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Amazing. A breathtaking epic. The hyperbole was all true. It’s the Empire Strikes Back and Godfather Pt II of Batman movies. It’s 2.5hrs of unrelenting, edge-of-seat, nail-biting tension. It’s thrilling, amusing, scary and above all, enter-fuckin-taining.
It’s true, Ledger provides the definitive Joker here. He’s scary, he’s funny, he’s chaos personified, an “unstoppable force”, as a character he’s stripped down to pure pathological purpose and insanity absent of context, and as a result, is pretty damn terrifying.
However, this is also Harvey Dent’s movie and Aaron Eckhart is the heart and soul of The Dark Knight, and really, the title is more about him than Batman. As the tolls of his war against crime lead him down a dark path, away from Justice and towards Vengeance, his transformation into Two-Face is believable, moving and one of the best FX jobs I’ve ever seen.
Batman is the driving force behind everything, he’s the catalyst that got things moving and he keeps the action rolling without pause. There are some amazing action sequences and Bale’s commitment to the role shines through as the tortured protagonist caught in the middle of so many battles and half wanting to give up.
There are flaws, sure, the HK sequence is almost entirely superfluous, there are a number of quick cuts in certain scenes that left me slightly dazed and confused, Nolan still can’t direct a close-combat action sequence, there’s also one or two leaps in narrative logic that are a bit extreme, but these are tiny roadbumps on a roadtrip peeling down the motorway at 200 miles per hour, bullets whizzing past and the wind rushing in your ears.
If you’re not dazzled by the cinematic spectacle and sheer awesome scope of what is effectively two massive arcs crammed into one movie and instead focus on the negatives, you’re a complete asshole.
This is the best movie of 2008. The best comic book movie ever made and an instant favourite of mine for a long time to come.

Post-script: Oh yeah, caught this on an IMAX screen, pretty awesome and definitely the way to go for this movie - especially given the few scenes that were filmed specifically for the 25 meter screen.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 8:21 am and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.