SF's IMAX theatre has been running 'round-the-clock sold out showings of The Dark Knight. When the 3 A.M. Monday-Tuesday show sells out, you know a movie is a hit. At last look, critics have ranked The Dark Knight at 95% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite all this approval, I say The Dark Knight is a mediocre piece of filmmaking.
It's just too hard to tell what's happening; information is often poorly presented to the viewer. Fast-cutting, ultra low lighting, and an out-of-focus camera make it hard to see anything, this is disorientating. For The Dark Knight, this is a problem because the movie feels like it doesn't make sense and the result is frustration. Ledger is really, really good in this movie, but we hardly ever get a good look at him. When we do, it's almost like a Jazz trumpet solo—brash, unique.
The IMAX version, worth the extra cash, has some neat tricks. Cityscapes are magnificent, and when Batman flies from one tall building to another, my head had to swivel to track him. But never is IMAX's huge frame used to anything close to it's full potential. The level of craftsmanship was better not only in the first two Batman movies (by Tim Burton), but also in Gangbusters, a TV show from the 1950s I've been watching a lot of lately. That's right, 1950s T.V. is better made than The Dark Knight.
It's been commented before that Rambo: First Blood Part II created a fantasy world where the Vietnam war could be won by the right man. Some of this conservative ideology / lone-wolf stuff is at work in The Dark Knight. To wit, multiple references to the Joker as a terrorist. How does Batman foil a Joker plot to bomb the populace? By getting information from everyones' phones. Harvey Dent, the hope of Gotham, is referred to as All-American. (Batman, referring to Dent, “Have you aver seen such an American face?”) Dent is so American that guns made in China can't kill him. According to Wikipedia, Christopher Nolan chose Aaron Eckhart to be Dent in part because of a “kind of chiseled American hero quality.”
But, the new darkness is how open The Dark Knight ends. Incorruptible American Dent is corrupted. Terroristic Joker is at large. I posit that this parallels current American political impasses, which is interesting, I guess, but what's fascinating is that Joker captures sympathy. Joker:
“You see, nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If I told people that a gangbanger was going to get shot, or a busload of soldiers was going to get blown up, nobody would panic. Because it's all part of the plan. But tell people on tiny little mayor is going to die and everyone loses their minds!”Good point.
Copying down this quote, I can hear Ledger's delivery, word by word. Ledger's Joker is wildfire and Loki. The lack of origin story, bucking genre convention, emphasizes these aspects. Other Batman characters have been darkly virtuoso—Jack Nicholson's Joker, Pfeiffer's Catwoman, DeVito's Penguin. But never do these actors go that extra six feet under to deliver a performance as sinister as Ledger. Furthermore, Nicholson, Pfeiffer, and DeVito had director Tim Burton, whose style aided their performance. Christopher Nolan's filmmaking, however, often hamstrings his actors (what possible justification is there for the sound design on Batman's voice?) by making it hard to see the actor.
Presumably to get The Dark Knight a PG-13 rating, violence on the human body is only described and not shown. The inanimate is ripped apart and exploded with something like affection, but blood takes place off-screen; except, I'm uncertain whether whatever cut Ledger took place on-screen or off-.
Reading what I have written, I notice that Ledger has stolen the focus of this review, much like he did The Dark Knight.
At certain theaters Journey to the Center of the Earth is presented in 3D, a gimmick that helps the film along. In response to the rise of T.V. in the 50s, Hollywood screens got bigger and productions grew more elaborate. Perhaps, with the rise of piracy, we are witnessing similar tactics with the upcoming group of films in IMAX or 3D. Of these strategies, IMAX is likely to be the more fruitful because 3D technology can't currently present objects as rounded, instead the image is composed of a sequence of planes at different distances from the viewer (i.e. foreground, middleground, background) reminding me of paper cutouts composing a diorama. On the other hand, only 3D startles with objects appearing immediately next to one's face.
Journey is a fabricated film, complete with a hook at the end a sequel can link onto. But, the film was good enough for the 10 year old sitting with her father in the row behind me, and it's good enough for me. Journey is a simple machine designed to be fun, and it is.
