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The Dark Knight: First Impression from someone who did not like it (7)

2:00 PM by Zia , under , ,

What?! Someone did not love this action-packed blockbuster? Blasphemy!

I eventually watched the movie everybody is talking about last Friday. I gave a lot of thought whether I should write a review ...Well why not? I have been actively watching movies for over 35 years so I do feel I have an opinion to share.

Why should I join the rest of the enthusiastic crowd, waving a red book and hailing director Chris Nolan as a genius?

Now, don't get me wrong, I did not hate the movie...OK, let's start on the good bits:

  • The first 20 minutes were brilliant: the pace, the editing, the music, photography and dialogues...All the ingredients to prepare the audience for a good show.
  • Bale's portrayal of Batman is exemplary: dark, fast and furious.
  • Some of the action sequences were excellent including the Batcycle
  • It's not as bad as Spider-Man 2 or X-Men 2
  • And....That's it!
Sure, Ledger's performance as a Joker was very good, not groundbreaking though. And yes, he certainly brought another dimension to the character. But he did not have the same impact or wicked humour (we are talking about a joker after all) as Nicholson's.

For a film of this scale, there were too many 'dead time', i.e. scenes with loads of cheesy dialogues and no action. For a long movie like this one, one needs to keep the audience on the edge of their seat. Take last summer's Transformer, the film was too long for me but still kept a good pace of action sequences.

The biggest problem with The Dark Knight was simple: too many characters and story lines. Sometime after the first 20 minutes, Nolan lost it: the movie was no longer about the capped crusader the film was named after but a whole series of people trying to distinguish good vs evil.

The 90's Batman movies failed for the very reasons: loss of focus when there were too many characters involved.

I reckon the film should have been called 'Harvey's lost it'.

Do I regret watching it? No...So this film comes very neutral: some good scenes but not worthy of the praise it has received.

For the record, Sam Raimy's first Spider-man remains for me the 'perfect' super-hero movie of recent time: simple, well-structured, with a comic book feel and a nice mix of dialogues and action sequences.



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7 Reply to "The Dark Knight: First Impression from someone who did not like it"

Zack on 24 August 2008 17:58

I couldn't disagree more.

The good vs. evil is what made this more than some crappy generic action movie... Take out the "slow bits" and "dialogue" and you have a caped vigilante and nothing else.

 

john on 26 August 2008 12:29

I really think this is a load of crap. I loved spiderman but this film took the whole superhero genre to a new level entirely. It went beyond the standard good versus evil stereotype. The film has done to the superhero genre what stephen king has always tried to do to the horror genre. It showed that you can take concepts such as chaos theory and game theory and apply them to what has usually been a popular context. The dialogue was always good (possibly unrealistically so)

 

bill on 26 August 2008 14:44

Now of course we are all entitled to our own opinions, but I don't think that you should say that the length of a movie is a downside. You are basically saying there wasn't enough action to justify the length of the movie... we can't help it that you have ADD and cannot concentrate for slightly extended periods of time, or cannot follow a few character's storylines. Get some medication then watch it again.

 

Anonymous on 27 September 2008 03:14

It sure is hard to go against popular opinion, isn't it? But one should't have to be insulted for it. If you have something intelligent to argue, fine. But calling someone else's opinion "a load of crap" or saying they have a mental problem because they don't agree with you... Well, that makes your own opinion pretty useless.

 

Tom on 6 October 2008 05:33

I felt somewhat similarly, though I probably liked it a bit better than you (averaged out an 8 out of 10 for me).

Essentially I completely agree that this movie simply wasn't about Batman in almost any way. Not that it wasn't a "Batman movie" - the gadgets are a delight, etc. Just that he wasn't really the star at all - far more about Joker and Harvey, etc. Even a bit more about Bruce Wayne than Batman.

I don't say that the above is a "Bad Thing" at all, but it's not a "Good Thing" either to me.

I generally don't mind "dead times", but I do get where you're coming from - the movie was very "wow bham, zoom" one minute, slow pontification by this character or that the next.

I guess it simply catered to the extremes a bit too much for my taste.

 

Alonzo Riley on 8 October 2008 19:11

Wow, you didn't like it because it was overly complex. What a bruising critique.

 

Anonymous on 4 May 2009 18:18

I really think this was a great movie, one of the best I've ever seen. All the things yall are saying are detriments, I feel are really what makes the movie. Yes, the title is The Dark Knight, but batman IS Bruce Wayne thus a facet of the movie is for Bruce to divide himself from the crusader and how best to do so, also trying to decide how far he is willing to go whilst masked. And i really think the pace of the film from how fast it would be going to suddenly slow is meant to try to get the audience to experience the hectic sense thats in the storyline and i think he does an amazing job of it. Many times directors go overboard, but i really think this movie has a great balance.