When I first saw The Dark Knight in the cinema all those months ago I had mixed feelings about it. I enjoyed the story and the twists, but it felt very long and rather disjointed. Add this to the sense of complete and utter hopelessness I got it, I was very happy that I was leaving the cinema to a beautiful sunny afternoon to lift my mood back up.
I rented the DVD and watched it again. I wanted to rewatch it because I felt it was complicated enough and that I might feel differently and enjoy it more when I knew what was going to happen so wasn't worried about following the plot so much.
I can't say I enjoyed it anymore then I did the first time. Sorry! On my first sitting I got two hours in to the point where Harvey is in the hospital and they do the he's become Two-face reveal. When I said above the film felt disjointed to me, this was the point that I was expecting it to end in the cinema, but no there's still another half an hour to go! I had to stop watching because I knew I'd be in too much of a black mood to go to bed and sleep well otherwise.
A lot of my thoughts from the first viewing still hold true for me. Batman's voice just sounds silly to me. And I want to know if he's got a really high-tech way of applying all that black make-up around his eyes! Rachel's relationship with Harvey doesn't convince me, I assumed I was meant to feel this so we knew that actually she's still holding a candle for Bruce, fair enough. But no, she then writes a letter to Bruce saying that she actually does love Harvey and is going to marry him. At this point Bruce comes close to actually showing some emotion, a rare thing in this film. The whole cast feel like they're simply going through the motions, I don't think any of them believe they'll get another film in the series so they didn't see any point in making the effort. For me the most emotionally charged part of the film should be where Harvey and Rachel are in the two warehouses rigged up to bombs and Batman is rushing to save them. Given that this apparently madly in love couple are saying their goodbyes to eachother, its a mystery how it ended up sounding like Rachel was actually looking forward to dying. Maybe no one thought to tell her that the film was going to carry on for another 45 minutes? I can only speculate....
Other small annoyances I have with this film; the computers all make whirring processing noises like in CSI; the sonar on the phone system is just a step too far for me to believe it would ever work in the way it's portrayed and there's no attempt to throw a Heisenberg compensator to make me any happier! Batman's cape would so have caught in the back wheel on his motorbike and injured him. The speech is unnecessarily quiet and then cuts to very loud action scenes meaning that I jump out of my skin and my neighbours probably now hate me. I know I'm being pedantic, but these things matter! One final thing, could someone tell Bruce that he doesn't need to be quite such a jerk to throw people off the scent that he's Batman. Thank you ;)
On the good side. Heath Ledger's performance as the joker is good. So good in-fact he's terrifying. The role could so easily have come off so badly but he plays the anarchist lunatic brilliantly. The film would never have been as popular as it was if it wasn't for the untimely death of Ledger and his part is good, it's a shame it was let down by a lot of other factors. The joker is a good character, he is unpredictable and as he points out in the film, chaos makes people scared. He also manages to make Batman look a bit of a tool by playing him so well, that amused me.
When I go to the cinema I want my escapism, I do realise that films would be very dull if they all had happy endings but this was just so bleak I wanted it to end so I could go back to my own life. I think that the Watchmen film found a better balance in this by showing a bleak future and a pretty sad ending but managing to give hope for the future. I know this is what Batman is meant to do at the end where he rides off into the night but after the previous 150 minutes of death and destruction with no hope I couldn't find that hope in the end. On reflection, my overwhelming feeling when I left the cinema was my appreciation of the sunny afternoon after all that darkness. I bet if I did a straw poll on what the weather was normally like in Gotham, the majority would say dark or raining. Even though we see several sunny days in the course of the film, it's clear that the darkness permeates the whole tone of the film and not in a good way.
Since it's fun to put things in nice little numbered boxes, I'll give The Dark Knight 4 out of 11. I can see why people like it, but it's too bleak for my tastes and it's certainly no where near as good as a lot of people hyped it up to be at the time.
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