Now obviously if you’re planning to, you’ve likely seen the second in the new Batman franchise, The Dark Knight already. For those of you who haven’t and even those who have and wish to see more, I strongly recommend getting your booking in to see it at an IMAX near you – i’m in the UK and to my knowledge there are only two IMAX cinemas with prints of TDK. I went to the British Film Institute IMAX by Waterloo last thursday and was absolutely blown away.
If you’ve seen the film, or the opening sequence online you’ll know it begins with high shots of the city (i’ll assume its really chicago, as they used this for Gotham in Batman Begins?) and these are truly breathtaking, the sheer scale of the Imax screen means you’re unable to focus on the entire projection canvas at once – this gives the effect that you’re looking at a real image – in the way that your peripheral vision shows you what surrounds your focused vision but you aren’t focused on it – i’m rambling here but its incredible, take my word for it.
The IMAX viewing aside TDK absolutely won me over as a film in its own right too, the narrative, the amazing acting by Ledger who literally puts everyone in the shade. To me it really didn’t feel like a ‘superhero movie’ as some films are being labelled – spiderman, superman returns, iron man etc – i’d happily call them superhero movies, but I have to say that TDK felt more like a Cop Drama with the best villainy you could imagine. I liked that the focus really wasn’t on Batman as a character this time around, it seemed to have more of a central theme of terror, and whilst it had post 9/11 written all over it, it didn’t dwell too much on the ‘terrorist threat’ branding, which would’ve really put me off.
Heath Ledger captured the kind of Joker i’ve always wanted to see onscreen. Having read tons of different takes on the character in the comics my favourites are still some of the most obvious – the ‘Killing Joke’ and ‘Knightfall’ Jokers – that kind of careless mayhem he seems to exude – never really drifting into supreme evil, and finding it all very amusing along the way. I found his portrayal of the character most pleasing when he demonstrated his more analytical side – his discussion with Dent about how good and evil works was inspired – I won’t say too much but if you’ve seen it you’ll know the bit I mean.
The decision to replace Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes with Maggie Gyllenhall was great too, Holmes always felt too young in Batman Begins as she still seems to look about 18 and we assume batman / bruce wayne is mid 30s? so that always felt a little weird (wait how old is Tom Cr.. forget it) – Maggie Gylenhall always feels more mature onscreen and she’s simply a better actress (see the excellent ‘Secretary’ for proof!), not that TDK demanded much of her, but she definitely brought what was needed to the role of Rachel.
The other welcome surprise was Harvey Dent, a fantastic turn by Aaron Eckhart, a guy whose work I’ve always liked to check out since his excellent work in ‘Thank You For Smoking’. The character of Dent was always going to be tricky, and I was concerned when I heard Dent would be in the film that it may suffer from the Spiderman 3 syndrome, not in that kind of ‘turning out appallingly fucking bad’ but just too many villains to write a cohesive narrative around. Granted TDK could’ve worked without Dent but it would’ve made for a much lesser narrative – his character evolves over the two hours and responds well to the situations he’s posed with, proving to be a fascinating hero / anti-hero in his own right – rather than a supporting character, which many of the comic adaptations seem to suffer with.
This leads me neatly to the writing. Now whilst not being incredible I found the writing absolutely hit the nail on the head tone wise – Batman Begins and a number of the ‘Superhero Movie’ subgenre seem to be written as an extended trailer with a series of one-liners littering them, whereas TDK felt like a truly well scripted piece, with only a few one-liner moments, some of which actually worked pretty well – Alfred pointing out that ‘Some men just want to watch the world burn’ served for an excellent surmission of the Joker and the film at large.
So to sum up – and I can’t not mention Batman’s ludicrous voice so there’s that out of the way – this is an excellent, perfectly paced piece of action / sci-fi drama, with no points where you felt you were watching an action ‘set piece’ followed by ‘some meaningful dialogue’ (see the appalling ‘Wanted’ in cinemas now), it all hung together very neatly. I also loved that the Joker kept me guessing throughout – was what occured ‘All Part of the Plan..’ or was it his random mayhem? I still don’t know, and I freakin love it. If you haven’t seen it yet then sort it out! Book tickets to see it at the IMAX, its more than worth the trip.
“Who wants to see a magic trick?”
