"The Dark Knight" Reviews

The Dark Knight is certainly a good movie. No arguments on that.

While I thoroughly enjoyed Batman Begins, I didn’t get the same feeling after watching The Dark Knight- something was lacking somewhere, nothing to relish (Heath Ledger is brilliant, but the pre-release hype killed it!), no goose bumps (except for, maybe, the Bat Pod scene) and overall, yeah, just that it is not a bad movie. I had arguments with my friends on this, but I couldn’t prove my point.

I was browsing through some film reviews today, came across this review by The Indian Express film critic Bharadwaj Rangan and I got the word I was looking for to support my point: laboured.

The storytelling is deliberate and laboured, and there’s so much pulling away for the larger picture, with such a densely plotted maze of procedural details, that the simple emotional beats get lost. When Batman faces the death of a loved one, we don’t feel that loss.

Rangan shares some interesting thoughts on the movie:

You cannot will a great movie into being. It just happens – if you’re lucky, and if about a few thousand variables click satisfyingly (and somewhat improbably) into place. The undoing of The Dark Knight appears to be that its greatness was pre-ordained (and heartily embraced by millions) to such an unprecedented extent that the film had to merely show up, and it would already be a masterpiece.

I didn’t grow up reading Batman comics; the only super hero comic I read was Phantom. It was in my college days that my friend told me about the greatness of Batman in the super hero world -like others, Batman has no super powers, but indeed he is a super hero! Batman Begins turned Batman into a human hero, which we all watched with awe. In The Dark Knight, Nolan takes that one step further. Rangan has an interesting take on this:

[..]in Batman Begins, where he transformed Batman into Bond, an ordinary hero (as opposed to a “super” hero) who needed the help of Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) just as Bond needed Q. This was an unprecedented level of inquiry into the origins of the powers of a superhero, who, in the comic-book universe, is typically self-made. In The Dark Knight, Nolan pushes Batman further into Bond territory, fashioning mirror events such as the loss of a loved one, or the fight sequence involving a shoe with a knife.
It feels funny to say this, because The Dark Knight is certainly not a bad movie. It is consistently interesting, well intentioned and well crafted, with a lot of expertly executed action eye candy – but the numerous story threads aren’t tied together in a fully satisfying way. The Dark Knight shapes up into a solidly good movie – and while that’s hardly an insignificant achievement, that’s all it is.

Update:
A thought was running in my mind while I was driving back home from work yesterday. To put it bluntly: The Dark Knight is like a Steely Dan song.
A Steely Dan song is a perfect piece of art, a flawless and meticulous production. There would be outstanding and extensive sax or guitar solos which can be considered as a song by itself (like Ledger’s performance). At some point these solos are woven back in to the song, at times painstakingly, and gradually we get into perspective. All Steely Dan albums are studio engineering marvels** and they get the best session musicians to play for them. Also, I am sure that The Dark knight wouldn’t be considered dated even after 20 years, just like a Dan song you heard, which was made in the late 70s sounds as fresh as it was recorded last year.
You know what to expect from a Dan album and you get exactly that, it just has to show up to be hailed as a classic – like Two Against Nature. And a solid album that it is.
But here is the point – would you ever hum a Steely Dan song in the bathroom?

**from Wiki: ..with one notable example being that Becker and Fagen used at least 42 different studio musicians and took over a year to record the tracks that resulted in 1980's Gaucho — an album that contains only seven songs - Did I say "laboured"?