My desire to see The Dark Knight was overwhelming. Since I had to work, I could not see the film until Sunday after all of my friends had already raved about the movie. So strong were my feelings for TDK that I had two dreams related to the flick: one weird dream where I was Batman (one of the best things other) and another were I dreamt I read an article about Nolan casting Daniel Day-Lewis as The Joker for the third Batman movie. Upon waking I was crushed to realize both of these were just dreams. But finally, I got to see the REAL deal. And it was glorious.

After shattering several huge box office records (opening weekend, non holiday Monday, first to $200M, first to $300M) and experiencing critical acclaim like few blockbusters ever have (94% on RT, top of imdb) it is time to discuss some of the problems in TDK. Few movies are perfect – what makes TDK frustrating is that it was so close – so close to being so much more than ‘the best comic movie.’ There was a lot of arguing for awhile about TDK’s fast ascent of the imdb top 250 but really the issue is that TDK was not perfect and the fact that TDK is the best comic book movie does not mean the movie is flawless.

What makes many of the following criticisms hard to see is that most of what I would have wanted to be different is still really good. When I make comments like “it was long” or “things were underdeveloped” I mean that the movie was still good for that long without scenes that dragged – it just had too many scenes; or things were underdeveloped relative to the rest of the movie and came across as afterthoughts.

The movie seemed to suffer from the Indiana Jones syndrome, which amounts to, destroy everything. Did you ever stop to think that for being an archaeologist Indy destroys a hell of a lot of history? In this movie Bats goes a little crazy on the Batpod just blowing everything away. This is not really “bad” per se but it shows how the movie began to slip into action clichés.

Along these lines the classic action movie arrogance set in where Nolan stuffed in some pointless action scenes. Did you ever wonder why the hero was kicking ass in some random bar or country? In TDK, while the Lao scene (among others, including but not limited to, Joker’s take over of Little Gamble, and the capture of Scarecrow) was sweet, it made little sense in the tempo of the movie or related to the plot. If those scenes were not there, the movie would only be shorter without much lost. Joker was clearly going to dispatch Gamble and the “resolution” of the Scarecrow plotline was powerfully anticlimactic.

While TDK received accolade after accolade, Spider-man 3 got ripped for a similar misstep – ruining potentially great villains. I have read a lot of reviews where they said they liked Two Face’s role in the film. Really? They didn’t want an actor like Aaron Eckhart to be Two Face for a whole movie? To me, the perfect exit for Two Face would have been in the hospital room where he yells, “you’re not sorry yet!” at Gordon. But he hung around way too long. Now the question becomes, what villain is serious enough, dark enough to be in the third film?

A general complaint was that some of the plot devices got repetitive. The Joker’s on-air proclamations were the same thing over and over – his social experiments were the same. Whether he was calling for Batman to reveal his identity, for Mr. Reese’s head, or for the two boats to kill each other – he was always calling for the people to rise up and do his dirty work. Sure that was the point of chaos v order, but it was the SAME thing!

The fifth major issue is that I was worried the movie walked too fine a line between brilliance and Batman and Robin’s mistakes – namely too many plotlines. Now I’m not saying I disliked the plotlines – quite the opposite – I’m saying there were too many plotlines and they were not developed as much as they could be. Where was the REAL drama of the Rachel-Bruce-Harvey love triangle? Or with all the web buzz that Mr. Reese (mysteries) could become the Riddler, more with him.

What were the motivations for all of the gangsters? Why did they ally with the Joker then betray him so easily? To make matters worse, the gangsters are still very in the movie, you just don’t understand them – they couldn’t even be counted on to be just in it for money – or revenge – they acted on Nolan’s whims.

Then the little things start to add up. The where are they factor? It seemed like Alfred and Lucius’ characters got short shrift when scenes from the mayor and Dent start taking up their time. Was it necessary to recast Rachel? Sure Maggie was better but we all knew Rachel was going to die anyways so it seems a little wasteful.

In the end though, it’s like the Joker says, “I believe whatever doesn't kill you simply makes you... stranger.”

Suggested reading:
Wall Street Journal review (one of the few that didn't like the film)

I hope you liked the review, if you have questions or comments for me, don't hesitate to shoot me an email at aaron.saltystix@gmail.com. If you want to read some of my other articles, click here.