I bought Batman the Dark Knight before watching it because 1) I really liked Batman Begins, and 2) I had friends tell me it was awesome. There has been a lot of public hype over the movie, but that seldom means anything to me as there has also been a lot of hype over Harry Potter and Twilight. At any rate, after having watched the movie, I have to say that it is not, in my opinion, worth all the hype.
I thought the Dark Knight was mediocre at best. Not awful, but certainly not great. It was the first movie I watched since Return of the King that I was ready for it to be over well before the end, and I was also surprised at how long it continued. For me what makes a movie great is an excellent storyline first of all, and great action sequences. The storyline in Dark Knight was stretched far too thin, and the action sequences were nothing spectacular.
The storyline was that Batman is cracking down on the mobs, so they hire the Joker to do something about Batman. The Joker is a psychopath and he ends up liking Batman and decides that he wants to keep him around so that he can just mess with him. So far so good, but that storyline does not require a movie of that length to be told. A subplot was the transformation of Harvey Dent into Two Face. Also good, because Harvey started as a good guy with some repressed tendencies, which eventually took control of him around the time of his accident. I haven't read a lot of DC comics, but I have watched many of their animated series, and one thing I know about Two Face is that he hates Batman but considers Bruce Wayne to be a friend. The way that they set up Two Face was great, he now had a reason to hate Batman, but not Bruce Wayne, and they also got rid of his love interest which was also a love interest for Batman even though as far as I know that character was never a part of the comics (she was unique to the movie). They killed two birds with one stone, and then the conversation between Harvey and Comissioner Gordon was great. Now, if they had ended the movie there then they would have had a perfect set up for a sequel. The Joker would have gotten his last laugh but he would be in jail, and we would all have been waiting for the next movie to see what Two Face is going to do. Instead they decided to drag the movie out and use Two Face as time filler, and then kill him off at the end of the movie. They also decided to add in this lame and unrealistic sequence with the bombs on the boats and the crews having the detonators for the dual purpose of taking up time and getting across some preachy psuedo-humanist message about how people are basically good and won't kill eachother, the over all effect resulted in a heightened amount of suspended disbelief coupled with cheesiness. Batman even says that to the Joker while he also tells the Joker that not everyone is as twisted as he is. He's correct when he says that most people are not as twisted as the Joker. The Joker is a special case, that's what makes him a villain. The part about most people being good by nature is not correct, and it is certainly inconsistent with the overriding theme of Batman. That theme being that people are corrupt and Batman is needed to drive fear into the hearts of evil doers. Batman fights evil with fear. Back in the day DC realized that their stuff was not very realistic, so they made Batman to be more gritty and realistic in order to better compete with Marvel, which did a much better job depicting human nature and creating relatable characters. But I digress, in real life if a situation like that occurred, people would be jumping over the sides of the boat as soon as word of a bomb was mentioned. Then the Joker would have blown up the boats. But to take a realistic approach to that would have undermined their preachy bullcrap message which never should have occurred in a Batman movie, and did nothing to add to the seriousness or credibility of the movie. If anything at nearly harked back to the old Adam West Batman where cheesiness was a deliberate part of the style. The point is, it should have ended with Two Face in the hospital and Joker in jail. They probably thought that since they were able to pull of having two major villains in the last movie they could do it in this one. They could have if they had introduced those villains simultaneously or close to it. But they really introduced Two Face too close to the end to be anything other than time filler. A pointless waste of a major villain.
Now for some more technical problems. The action sequences were not that great. Batman should have had moves more like Daredevil. The Daredevil movie had splendid fight sequences. Batman has no superpowers, what makes him potent is his intellect combined with his agility. He does not have someone else inventing his gadgets for him, he makes them himself. Batman is a genius. He's an inventor and detective. But in the movie he has someone else making his stuff. Also he moves too slow, and he doesn't seem particularly agile. If Batman is going to wear any kind of armor, it would be a light mesh mail type armor that would not in any way hamper his agility. He's not going to wear some heavy plated armor, as cool as it might look, which causes him to move slow. That is why the action sequences were just mediocre. He doesn't take bullets, he anticipates where they are going to be and makes sure he is gone before they get there. Superman takes bullets. Batman is supposed to move more like Daredevil.
Another problem I had, which most people will not think about, is the scope of the injuries to Harvey Dent's face. Yes I know he's supposed to be disfigured and jacked up, but realistically there is no way he could survive an injury like that without immediate treatment, and he certainly would not be well enough to walk. When someone has a 3rd degree burn usually the blackened tissue has to be scraped off of infection will set in. Also, he had muscle tissue exposed, and missing. He shouldn't be able to talk, and he even had bone exposed. He shouldn't be able to talk, or move. That sort of effect works well in the Terminator movies, but on a real human who's biological components are not simply superficial, injuries of that nature are going to be seriously debilitating. Yes he should have been jacked up, but the way they did it was unrealistic.
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