When I got home last night after seeing it I logged onto ventrilo and after making one really bad joke about Ledger being dead infront of the camera and completely lifeless in the role, I immediately began to gush over how blown away I was by the movie. I was filled with an energy that I feel allowed me to articulate how I felt about it perfectly at the time and I honest don't think I'll be able to do so with the same accuracy ever again. I don't think I have the energy to even try.
So instead I'm afraid all I can offer you is some scattered thoughts and humour because apparently the movie splattered the majority of my brain all over the walls of my skull.
The negative reviews are hilarious and common but not really maddening because everytime I actually read one of them, the guy writing it comes off as a total moron who didn't take the movie seriously because he's a douche-bag. I am actually going to post a lot of these sometime this week in my next installment of Game Failers, but here's a couple for you to enjoy now.
Batman's psychic scars are mirrored by those of the Joker, while his lofty ambitions and grievous failings find their counterparts in Harvey Dent. He's the tight-jawed district attorney played by Aaron Eckhart, who also plays the hideously, and finally tediously, deformed Two-Face. (Both of those incarnations flip a coin fatefully in the fashion of Javier Bardem's monster in "No Country For Old Men," except that this coin has two heads, so what's the point?)
Wow...
The production outbonds Bond with technology that includes a new Batsuit made of titanium-dipped triweave fiber (so Bruce can turn his head), a two-wheeled vehicle called a Bat-Pod (they couldn't call it an iPod and they didn't want to call it a motorcycle) and a new Batmobile that looks to be less than brilliant when it comes to gas mileage. Quick shots of the control panel show two of the car's operating modes to be Loiter and Intimidate. The movie's main mode is Suffocate.
Yeah, what was with that NEVER BEFORE SEEN batmobile I really wasn't expecting that. What was worse though was the "bat-pod". I mean, they just wouldn't shut up about that thing. I think "bat-pod" was said more times in that movie than "Dark" and "Knight" put together and that scene where batman was dancing around with it as a black silhouette standing on a bright single-colour background? Horrible.
One of the things I really loved about the movie was how real it manages to make the whole thing seem while keeping you on the edge of your seat the whole time. There is nothing boring about this movie and with how long it is, that's pretty amazing. But as exciting as it is, nothing ever seems over the top. The Joker is introduced and used thoroughly as a believable and yet fasinating character and yet
he is the Joker. He wears a purple suit most of the time, he's got the make up on, he makes jokes all the time, makes the batmobile lose a wheel and then gets away. I dunno what it is, maybe it's just the fact that he never releases neon green toxic gas on his enemies or fires a bang-flag at anyone, but he just seems
real. Heath Ledger's performance and Nolan's direction and writing suck you in and present the Joker to you in a way that despite his intensely cruel and theatric nature, he never seems outlandish.
I guess it's sort of why the whole movie works so well. You could probably take most of this movie, strip out everything batman from it and still be left with a pretty exciting crime drama along the lines of Se7en or what have you. But then you add the fact that it's Batman and what that offers the movie in terms of characters and themes and the result is a movie that blows you away. It is a movie that only benefits from being a superhero movie and in no way can be seen as suffering from having to be based on its source material and that's what something like Batman deserves. It deserves to be taken seriously and treated seriously and made to shine, not to be tied to a stick and then dangled around in front of us like a couple of batman movies in the past have done.
No, it's not perfect, there is a character or two that don't really seem to mean much and the storyline isn't seamless, it's true. But the movie never gave me a chance to dwell on those grievences and what the movie does right and perfectly made such a stronger impression on me that I really have to think about them hard before they start to annoy me.
