The Dark Knight - Movie Review
Jul. 20th, 2008 03:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatI woke up early, yes on a Sunday no less and not by intent...and decided having nothing better to do, to brave the heat and humidity to go see The Dark Knight. Some people go to church on Sundays, I go to movies. ( It's not that I don't believe in God, I do, I just don't like religion all that much.)
Was The Dark Knight worth it? Oh yes, and then some. Heck the previews alone were worth the price of admission - they gave us previews of Quantum of Solace, The Watchmen and Terminator: Salvation - all of which look amazing, especially The Watchmen. Previews aside, the Dark Knight may well be the best action/superhero film that I've seen in my life. Although that may not be fair - since the other films really don't aspire to be much more than fun rollercoaster rides. This baby made Iron Man feel like a saturday morning cartoon by comparison, and I enjoyed Iron Man.
To spoil or not to spoil, therein lies the question. If you've read or are at all familar with the stories in the following three Batman graphic novels that more or less redefined the Batman comic series and persona back in the lat 1980s and early 1990s, I probably can't spoil you - you know the story, more or less. Those three graphic novels are: The Long Halloween by Tim Sale and Jeff Loeb (whom I believe Whedon may have gotten to write one of the Buffy issues), The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, and The Dark Knight by Frank Miller. Of the three this film follows the first one the closest - The Long Halloween - provides us with the dual tales of the Joker and Harvey Dent, changing Dent's origin story slightly from original. The Long Halloween may be one of the scariest and grittest noir stories told about an action hero. This film follows it - very closely. If you are not a fan of the noir superhero genre and by "noir" - I mean dark, gritty, and violent with a somewhat nihilistic/cynical look at human nature - you will not like The Dark Knight. If you are a fan of this particular genre, as I am, you will be in movie heaven. To say it is a dark and at times sadistically violent film is an understatement. This is not Superman or Fantastic Four or X-men.
This is the film I thought Tim Burton was planning to make in 1980 and was grossly disappointed. Burton's film, while fun and stylish, pales in comparison to what The Dark Knight manages to accomplish, an accomplishment that falls just a notch or two short of being a masterpiece in this genre. The fact it falls short may have a great deal more to do with the genre it is in than with anything else. Fans of Miller, Moore, and Loeb's Batmans, will however be pleased.
The Dark Knight does in some respects, far better, what others have tried to do in similar ventures such as V for Vendetta, Wanted, Iron Man, and including Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog, except here the lines are far grayer. There is an air of mystery in this film that is lacking in those other films. And the villians here in some aspects reflect the choices our protagonist, Bruce Wayne, has made. The line between Bruce and the Joker, as the Joker himself points out with cackling glee is not all that thick. The only thing separating us, he tells Batman, is you have rules. One, says Batman. Yes, cackles the Joker, and once you break it, you are no different than me.
Throughout the film the two are juxtaposed - compared. We flip between them. That's a major theme here - how everyone has two faces, two sides of a coin. Harvey Dent enjoys flipping a coin - telling people that's how he decides what to do. It's his "father's" trick. That's another heavy theme in the film, which also reflects an aspect of our hero's psyche - Bruce Wayne reactes to his father's memory, but which father - Ra Al Ghul, Alfred, Lucius Fox, or the biological one? Perhaps a combination of all? There's multiple stories here, which at the hands of a less adept director and writer might have unraveled, here they have a central focus - and that is as reflections of Batman himself.
Harvey Dent - is the white knight district attorney, the current beau of Wayne's childhood love Rachel Dawes, the woman he hopes to be with some day if he can ever let go of his alter-ego. Dent is the hero that Bruce sees as his own and Gotham's salvation. The hero who can put away the crooks without a gun or a fist, without violence. If Dent succeeds, the Batman can retire and Wayne is free. Dent represents all that Bruce Wayne is fighting for. Dent is the man that Wayne believes his father wanted him to be.
The only problem is Dent is a bit too much like Bruce - he has his own twitches. I make my own luck he tells Rachel. My coin has two heads, one on both sides. It's a two-faced coin, each face the same. What's disturbing is his constant need to flip it. And like Bruce, he is also a bit of an ideologe or idealist - he argues - impressing Wayne, who clearly shares his views - that Gotham needs a guard dog, a hero at its gates, a vigilante who keeps back the villians. The Russian Ballerina currently dating Wayne states that doing that provides one person with too much power. Rome, she says had such a hero, his name was Caesar, and he never wanted to leave. Batman flirts with similar power issues in this film and more than once comes periliously close to being like Caesar, being the man he fought in the first film, Ra Al Ghul.
The Joker - is the opposite of Dent and Ra Al Ghul and Wayne himself. He is as Bruce's trusted aid and foster father, Alfred states, a man who enjoys nothing more than just watching the world burn. It is his only aim. There's no bargaining with such men. They care for nothing. This is the difference between Jack Nicholson's clown and Ledger's - and the reason why Ledger's will haunt your nightmares long after the film is over. To say Ledger's performance in this role is terrific or admirable is a gross understatement. It is literally mind-blowing. Ledger's voice cackles like one of those clowns from a box popping up. "Why so serious?" he jests, sucking on the scars that lift his lips into a perpetual smile, a knife to his victims cheeks threatening to create a similar scar upon their visage.
Commissioner Gordon - underused in the films prior to Nolans, has a beefier role here. If there is a human voice in this film - one of compassion, it may well be his. The good cop stuck in the middle of an institution that is rotting from within. He knows there are bad cops in his force, but he also knows that he can do little about it, but work with what he has. He's the everyman, the day to day hero, who fights his wars...the best he can. Gary Oldman disappears into this role, barely recognizable, and brings a compassion and sympathy to the role that in some ways centers the film. In Gordon we see the battle between good and evil, won on a daily basis, without the self-promotion and grandstanding of Dent or the self-righteous arrogance of Wayne.
Then there's the girl, Rachel Dawes, played quite sportingly by Maggie G. who does a far better job and more believable one than Katie Holmes. She's smart and capable. The problem with Dawes' role is well what I stated in my review of Dr. Horrible. And is also the problem with Barbara Gordon and Detective Ramirez roles in this film. While I understand the rules of this genre provide women with limited functions - this is remember a world run by men and male violence - I'm not sure I should accept it. And I can't help but wonder what men think or are thinking when they watch these films? Or write them? What are they thinking when the only roles they provide for women are these? And how would they feel if the gender roles were reversed? And men played those roles? If women ran things? A few writers have played with the idea, both oddly men, although there may be more - the one's I know of did it on TV - Rob Thomas with Veronica Mars, and Joss Whedon with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Dawes's role in this film makes me uncomfortable - she poses as little more than a choice for the protagonist, an option. Much like Penny in Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog. And like Penny, Dawes is a bright light, the other way, the hope. This by the way is a typical trope in noire fiction - known as the gal friday or the mother - the hopeful female figure who could save our hero. She's his last hope.
Of the characters portrayed in this film, Harvey's tale is perhaps the most interesting and thematic. Harvey Dent stands between the protagonist and the antagonist - he is the playing board on which they are fighting their battle. The winner is not who lives or dies, or who is caught, but rather who gets Dent's soul. Dent - as the Joker states is only different from himself and Batman because he hasn't been made a freak. All you have to do to become mad is fall down, states the Joker, that's all the separates Dent from me.
The Dark Knight, of the Batman flicks inspired by Frank Miller's revisionist graphic novel of the same name, may come closest to matching the themes within that novel. The concept of a vigiliant coming very close to a facist dictator creating his own army, an ideologue who is willing to break all the rules to create his world. It's a theme that the first film preached about, but the second adeptly shows, with more of an air of mystery. Will Batman go there, will it happen? Can any superhero not go there eventually? We are not told - so much as left to draw our own conclusions regarding what happened here. Is the Batman truly a hero...or just the hero that this dark world requires, a dark world that he may or may not have had a hand in creating? Would he be a hero anywhere else? Or the villian in the hero's cloak? 'A world without the Batman,' the Joker cackles to Batman's smooth soft hiss of denial, 'is too boring, too tame. You,' he tells him, hanging upside down hooked into the side of the building by a bat hook, 'complete me.' 'I can't kill you, you're too much fun.'
To beat the Joker, Wayne turns the Batman into the villian of the piece, takes the blame for crimes someone else, someone he respected, has done, in order to protect that person's image, and tells Gordon to hunt him - the Batman. To let him be the Dark Knight, the vigilante that has gone too far and people should hate and not want to become.A counter-opposite to how he is portrayed in the beginning of the film. He ousts himself as a freak, before they can. 'Hoping,' as Dent says in eerie foreshadowing early on and echoed by Gordon at the end, 'to die a hero as opposed to surviving to see himself become the very villian he hates and has seen others become.'
Was The Dark Knight worth it? Oh yes, and then some. Heck the previews alone were worth the price of admission - they gave us previews of Quantum of Solace, The Watchmen and Terminator: Salvation - all of which look amazing, especially The Watchmen. Previews aside, the Dark Knight may well be the best action/superhero film that I've seen in my life. Although that may not be fair - since the other films really don't aspire to be much more than fun rollercoaster rides. This baby made Iron Man feel like a saturday morning cartoon by comparison, and I enjoyed Iron Man.
To spoil or not to spoil, therein lies the question. If you've read or are at all familar with the stories in the following three Batman graphic novels that more or less redefined the Batman comic series and persona back in the lat 1980s and early 1990s, I probably can't spoil you - you know the story, more or less. Those three graphic novels are: The Long Halloween by Tim Sale and Jeff Loeb (whom I believe Whedon may have gotten to write one of the Buffy issues), The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, and The Dark Knight by Frank Miller. Of the three this film follows the first one the closest - The Long Halloween - provides us with the dual tales of the Joker and Harvey Dent, changing Dent's origin story slightly from original. The Long Halloween may be one of the scariest and grittest noir stories told about an action hero. This film follows it - very closely. If you are not a fan of the noir superhero genre and by "noir" - I mean dark, gritty, and violent with a somewhat nihilistic/cynical look at human nature - you will not like The Dark Knight. If you are a fan of this particular genre, as I am, you will be in movie heaven. To say it is a dark and at times sadistically violent film is an understatement. This is not Superman or Fantastic Four or X-men.
This is the film I thought Tim Burton was planning to make in 1980 and was grossly disappointed. Burton's film, while fun and stylish, pales in comparison to what The Dark Knight manages to accomplish, an accomplishment that falls just a notch or two short of being a masterpiece in this genre. The fact it falls short may have a great deal more to do with the genre it is in than with anything else. Fans of Miller, Moore, and Loeb's Batmans, will however be pleased.
The Dark Knight does in some respects, far better, what others have tried to do in similar ventures such as V for Vendetta, Wanted, Iron Man, and including Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog, except here the lines are far grayer. There is an air of mystery in this film that is lacking in those other films. And the villians here in some aspects reflect the choices our protagonist, Bruce Wayne, has made. The line between Bruce and the Joker, as the Joker himself points out with cackling glee is not all that thick. The only thing separating us, he tells Batman, is you have rules. One, says Batman. Yes, cackles the Joker, and once you break it, you are no different than me.
Throughout the film the two are juxtaposed - compared. We flip between them. That's a major theme here - how everyone has two faces, two sides of a coin. Harvey Dent enjoys flipping a coin - telling people that's how he decides what to do. It's his "father's" trick. That's another heavy theme in the film, which also reflects an aspect of our hero's psyche - Bruce Wayne reactes to his father's memory, but which father - Ra Al Ghul, Alfred, Lucius Fox, or the biological one? Perhaps a combination of all? There's multiple stories here, which at the hands of a less adept director and writer might have unraveled, here they have a central focus - and that is as reflections of Batman himself.
Harvey Dent - is the white knight district attorney, the current beau of Wayne's childhood love Rachel Dawes, the woman he hopes to be with some day if he can ever let go of his alter-ego. Dent is the hero that Bruce sees as his own and Gotham's salvation. The hero who can put away the crooks without a gun or a fist, without violence. If Dent succeeds, the Batman can retire and Wayne is free. Dent represents all that Bruce Wayne is fighting for. Dent is the man that Wayne believes his father wanted him to be.
The only problem is Dent is a bit too much like Bruce - he has his own twitches. I make my own luck he tells Rachel. My coin has two heads, one on both sides. It's a two-faced coin, each face the same. What's disturbing is his constant need to flip it. And like Bruce, he is also a bit of an ideologe or idealist - he argues - impressing Wayne, who clearly shares his views - that Gotham needs a guard dog, a hero at its gates, a vigilante who keeps back the villians. The Russian Ballerina currently dating Wayne states that doing that provides one person with too much power. Rome, she says had such a hero, his name was Caesar, and he never wanted to leave. Batman flirts with similar power issues in this film and more than once comes periliously close to being like Caesar, being the man he fought in the first film, Ra Al Ghul.
The Joker - is the opposite of Dent and Ra Al Ghul and Wayne himself. He is as Bruce's trusted aid and foster father, Alfred states, a man who enjoys nothing more than just watching the world burn. It is his only aim. There's no bargaining with such men. They care for nothing. This is the difference between Jack Nicholson's clown and Ledger's - and the reason why Ledger's will haunt your nightmares long after the film is over. To say Ledger's performance in this role is terrific or admirable is a gross understatement. It is literally mind-blowing. Ledger's voice cackles like one of those clowns from a box popping up. "Why so serious?" he jests, sucking on the scars that lift his lips into a perpetual smile, a knife to his victims cheeks threatening to create a similar scar upon their visage.
Commissioner Gordon - underused in the films prior to Nolans, has a beefier role here. If there is a human voice in this film - one of compassion, it may well be his. The good cop stuck in the middle of an institution that is rotting from within. He knows there are bad cops in his force, but he also knows that he can do little about it, but work with what he has. He's the everyman, the day to day hero, who fights his wars...the best he can. Gary Oldman disappears into this role, barely recognizable, and brings a compassion and sympathy to the role that in some ways centers the film. In Gordon we see the battle between good and evil, won on a daily basis, without the self-promotion and grandstanding of Dent or the self-righteous arrogance of Wayne.
Then there's the girl, Rachel Dawes, played quite sportingly by Maggie G. who does a far better job and more believable one than Katie Holmes. She's smart and capable. The problem with Dawes' role is well what I stated in my review of Dr. Horrible. And is also the problem with Barbara Gordon and Detective Ramirez roles in this film. While I understand the rules of this genre provide women with limited functions - this is remember a world run by men and male violence - I'm not sure I should accept it. And I can't help but wonder what men think or are thinking when they watch these films? Or write them? What are they thinking when the only roles they provide for women are these? And how would they feel if the gender roles were reversed? And men played those roles? If women ran things? A few writers have played with the idea, both oddly men, although there may be more - the one's I know of did it on TV - Rob Thomas with Veronica Mars, and Joss Whedon with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Dawes's role in this film makes me uncomfortable - she poses as little more than a choice for the protagonist, an option. Much like Penny in Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog. And like Penny, Dawes is a bright light, the other way, the hope. This by the way is a typical trope in noire fiction - known as the gal friday or the mother - the hopeful female figure who could save our hero. She's his last hope.
Of the characters portrayed in this film, Harvey's tale is perhaps the most interesting and thematic. Harvey Dent stands between the protagonist and the antagonist - he is the playing board on which they are fighting their battle. The winner is not who lives or dies, or who is caught, but rather who gets Dent's soul. Dent - as the Joker states is only different from himself and Batman because he hasn't been made a freak. All you have to do to become mad is fall down, states the Joker, that's all the separates Dent from me.
The Dark Knight, of the Batman flicks inspired by Frank Miller's revisionist graphic novel of the same name, may come closest to matching the themes within that novel. The concept of a vigiliant coming very close to a facist dictator creating his own army, an ideologue who is willing to break all the rules to create his world. It's a theme that the first film preached about, but the second adeptly shows, with more of an air of mystery. Will Batman go there, will it happen? Can any superhero not go there eventually? We are not told - so much as left to draw our own conclusions regarding what happened here. Is the Batman truly a hero...or just the hero that this dark world requires, a dark world that he may or may not have had a hand in creating? Would he be a hero anywhere else? Or the villian in the hero's cloak? 'A world without the Batman,' the Joker cackles to Batman's smooth soft hiss of denial, 'is too boring, too tame. You,' he tells him, hanging upside down hooked into the side of the building by a bat hook, 'complete me.' 'I can't kill you, you're too much fun.'
To beat the Joker, Wayne turns the Batman into the villian of the piece, takes the blame for crimes someone else, someone he respected, has done, in order to protect that person's image, and tells Gordon to hunt him - the Batman. To let him be the Dark Knight, the vigilante that has gone too far and people should hate and not want to become.A counter-opposite to how he is portrayed in the beginning of the film. He ousts himself as a freak, before they can. 'Hoping,' as Dent says in eerie foreshadowing early on and echoed by Gordon at the end, 'to die a hero as opposed to surviving to see himself become the very villian he hates and has seen others become.'