filmed with IMAX, because those scenes are crazy awesome and filled with win and stars and rainbow flowers.
But yeah, I need to sleep on this to get my bearings back. I just…holy CRAP.
Did the constantly shifting focus on screen size not prove a little distracting or irritating? I mean we’re going like so it’s by the by but I’m curious!
At first, it was a little, but only because I wanted the whole film to fill the screen based on the beauty of the opening shot alone. The IMAX-shot sequences are awesome, but once the film’s story kicks in, you won’t even notice the switches.
I’m very excited!!!!
I’m new to the world of reviews and for someone who classed themselves as a lover of films I’ve recently come to appreciate that my love is but a toe hesitantly dipped into a deeper pool of knowledge of films. Am now feeling the need to submerge a little further and am sticking Batman Begins in my DVD right now! Brilliant review.x
I just got back from the IMAX screening:
That truck/bat-pod/armoured car sequence?
In IMAX?
OH MY GOD!
Fantastic! Best sequence of the blockbuster season!
I still cannot get my head around the Two-Face effects - phenomenal, utterly phenomenal! CGI? Physical effects? Whatever it is it is flawless and seamless.
This film is fantastic. The first film out of the whole blockbuster season that hasn’t lost anything on repeated viewing!
By the way Grundy, the line was “I’m not wearing hockey PADS!” Coz, you know, the impersonator was wearing hockey pads across his chest?
Told you that IMAX was something else. The very first shot of the film gave my poor little sister vertigo, but she shut her eyes for a second and then she was perfectly fine
And yeah, the semi flip/Batpod trick flip in IMAX was my biggest “OhmyGodSWEET!” moment of the year so far. I just about lept from my chair with glee
Speaking of the little sis, she is IN LOVE with this movie. She’s seen it once with me and my friend, then again with me and our dad, then AGAIN with her friends, and wants to see it AGAIN! She LOVES it, and she was kinda lukewarm about Begins. She, my dad, and all of her friends do seem to have a problem with Maggie Gyllenhaal, though. When she first came onscreen, my dad leaned over to me and said, swear to God, “She is UGLY!” When Joker says “Hello beautiful”, my dad goes, “I don’t think so!” Has anyone else heard these complaints?
Yeah, I know it’s pads, but it was funnier when I though it was pants.
Hockey pants IS funnier
I don’t see the Maggie think from a talent or a good-looks point of view, to be quite frank.
“thing” not “think”. Sorry!
As I said to Wyv earlier today, I got the best weekend delivery of screeners on Saturday…
… Another INDY 4, KUNG FU PANDA, WALL-E and THE DARK KNIGHT. I’ve watched it 3 times now since Saturday. I can’t get enough of it!
Trackbacks
What's Your Opinion?