Yet another Dark Knight thread.
 

So.

I think I may actually hate this movie.

Mainly I think my view is that it was a great, great, unbelievably fantastic Joker movie; it was just a godawful Batman movie. Basically Batman spends the entire movie getting his ass kicked by the Joker, letting everybody around him get murdered, and then I mean okay I know this can't be what actually happened but it sure looked like he killed Harvey Dent? WTF?

I mean instead of standing around with his dick in his hands and like, appointing himself the all-seeing Fuhrer of Gotham, would it have killed him to I don't know, do some detective work? Try and actually consider the psychology of his enemy, gather some clues or something, get a move or two ahead of him?

And good Lord you know when Gordon said he trusted his men I assumed he was doing this based on reason, not dumbassedly walking along with a sign on his back saying 'I'll trust anyfuckin'body with a badge, somebody please play me for a prize fool!'

Oh and seriously. Katie Holmes lives through the whole fucking movie, but Maggie Gyllenhall, her you fuckin' kill? Nice move Christopher Nolan, you total, total d-bag.

Well... the ground killed him... or something. Batman doesn't kill, don't be ridiculous.


I just don't see why if Nolan's going for hyper-real Batman, he'd throw in the whole "let me somehow get the thumbprint from the bullethole, then use my moon technology from the future to turn everyone's cellphones into magic sonar, giving me god vision" thing. It even seemed to be trying to call as much attention to itself as possible at parts.

Are you really going to tell me you failed at using spoiler-tags on the second post of the ding-dang thread? Seriously? We can't even make it to like the third or fourth post before I have to ban somebody?

Okay you know what I'm gonna fix that for you this one time but seriously guys, no more of that.

I think officially Harvey was simply knocked unconscious and his death faked as this obviously unrelated "Two-Face" character was buried away someplace (probably Arkham) so as to not taint the legacy of Gotham's uncorruptable beacon of hope.

Honestly, I wasn't sure what happened there either and had to look it up after the fact, which I did feel was one place the movie went wrong. R ushing the ending to where you're not sure of something kind of important like that is kind of a no-no.

I'm going to warn you now, that you may be turning into me.
Cause so far I think I'm the only one on the planet who didn't like this movie.

It wasn't even so much 'rushed' as that the movie just felt like a three-act script with two friggin' acts and then like five minutes of cleanup at the end.

It's nothing new. Shit, I hated the Spider-Man movies. Everyone loved the Spider-Man movies.

I was mostly surprised in that Batman Begins was like, possibly the greatest movie I've ever seen. But this movie was just...

...I mean in all honesty, it was a totally and unbelievably fantastic movie.

But I goddamn hate it all the same.

I'll put it the way my mom did, "It was a movie that wasn't that great, but Heath Ledger as the Joker made it awesome." It was a movie about the Joker, and to that end it was great. Everything that wasn't Joker wasn't as good. Everything else didn't really bother me since I've never really read the Batman, Spider-man, Superman, etc. comics, so yeah...

I dunno, I only really liked the second Spider-Man movie. I was really disappointed by Batman Begins, though. I liked this one a lot better.

I'm sorely tempted to repost my cohesive criticism of TDK here, as it didn't get any responses whatsoever in the other friend...but if no one responded to it it's probably a pretty good sign that no one thought much of it. =P

But my biggest critiques: 1: Batman's moral flexibility and no real statement of his actual position regarding whether or not it's acceptable to kill a supervillain (that's the entire point of his conflict with the Joker, but then he offs Two-Face like that? Strange. And does Batman seriously believe that, by letting the Joker live, he wouldn't be responsible, even if only indirectly, for any future deaths the Joker might hypothetically cause if he escaped from prison like he already has?!?), 2: Gotham looks completely different from its appearance in the first movie, and 3: Gotham and a few other factors really seem to disintegrate much of a cohesive link between BB and TDK.

EDIT: That's interesting. If anything I'm probably going to be the only human being on the planet who enjoyed and liked both movies, but actually had a slight preference for the first over the second.

EDIT 2: Maybe I've overanalyzing this, but I also really didn't care much for the way Dent's transformation to Two-Face was handled. For one, I thought the concept of a conversation between the Joker and Two-Face rather unbelievable as a catalyst to change Dent's entire worldview. Furthermore, the entire thing kind of screamed "Rachel was THAT important to you?" to me. I mean yes it must absolutely be terrible to lose a loved one like that (did he forget the Joker's responsibility in that whole ordeal?) but...I dunno. Maybe it would have worked better for me if there was some exposition like "Dent was an orphan and Rachel's the only human being he ever cared for in his life." Because it's kind of like: yeah Rachel's dead and you liked her lots, but don't you have a family? Friends? Don't you have anything or anyone else who can console you, grieve with you? Don't you have any rocks with which to maintain an aura of sanity?
And then Batman fans say to me "well the entire concept is that Two-Face always had split personalities but Rachel's death brought it out of him." Well, okay, I can accept that -- but there was absolutely no foreshadowing to the dual-personality angle prior to Rachel's death! If you want to pull that out of your ass you have to build up on that point gradually -- show a couple scenes prior to the Dent/Rachel escapade where Dent's other personality briefly slips out, only to have Rachel around to keep it bottled within. Otherwise it's just kind of like "Oh by the way, Gordon, call me my old name and here I go descending into evilness." And I mean I'm sorry if I sound insensitive, but millions of people lose loved ones in terrible ways and DON'T decide the appopriate course of action is to flip coins and start killing people.)

I think that's really why at the end of the day, while I like Harvey Dent as a protagonist, Two-Face is my least favorite of the Nolan-directed antagonists so far -- even worse for me than R'as or Scarecrow.

It's still a great movie, but the Joker made it great. So did Gordon, Rachel and the butler -- I'd even say their acting performances were arguably better than Bale's Batman. Two-Face really didn't do much at all for me. I almost wish they just kept him as Dent throughout this movie and left his descent into Two-Face for a more gradual third movie occurance. You know, leaving him grieving for Rachel and then slowly watch his sanity erode over time. As opposed to Joker somehow pulling that off in a single conversation.

Well, with Begins it was a good enough Batman movie, but I felt like the villains were so misused that I really just couldn't get into it. Either have Scarecrow or Ra's al Ghul and if you do go with the latter, don't screw it up. Pronounce his name right, for instance. Don't try some half-assed plot twist where you try to lead your audience to believe that the old asian man is Ra's and Liam Neeson in his obvious Ra's beard and hairdo totally isn't him, while squeezing him deep into Bruce's whole backstory. If Burton got shit for it when he did it to the Joker, Nolan shouldn't be allowed to get away with it for Ra's.

Which is why I enjoyed this movie a lot more. It lost a lot of actually being about Batman, but it did gain a lot insofar as weaving a story for Harvey, Gordon, the Joker, and Gotham City as a whole. In this sense, I do find it fitting that it was the only Batman movie to not actually have the name "Batman" in the title.