The Dark Knight: Review #1.

Shockingly, I saw a comic book movie before Chris did. And wrote a review about it and didn't procrastinate. Shocking turn of events. There are spoilers aplenty. I guess I should make it official and say this;

:::::SPOILER WARNING:::::

DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU STILL PLAN TO SEE THE MOVIE

So, The Dark Knight. Pretty good movie. It was also very long. I never looked at my watch during the movie (which is a sure sign that a movie is boring me) because it had plenty of action and there was always something going on, but I felt they could have cut some things out, spend some things up and shortened some of the scenes. And it could have ended a couple of different times. It wasn't even close to Return of the King's four endings, but it was getting awfully close.

I liked it a lot better than Batman Begins. I did not see Begins in the theater, and when I finally saw it on DVD, I thought it was good, but not great. I was very impressed with the Dark Knight. They bumped everything up a few notches. And Heath Ledger WAS amazing. I'm glad the hype was finally warranted. He played the character perfectly and his lines were great and delivered perfectly. The part where he made the pencil disappear during the mob scene was great. That whole mob scene was outstanding. It sucks that he won't be able to come back an reprise the role. And they set it up with a lot of lines like, "We're just going to have to do this again" and "I can see us doing this for a very long time".

I loved the darkness of the movie. I was always drawn to the Frank Miller and late eighties version of the character. The really did their homework and got that version of the franchise right. You can tell what source material they were using, obviously the Dark Knight series, but also things like The Killing Joke One-Shot that I still have. I saved up for a first printing of that one and must have read it at least 500 times.

One thing about the movie that was very interesting was the ending. Obviously, if they knew what was going to happen, they would have killed the Joker and let Two Face survive to come back in the third movie.

So, in my opinion, they've got a problem in the next movie as to who the villian should be. They can't bring someone in to play The Joker. They just can't. Heath Ledger owned the character and will be the definitive movie version of the Joker for the next 20-30 years. The Riddler is too campy, Mr. Freeze still left a bad taste in everyone's mouth from Batman & Robin. The Penguin is a possibility, but again, that's been done. They killed Two Face. So, what's next? Killer Croc?

My guess is they try and bring Christian Bale back for the JLA movie, after Man of Steel and the Wonder Woman movie. Kind of like how Jon Favreau says he sees the third Iron Man movie as being the Avengers flick. It just makes sense. That's how I would do things.

Some other observations, I thought the movie was a little too predictable, there were more than three or four times I said something was going to happen and it did. And I did not read any spoilers online. BUT, Gordon faking his death was a pretty nice surprise. It got me, I didn't see that coming, and was a little upset that they did it until he came back. But I did think the way they brought him back was pretty cheesy.

And I understand what they were trying to do with Harvey Dent being the "White Knight" for most of the movie, but he was Two Face for a VERY short amount of time and then they killed him off at the end. Very strange. And killing Rachael was an interesting choice. One part that I thought was pretty lame from that whole sequence was the way he fell over in his chair and tipped over one of the gas barrels. It just seemed very forced to me.

And could anyone make out Gordon at the end of the movie? It was weird, it was like they had the mix of the score turned up too much or something. I talked to a friend of mine at work today and he noticed the same thing. And when Bale was talking when he was Batman was also hard to understand in spots. Way too guttural.

Overall, I thought it was a great movie, and I will probably be buying it on DVD. In fact, I'll probably buy Batman Begins on DVD when the Dark Knight comes out just to have them both.