I loved it! Things to love about the Dark Knight:
1. The Joker, obviously... Yes, he deviates from the way the Joker is portrayed in the comic by his grungy looks. But a true-to-the-comics Joker wouldn't have fit into this kind of movie. In the comics, the Joker's real face is clown-coloured, because he was mutated. And that works in the comic, because comic-book Batman lives in a universe where this kind of weird s**t happens all the time. But the movie is set in a more realistic universe (I don't say realistic, just
more realistic...), so the clown-face has to be make-up. And the make-up gets more and more messed-up the longer it has been worn, which is how make-up actually behaves. You can see he looks a little better again in a scene where you could have expected him to patch up on the paint since last we saw him.
And he's truly credible as a guy who's dangerous because there are no limits to what he could do, and he doesn't play by the same rules as the rest of us. And
that has always been the most important thing about the Joker, which is captured great.
2. It's great that the Joker doesn't get any "origin" that
explains him. It's always so stupid where some pop-psychological cliché s**t is pulled out in a movie or a book to explain a truly weird psychopath of a character...
3. There's this issue about how far it's reasonable to go in fighting terrorism, if it's okay to become as bad oneself in an attempt to keep up... And I love the whole thing with Batman going all Big Brother and spying on everyone in an attempt to find this one terrorist, and Lucius objecting.
4. SPOILER:
 Spoilers! |
I loved the ferry incident too... Yes, it ended allright, with one prisoner stepping up as a hero (pretty cliché though that he had to be big and black), and the civilian citizen who said he'd finally blow the prisoner boat up finally lost his nerve. But Batman didn't know how close it was that the Joker's expectations were fulfilled... To the audience it sounds really naive when he says that the people of Gotham chose good, since we've been treated to scenes where they vote about blowing up a whole ferry of other people to save their own skins, and the blowing-up-solution wins big time. |
5. All the cast was good... And Rachel's problems of making up her mind about which guy to choose were credible. Not like, say, Mary Jane in Spiderman 2. MJ basically goes "Okay Peter, since you're always late for dates I'll punish
myself for your behaviour by picking some random guy who I don't really love and spend the rest of my life with him!". I mean, that's not the behaviour of a sane adult woman, she's being completely psychotic. With Rachel you can understand her qualms. And I love that she has the ability to keep her head cool in all situations and is portrayed as far braver than the average person... otherwise she'd just look extremely helpless beside the big brave men. Like Kim Basinger's horrible Vicki Vale in the first Tim Burton movie, who just screams and screams till your ears start to bleed.
So I'll have to agree with this site's review! It was a great movie!
Plus I'm not even annoyed by the "bat-voice"... If he's really gonna disguise his voice when talking to people who knows Bruce Wayne, growling out the sentences like a death metal singer with a cold is probably the best way. And then I guess it just became a habit over time, so now he automatically speaks like that whenever the suit is on.