The Dark Knight Gets His Show Stolen

Two and a half weeks since I saw and loved The Dark Knight, and I still haven't written a thing about it? My goodness, I am slack.

Well, it isn't just slackness. Unlike, say, Iron Man (which was crying out for me to be flippant and disrespectful about it), The Dark Knight was mostly just really good. I'm not very good at writing about things that are awesome; it tends to degenerate into burbling and overuse of the word "awesome", with a complete absence of meaningful content. Perhaps I should start out by complaining, and see how I go.

There were two things I actually didn't like, and the main one was the "Batman voice". I don't remember noticing it as much in Batman Begins, perhaps because Bruce Wayne had all the lengthy speeches; this time, when Batman spends quite a lot of time talking, his bass-ified Batman voice is not as silly as Xerxes' in 300, but still quite silly and not always easy to understand. It's all very well to have a dramatic hero voice, but not if it makes you sound like a cheap speaker-human hybrid. The second thing I didn't like was Two-Face's, well, face. It looked like something I would expect to see in a shlocky horror movie, not in a gritty-realism Nolan Batman.

The only other quibble that I had was that I wanted the Joker to tell a third version of the "wanna know how I got these scars?" story, not have Batman interrupt him. A third story would have been nicely symmetrical (although I suppose disrupting that was a fair enough play, I am still cranky with Nolan). Incidentally, the Joker's stories reminded me oddly of The Mountain Goats, so much so that I have been listening to All Hail West Texas and We Shall All Be Healed even more than I otherwise would have (hint: that is a lot).

Heath Ledger's Joker was, as we were all brainwashed into expecting encouraged to expect, excellent. I don't think the hype was in any way unwarranted. The Joker was utterly insane, in the way that also suggests a frightening sort of sanity, and not overplayed at all. I think one would have to look very hard to find a trace of Heath Ledger in the performance -- and I won't get into analysing that, because it would just be overreaching (and morbid overreaching, at that). So much has been said in praise of this Joker that it would be dull and repetitive of me to rehash it, so I'll just say that this movie was a Joker movie, not a Batman movie.

The (mostly) unsung hero, though, was Gary Oldman. He was just brilliant - but then, he always is.

Other bits and pieces of opinion and observation:

• I am susceptible to irritation when the generic bad guys in superhero movies are always filthy foreigners. I know it's "just" genre schtick, but it's irritating.
• The pointed real-world political allegorical posturing didn't actually annoy me much, if at all. It was fairly deftly done.
• The whole thing with the two ferries was amazing.
• I am so taken by this idea (warning: spoiler) from thekit that I am going to be bitterly disappointed when the next movie comes out and something else happens instead.
• Michael Caine & Morgan Freeman = win.
• Really enjoyed Batman's transformation into the dark knight, angst and all.
• Can we have the next movie now?
• How about now?

It took me quite a while to resurface after some very necessary hand-unclenching, two very sure signs that I got sucked in good and proper. The whole thing didn't feel long at all. (It was long; I know, because the buses had stopped running by the time it finished. Sigh.)

In short: A+, would watch again (a rare thing for comic book movies, although it seems that they're the only ones I get out and see these days).