Sunday, July 20, 2008

The Dark Knight - Dark and Gripping!

One first impression - AWESOME!!

Christopher Nolan returns with a superb sequel to what was an interesting (& most required) restart to the Batman franchise. Teaming up with his brother, he delivers a dark and brooding story, which keeps the audience engaged thru' out.

Batman keeps doing good for Gotham, but not everyone perceives him to be a hero... meanwhile a while knight is emerging, DA Harvey Dent who seems to have the best interests of Gotham (and Rachel!!) at heart. This seems to be the perfect setup required for Bruce - let Dent take care of the criminals and end his taxing double-life as Batman...

....until of course The Joker turns up ; a man with no morals and a sheer mission to give the people a "better class of criminal", he shows Gotham how terrorizing a person can be, holding an entire city hostage to his antics.. brilliant!!

I wont discuss the story any further becoz it would be "spoiler-time", but suffice to say it packs in a lot of bang with dark themes and moral dilemmas, every major character has a part to play and is left to question their basic ideals..

Performances are all top notch with Christian Bale and Heath Ledger deserving special mention.. It is indeed a great achievement that Nolan managed to get this much of a good screenplay into what is essential a comic-book summer blockbuster without compromising on the big-setpiece action sequences...

My only real grouse is the ending (which I dont want to reveal) and also possibly using Two-Face pretty lamely (though his story arc lends a lot credence to the Batman-Joker rivalry)..

All said and done - a real gem and possibly the best comic book movie ever (possibly, only because I havent seen all the comic book movies)...

Edit : This came about during discussions on Muhi's reply - Now that Ledger is dead (but the Joker isnt) (spoiler in white), I am really interested to see what Nolan does with part 3. "The Dark Knight" is going to be very very difficult to live upto!!

Edit 2 : I am notching up the score by 2 more points after watching the movie again. Given the way the story goes, the ending is really very well done. Its just that when I was watching the first time, Nolan was setting the bar higher with every sequence and I expected a "bang" at the end. Of course, one question remains : How & when did the Joker rig up the bombs on the yachts, without anyone noticing? Fans have already answered on imdb saying he used the 1 year period from part1 to do this, but while this can explain everything else, it doesn't explain the yachts. (spoiler in white)

Score : 84 (DONT MISS IT!!)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Had similar feelings about the movie, though I was more disappointed than you are with the ending. The movie was building terrifically to a climax that never happened at least for me, ie the ending should have been motivated and executed better. I could spot traces of Jack Nicholson (The shining) in Ledger's portrayal. You cant help but empathize for this guy from the streets taking on Batman with all his high tech gadgetry. Inspite of my gripes, I still agree its a not to miss film, however Imdb rating it the best movie ever made is just ridiculous. Oh and one more thing, my wait for batman 2 began the moment batman 1 ended ... Part I made me such a fanboi. So with all those huge expectations, the movie failed in making me feel the same way about batman 3.