I can finally fucking say that i have seen it 3 times thus far, and each time it got better, simply due to picking up on things that you might not the first go around.

Haven't seen it in imax, perhaps if I feel up to it, I may.

You leave totally satisfied having seen the film, as it was greatness, but then you also sort of feel depressed, simply because as a whole the film was dark and doesn't really end on a high note like most superhero movies do(but then this is why I love Batman, and dont much care for any other comic book stories) and then you have to think about Ledger, who really nails the role he did, captivating you, and making you kinda sad about the fact the Joker, at least the way he played the part, cannot ever come back to the franchise.

Haven't enjoyed a movie this much since LOTR really.

I loved it!

It sagged something fierce in the middle,
but was good overall.

Finally saw it! The IMAX was worth the hike up to Lincoln Center. I didn't like it as much as Batman Begins, some of the reasons are just about the specific things I want out of a superhero movie, and some the reasons I think stand on their own. But I did like it, quite a lot.

I looked away for the pencil gag because I'm squeamish, but Mr. W. comfirmed that seeing it really wasn't any worse than understanding what happened. It seems impossible to sort out a real opinion of Ledger's performance from the hype, which is a shame, because it deserves more than the impression that he got a Death Bump. I liked the shtick with the stories about the scars, because either of those stories, or parts of either of them, or neither of them, could have been true. (I tend to think it's mythology that this translates to real evil people though, usually they're just obvious. I read a book about the interviews Ted Bundy gave to the FBI about the green river killer, and something I always remember about it was that he talked almost completely in cliches - and the author said sociopaths frequently talk like this, because they think it will make them sound like they have regular feelings, and instead it just highlights that they don't, because the attempt at imitation is so obvious. Not exactly the brilliant complex mind of the fictional monster.)

I liked Eckhart's performance also. I was a little uncertain about him until I heard things about how good he was, because I wasn't sure I'd be able to believe him as a genuine crusaduing DA. I saw him in Thank You For Smoking, and it's not that I don't understand that actors can play different characters, but he just looks like that guy, that smarmy bastard. His face just says to me 'I'm a gladhanding sack of shit wrapped in an attractive package.' Thinking it through, I realized what I'm seeing is something so like an archetypical hero's face that it looks like a parody of a hero's face, which is actually what they needed for the two-face thing. I bought him as sincere, and as heartbroken.

Although, and this is a writing thing, the build up to the nickname gave it more weight than it deserved. It wasn't really actually clever considering that is was, as far as I can tell, simply rooted in the fact that regular cops don't like Internal Affairs Division cops. Pretty much everything else in the movie argues against the idea that Dent was only pretending to be good, so I can't believe they wanted me to think that. In that case the nickname (pre-maiming, of course) is just generic. Oh, and he looked dumb in the warehouse - 'Here I am wired to a bunch of oil drums containining an unknown substance. I guess I'll just thrash around and see if that helps.' If it was supposed to be that he utterly lost it when he realized Rachel would die, it wasn't timed correctly.

There were a couple of other things I thought were sloppy writing - it really looked like Lucious fell for an obvious information-gathering trick. But again, everything else indicates that isn't what they want me to think, so I don't know why they didn't just have the blackmailer be the one to explicitly bring Bruce into the conversation.

I suppose I'm more interested in why be a hero than in watching colorful evil, not that I didn't enjoy it. But it didn't have as much heart for me as the other one. I could see where they were going with the boat thing, but it didn't really grab me. There wasn't room for it in the story, but knowing something about the convict who tossed the detonator would have helped. It came out more just like 'Hey, surprise!' I can see that the question of why be a hero, the fact that it's not Big Bad Evil that is the problem so much as the fact that most ordinary people simply shrug and say 'what can you do?,' and the fierce protectivness of Gotham, the universe entire in the form of a huge city containing every type of person (ok, I'm a self-and-city-centered New Yorker, and heh, "bridge & tunnel," pretty sure they don't say that anywhere else - EDITED TO ADD, I went back to the NYT review, and read the reader comments, and discovered that the city is apparently totally recognizable as Chicago, if you know Chicago, which I don't) is all integral, but I just felt it more last time. It might be more a natural part of the origin story.

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I don't agree with you Wildy, you use too many words to say one thing.


SPOILERS!!!!


I personally loved the warehouse scene. And no, it wasn't dumb, he didn't threw himself to the floor, HE FELL. I thought the timing was perfect, and the parallel scenes were done really good.

Actually, that is something I really enjoyed about this movie, the parallel or simultaneous scenes, they were so well executed. The chase with the Joker, and the other scene were the Joker was in jail and they were simultaneously trying to rescue Rachel and Harvey, all that back and forth I thought it was amazing, and it was a great build up to a great climax of the first 2/3 of the film. I loved it.

In fact the whole movie is about split scenes, or simultaneous events building up to a climax and the movie delivers.

The Joker is such a scary psychopath, I was literally GAWKING at every scene and twist and turn he provoked, I mean he seemed cleverer than Hannibal Lecter, it was really scary.

I don't know why you don't like Aaron Eckhart, I haven't seen him in anything else except Erin Brokovich, but I liked two face. He was a really inspiring character, he trully made me believe I was seeing a man who blindly believed in justice and lived accordingly. And then when he loses Rachel and he becomes two face, it's so heartbreaking. When he screams on the hospital, OH MY GAWD, probably one of the best acting I've ever seen in a super hero or popcorn movie. And the transformation into two face to me it's believable. This was a man who can't handle the fact that after being so righteous he gets "punished" in such a horrible way. Why?? he doesn't get it, so he flips. He finds himself in the midst of chaos and his only way to deal with it is anger and revenge, but he can't fully forget about justice so he just throws all he once believed out of the window and leaves it all to chance, wich he now believes is what's fair and just. It's the only thing that makes sense, no other ideal or organized justice or whatever means anything anymore.

It was brave to kill Rachel.

Why do you say there wasn't any room for the boat scene in the story?? I disagree, I think it was really clever. And I don't care about the criminal who tossed the detonator out of the window, I mean you might care about him but all there is to know about him, or all that is relevant about him, comes through in that scene. He just sees the absurdity and the horror of the scene being played before him, the notion that they have to kill who knows how many others, and even though maybe he is a killer himself, he just feels it's too much. He has no right. THEY HAVE NO RIGHT. So he tosses the control out of the boat. End of story.

What did you wanted to see or know about that man?? to show a single frame or second more of that character would be too much, it would've distracted from the plot, it would've just ruined it, it's unnecessary. We don't need to know anything else about that character, maybe you do but the movie doesn't have to, the scene is written perfectly, it doesn't need anymore.

And it's weird because the man on the other boat is probably the complete opposite of the convict but he comes to the same conclusion and does the right thing. I guess the point to the scene is to counterattack what the Joker said during the interogation thing, the Joker believes that amidst chaos, all civilization gets thrown out the window, and that may be true, and he succeeds in proving that through out the film but the boat thing is like too much, it's way too much, he has overdone himself and people just do the civlized, right thing to do. So the joke is on the Joker because at the end, I guess reason and good prevailed, they eventually did the right thing and they realized that blowing up the other boat is just wrong on so many levels and they chose to be blown up rather than blow up. I think it was heroic and I think it was a really great scene.


I think that you feel the movie did not delve into the Batman character and instead focused on the villains. Again, I disagree with you.

Yes, there is a lot of focus on the villains in this film, specially on the Joker, BUT this is not Burton's or Schumacher's adaptation, where Batman was simply a footnote. It wasn't even a footnote, it was more like an after thought.

I think this film reveals a lot about Batman, just like the first film, specially in the end. In this movie we get to explore just how serious Batman is, and how deep his concept of justice is. He is such a just man, so fair, so NOBLE that he is willing to completely sacrifice himself on behalf of the people of the city. First he is willing to turn himself in to safe people, and at the end he is willing to take the blame for everything Harvey did, he is willing to present himself as the villain, to be hated by everyone, because he knows Gotham needs a tangible ideal, a tangible hero like Harvey Dent and he can't tarnish that in any shape or form. I mean the SACRIFICE he makes, I mean c'mon!!!! I was literally moved to tears. I don't know how can you say this movie doesn't explore Batman/Bruce Wayne. I think it reveals even more than Batman Begins.


There's a lot of hype about this film, and with Heath dying and all even more so but I trully believe the movie lives up to every single inch of hype there is for it.

Well I saw it my second time last week, and am still dying to see it again as soon as possible. And especially in IMAX.

One thing I do have to mention, I was watching Batman Begins on tv last night, and after seeing the second one and then returning to the first, you pick up on even more nuance and even more like, intelligent continuity and evolution of the character and his world.

While they didn't focus as much time maybe further developing Bruce and Batman in explicit ways, one thing you do notice is that in the second film, he's more about quiet strength and self-confidence. In BB, he had alot of self-doubt and there are a fair few scenes where he shows how green and unprepared he is through his mistakes.

The first would be when he appears in Gordon's office in the dark that first time, prior to having the suit, and nearly fumbles his getaway after he jumps from the roof and crashes into the fire escape and hurts himself.

The second being when he's investigating that building in the Narrows ahead of Scarecrow and his goons arriving to torch it. Scarecrow notices the window's been left open and that there are some footprints out on the ledge. Then he's able to get the drop on Batman and spray him with his toxin and set him on fire.

In the second film he doesn't seem to make many of the same "rookie" mistakes, and it also shows him being more of a detective, independently. I especially loved the part where in TDK he did his own ballistics test on the bullet that he cut that chunk of wall out to get, and then took it to Lucius Fox to digitally reconstruct the image and was able to isolate the fingerprints of the person who loaded it into the barrel.

I do have TWO obvious inconsistencies, in my mind at least, from the first film to the second:

First, timeframe wise in relation to one another, TDK apparently takes place about a year after the events of BB (Joker's comment lends weight to this, when he mentions that a year ago none of the mob bosses would've been scared of anything, than Batman showed up. The second simply being some press I read ahead of the movie mentioning the same thing). So if at the end of BB Gordon tells Batman that the Joker is already on the scene, then how'd another full year pass of him running uncheck and committing crimes without Batman having any major run-ins with him prior to the events depicted in TDK. We get no explicit mention of Batman and Joker having any face to face encounters prior to the new film. It just made me stop and wonder what Batman was doing throughout that entire year. Even the fact that The Scarecrow appears briefly at the beginning of TDK leaves me wondering why Batman wouldn't have been able to catch up with him and apprehend him prior to the events of this story.

Secondly, Batman goes to Lucius because he needs a new, more lightweight suit for mobility. Why did he trudge around for an entire year in a suit where he couldn't turn his head and not find the need for a new set of body armor sooner? I would think that would've presented itself as an issue much sooner than the specific scene early in TDK where he's hanging onto the side of Scarecrow's van and gets knocked off because he can't move quickly enough or whatever.

ok, i have never been a big heath fan and the buzz around his performance really but me off but...holy fuck...he was fantastic.

i hate the way christian bale speaks when he is in his batsuit, he sounds like a drunk.

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I totally agree. It was unintentionally hilarious and I found it quite distracting. A number of people were openly laughing whenever he spoke and did that weird teeth bearing grimace thing. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea? Apart from that I thought it was a fucking great film, easily the best comic book adaptation I've ever seen.

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I don't remember Bale in Batman Begins so well, but he is SO GOOD at playing a character with 3 sides in Dark Knight: Batman; Bruce Wayne in front of the public, a cocky Bateman-type persona; and Bruce Wayne interacting with close friends, with a quiet warm & loving smile the whole time. Aside from the awkward Batman voice, he played each side to Wayne exceptionally well so that there was much needed complexity to the character.

And as for the Joker, I feel like I can finally figure out something to say: My favorite line delivered by Ledger is when he responds to "you're crazy" with "No, I'm not." Ledger's timing was 100% perfect throughout the whole movie, and this just set the pace. The interrogation scene was the best in the movie.
I'm just so happy to have such a terrific villian FINALLY.

Oh & I just want to mention that I thought Hans Zimmerman's music just so good, yes. Anyway.

I've now seen it 3 times, and I think a fourth may be coming up soon. I'm nuts.

you are mistaken. There is only a few months between the end of batman begins and the dark knight in continuity, it's not a whole year.

When the Joker says the "a year ago " comment, obviously he is not being like accurate but he is referring to a year ago as in last year when batman wasn't around, in other words the last year is before batman begins.

Batman Begins takes up like a whole year, an the dark knight is a few months after batman begins, so the joker is clearly referring to the year before batman begins, when batman wasn't around.

Haters to the fucking left. Christian's Batman voice wasn't only cool, but incredibly fucking sexy. I loved it.

when he goes like: "WHERE ARE THEYYYYY" BAM! hits joker on the head, "WHERE ARE THEYYYYYYYY"

my god, sexy as fuck.

I was thinking about the Batman character and his complexity and how deep his psychological fuck up actually is that I came to the conclusion that he can't be a walk in the park of a character. He must be a difficult character to play in every way and Christian did such a fantastic job.


You are all probably sick of me but I can't stop praising this movie.

That movie actually deserved the hype. I finally saw it and it was just so intense, I loved it.

And it wasn't all CGI-tarded like so many movies these days, everything looked real and you weren't distracted by how fake looking anything was.

I was so tensed up during most of the movie, the Joker's humor was like breathing a sigh of relief. I don't know whether I actually let out a proper laugh even. It managed to be more suspenseful than any of the Saw/Hostel type movies even though all the gruesome bits were more of implied than actually shown.

I thought the whole cast was great, even Maggie Gyllenhal. It made me sad Heath Ledger won't be around anymore, he was simply amazing as the Joker. While I was watching the movie I completely forgot it was him. Normally I'll be watching a movie and at points I'll think "Oh that's Gary Oldman, there's Morgan Freeman", but during the movie I actually completely forgot about the actors.

I wanna see it again.

I know, I was completely tense during the movie because the Joker was so unerving(is that the word?), he was scary.

And nothing looks more believable than what's real, like real stunts.

The movie looks incredibly realistic because the CGI is used to the minimum, as opposed to spider-man or harry potter or whatever.

I liked the Batman voice, but I can see why people would have a problem, because it was jarring. But at least it makes it plausible that people could meet both Batman & Bruce and not connect them. For some reason I also really like the way that I have trouble picturing the same face under the mask - I know I'm falling for the very simple trick of the fact that the nose on the mask is bigger and differently shaped than the one under it, but I find it satisfying.

I also like that he gets hurt, because superheros usually don't, and falls asleep in business meetings, causing people to roll their eyes and mentally curse trust-fund brats who can get away with partying all night because they can do anything they want. That's something I don't remember ever really being addressed before these movies, the fact that he would have to not just give up on having much of a life as Bruce Wayne, but also give up on any manner of good reputation. 'Drunken Billionaire Burns Down Own Home'

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