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1. In a nutshell: not bad, but certainly not as good as the first one.
2. As with 'the first one,' Batman Begins, the excessive running-time (now 2 1/2 hours!) is padded out by a superfluous, overextended sequence in the first half set in East Asia: here a very James Bondy bit of business in Hong Kong. Just doesn't fit with the rest of the movie. If Nolan wants to audition for the 007 franchise, he should do it on his own time, not ours.
3. C.Bale's Bat-voice has become an exaggerated rasp, occasionally inaudible/indecipherable. A retrograde step. Key supporting players M.Caine (as Batman's "batman") and M.Freeman have much less to do than last time. Another retrograde step. M.Gyllenhaal, surprisingly, makes slightly less of an impact than K.Holmes managed - even considering the fact she has shorter screen-time to play with.
4. If H.Ledger's Joker is supposed to be so showstoppingly amazing, why did the scriptwriters feel the need to introduce a subsidiary "villain" for the final third? This represents a surprising failure of nerve. Speaking of minor evildoers, C.Murphy pops up so briefly at the start as 'Scarecrow' - the leftfieldish baddie who was one of the sly highlights of the first movie - that you wonder why they even bothered.
5. The film introduces an intriguing philosophical angle in which the Joker reveals that he's a nihilistic kind of "freak", much closer kin to Batman (all that theatricality, flamboyance, dress-up) than the city's square, conventional rule-bound cops. Fair point. Unfortunately the Joker has a gets the wrong end of the stick when it comes to his beloved "anarchy". Anarchy in its purest sense means no rulers. It doesn't really mean no rules.
And the picture doesn't even follow through on its poster's promise of "a world without rules" - the rules remain crystal clear throughout. The Dark Knight should and could have been a nightmarishly unpredictable trip to the dark side and beyond - instead, Nolan tries to appeal to both kids (Bat-bike?!) and adults, but consistently trips himself up (the courtroom and press-conference scenes are distractingly implausible and silly.)
In the drive to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, hardly any bloodshed is shown - and having had the audacity to blow up and demolish an entire hospital, the filmmakers then chicken out by informing us that the building was safely evacuated beforehand. The near-incessant violence - largely without consequences for the injured - is much closer to the discredited ker-POW cartoonishess of the 1960s TV show than Nolan and company would presumably like to admit.
6. Dodgy subtext. The first film was all about whether or not Gotham should be destroyed or not. The conclusion: Batman could make it better. This movie moves forward: Batman realises he, a masked vigilante, can't save Gotham on his own. He looks to the new DA, Harvey Dent (A.Eckhart) as the city's "white knight" saviour. Circumstances prevent Dent from properly fulfilling this function.
But Gotham - or any real-world city (and The Dark Knight is ostentatious in its desire to inject some measure of "realism" into the superhero genre) - is never going to get anywhere if it waits for messianic public officials to solve its social problems by simply cracking down on criminals. A megalopolis like this (30m inhabitants, we're told) must rely on bottom-up solutions, which are never even considered or mentioned in the Bat-universe. And they wonder why the city is in such a mess. These aren't minor consideration, given how many people are going to see - and possibly be influenced by this particular movie.
7. Disappointingly ropey conclusion, cumbersomely explaining the picture's title and turning Batman from hunter to hunted - this switcheroo executed in a clunky manner that feels like the result of multiple script rewrites. Batman Begins, by contrast, set us up pretty niftily for part 2 (a somewhat false dawn, in retrospect.)
8. American critics and public seem to have been afflicted by some kind of mass hysteria with regard to The Dark Knight: the $155m opening weekend has been straight-facedly described as the pop-culture-phenomenon equivalent of "where-were-you-when..?" events such as the assassination of JFK and the Apollo moon landings. It was bad enough when people started getting worked up about how much a movie took in its opening week. Now is the weekend going to be the benchmark?! Why not the first day? The first hour? The first minute?
The film, while slickly-assembled and commendably ambitious multiplex fare, is really no great shakes; Ledger's performance is perfectly fine, but nothing to get too excited about (and is he deliberately trying to sound like P.Giamatti?) His untimely death seems to have catalysed a wild over-reaction to the movie. Yes, it's his best work - but, given what he'd done before (previous best: that engaging and widely-underrated comic turn in Brothers Grimm), is that really such massive praise?
Yes, he may well have gone on to much greater things. We'll never know. J.Dean / I.Curtis / K.Cobain syndrome, yet again? Perhaps. And there has to be just the shade of a suspicion that those behind The Dark Knight have put so much emphasis on Ledger and the Joker because they know that the picture's hero is, for all the talk of dark psychology swirling around him, a bit of a plank.
Everybody should just try to calm down.
9. An eye without an eyelid... it just dries up in minutes. Don't take my word for it:
The German then did something very strange. He smiled and licked the man's spittle from about his mouth. He was a very large man with enormous hands and he reached and seized the young captive's head in both these hands and bent as if to kiss him. But it was no kiss. He seized him by the face and it may well have looked to others that he bent to kiss him on each cheek perhaps in the military manner of the French but what he did instead with a great caving of his cheeks was to suck each in turn the man's eyes from his head and spit them out again and leave them dangling by their cords wet and strange and wobbling on his cheeks.
And so he stood. His pain was great but his agony at the disassembled world which could never be put right again was greater. Nor could he bring himself to touch the eyes. He cried out in his despair and waved his hands about before him. He could not see the face of his enemy. The architect of his darkness, the thief of his light. He could see the trampled dust of the street beneath him. A crazed jumble of men's boots. He could see his own mouth. When the prisoners were turned and marched away his friends steadied him by the arm and led him along while the ground swung wildly underfoot. No one had ever seen such a thing. They spoke in awe. The red holes in his skull glowed like lamps. As if there were a deeper fire there that the demon had sucked forth.
They tried to put his eyes back into their sockets with a spoon but none could manage it and the eyes dried on his cheeks like grapes and the world grew dim and colorless and then it vanished forever.
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing, pp276-7
Neil Young
23rd July, 2008
for a more conventionally-structured review, as opposed to these chaotic / nihilistic / 'anarchic' notes, try A.Nayman
MORE FROM SUMMER 2008
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USA
152m (BBFC)
director : Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins, The Prestige, Insomnia, etc)
editor : Lee Smith (Batman Begins, The Prestige, Master and Commander - The Far Side of the World, etc)
seen 22.July at Empire cinema, Newcastle : press show
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