The Dark Knight

I know that everybody and their brother has seen this one by now, but I'm just getting to it for various reasons. I have to agree with one of my friends that this is one of the better comic book movies, but it's still several elements short of deserving a Best Picture nomination in my opinion. You might want to take my opinion with a grain of salt on this one, as I strongly disliked "Batman Begins" in just about every respect, which is one of the reasons I was so slow to rent "The Dark Knight". If I hadn't heard such good things about it from friends, I probably wouldn't have bothered renting it at all.

Heath Ledger and Gary Oldman put in great performances, and Aaron Eckhart is good as well. It's a good thing that Gary Oldman is on his game, as this is really Commissioner Gordon's story. Batman is almost an afterthought in his own movie, which was fine with me, actually, as I'm still not at all a fan of Christian Bale, and he absolutely doesn't hold up against Heath Ledger's Joker.

The acting performances held my interest enough that I didn't realize some of the problems I had with the story until after the fact. For starters, I never had any sense at all of what the Joker wanted, and this bothered me a lot even as I was watching the film. I'm sure a lot of people just accepted that he was supposed to be crazy and that was enough, but even "crazy" people have reasons for what they do. "I had to kill him so the squirrels didn't steal my pajamas" is still a reason. "Because it's fun" is a reason to do some things, but I don't buy it as a reason to plan wildly elaborate crimes, tweak the noses of powerful gangsters, and kill dozens of random people. The crimes themselves were well conceived and as funny as they needed to be, which I'm sure wasn't easy to write. I could live with the contradictory reasons given for the Joker's appearance, and even with the complete lack of any background at all as a stylistic quirk, though I found it less than satisfying. I don't necessarily need everything spelled out for me, but I prefer when you can at least infer a motivation on the bad guy's part. That's tough to do when he appears to be intentionally contradicting himself through most of the movie. For example, he says to Harvey Dent at one point that he's not a planner after we've watched him pull off at least three crimes that would've required incredible amounts of planning to pull off as he did.

As for Christian Bale as Batman, I'll just say that stone faced doesn't equate to intensity for me and leave it at that. This could have been a much better movie with a different Batman who actually seemed to care about stopping the Joker (or about anything at all, for that matter), and might have worked better as a crime drama following Jim Gordon and omitting the Batman character altogether. They would've sold fewer tickets to that movie, though.

I found the ending disappointing after all of the build-up, as well as being contradictory to Batman being well established as a character who simply doesn't kill people. To me, that's an essential part of the character because it's the most important difference between him and the other costumed crazy people that he keeps beating up and turning over to the police. It's true that he doesn't actually kill anyone, but the damage to his reputation with the public thinking that he did would be sufficient to get him locked up for a long while the very first time the police had the chance to do so.

I actually enjoyed the movie well enough while I was watching it, largely carried along by some of the strong acting performances, but at the end of the day I think Chris Nolan's take on Batman is just very different from mine. I really enjoyed "Memento" and I've always been a Batman fan, but the combination of this director and this character just doesn't work for me.