Title: The Dark Knight Movie Review
Genre: Action/Crime/Drama/Thriller
Cast: Bale, Ledger, Eckhart, Gyllenhaal, Caine and Freeman
Director: Christopher Nolan
Release: (2008)
Clearly, I must hate Batman. I mean, The Dark Knight came out well over a week ago by now and, like an ingrate, I just showed up this weekend to see it for the first time. Not my third, fifth, or eighth time like a real Batman fan – my first. For shame. I thought I could hide my scandalous indifference towards the caped crusader by keeping all these Batman masks and action figures littered around my office area for as long as I can remember. I thought I might distract from my deplorable irreverence towards Nolan’s great masterpiece by stringing up this oversized Dark Knight figurine (with adjustable cape, playa’) on a series of fishing lines to look as if he’s flying down at my desk in attack mode, several years in advance of its release. But, nay, I’ve been exposed.
I had a lot of work due at my job last week, and I didn’t tie my resignation to a bat-shaped paperweight and throw it through my boss’s window on my way to a premiere somewhere instead. I had some big proposals coming due for school, and I didn’t mail them all in with nothing but a Joker card enclosed in the envelopes and then drop out of school to begin a pilgrimage to see The Dark Knight fifty times in fifty states in fifty days. My girlfriend’s parents were coming into town to visit last weekend, and I didn’t pull on my Kevlar-toed batboots and kick her ass to the curb to get out of seeing them instead of Mr. Nolan’s Opus. I’m sorry, alright! How many ways do you want me to say it?
I know, I know. You’ve seen it six times, I’ve seen it once. You still re-watch all the trailers on your phone in the bathroom at work twice a day, I don’t. You were the first one to tell your friends that you think Heath Ledger “reinvented” The Joker, that you “ will say it right now – Best Supporting Actor, hands-down” and that they “really have got to see it”, I wasn’t. You’re smart, I’m stupid. You’re fast, I’m slow. You’re strong, I’ve got spaghetti arms. Your hair is like apple-cinnamony rabbit’s fur, mine’s like mess hall-used Brillo pads. You eat in restaurants, I eat dog poo outside. Ok? Is that good enough? I know you don’t need to read any more reviews about this movie and you’re so far ahead of pseudo-fans like me that you’ve already written four drafts of a sequel for your fan fiction web site, but I didn’t see any other movies this week, alright? I’m sorry. Humor me.
Aside from the conflicts I had last weekend, another reason I waited a week to see The Dark Knight was to see it in IMAX. (I know, if I was a real fan I could have bought tickets to last weekend’s IMAX premiere a month in advance, I’m not trying to make excuses.) But it was a reason, and it was worth it. Throughout the film, Director Christopher Nolan integrates a number of sweeping, swooping, and soaring over cityscape transition shots filmed specially with IMAX lenses and processed specifically for the IMAX audience. This would include the very opening shot in which he uses this approach to, almost quite literally, drop the audience right into the middle of the action. From there the film hits the ground running and never looks back for the next two and a half hours. By itself, this represents a pretty significant deviation from the approach of its predecessor, Batman Begins, in which the back story was paramount and the action was comparatively meted out like the studio was paying for pyrotechnics with food stamps.
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