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Threequel speculation aplenty below, but I just want to lend my full-throated support for this.
Tick, I think you need to face the fact that your "own personal aesthetic values" are just that.
Absolutely! What kind of piece of filth applies their aesthetic values to a process involving sitting down and watching and hearing things for two and a half hours, and then feels entitled to share them as a valid thing to bring to a discussion of that experience. Tickspeak, I am going to have you banned, if it is literally the last thing I do. If I have to crawl to San Francisco on my stumps, I WILL DO IT. There is no place for scum like you on this message board.
Anyway, Policy for that. I saw the film, finally, at the IMAX, which is probably the best way to see it. The IMAX is, it turns out, so powerfully hypnotic that the trailers got me thinking "Holy God! I need to see "Watchmen" at the IMAX. It looks Timmy Terrific".
That said, I enjoyed TDK very much. It was a good action movie and a very good superhero movie. I was impressed that it managed to last two and a half hours without losing my interest, or feeling overlong. The shot design was largely very good - the fight scenes are jerkily cut, which is irritating, but I think that's a directorial decision to mark out the Wu Shuish League of Assassins stuff from the clubbing brutality of a man in an armoured suit fighting bar-room brawlers. The central performances were all strong, but - whisper it - I thought that although Ledger did what he did very well he didn't have an awful lot to do, apart from the game of chicken. There's no there there in the performance of the Joker - and yes, fractal personality, Clown at Midnight fishcakes. Oldman and, surprisingly, Caine impressed me more for what they did with their roles - Oldman obviously had a lot more to get his teeth into, but he was so unexpectedly devoid of ham stuck between those teeth that I don't know whether I ought to praise him for the perforamnce or Nolan for beating it out of him.
The action sequences were superb, although with that budget I'd be slightly surprised if they weren't - in particular, the conclusion of the car/truck chase. The Hong Kong sequence was very impressive, although it felt rather BondBourne rather than Batman, as has been said. Somebody early on clearly realised that IMAX + aerial camera = money shot, and really quite a long time is spent in forward pans over Hammer Bay and Chicago.
Having said which, one thing that did fail to jar and not in a good way was how resolutely urban it was. Batman Begins, for all its confusion, did something genuinely different and explored a different part of the background material with Ra's Al-Ghul. This was a mix of cop, action and urban superhero movie tropes, which tend to share a similar set of shades.
I also felt that some iffy directorial decisions crept in - Batman's Ron Perlman impression being one, and the decision to have Harvey Dent take time out from his campaign of vengeance to handcraft a two-sided suit in order to salute the magic of Tommy Lee Jones another; it was a concession to previous iterations of the character which jarred nastily with the broadly realistic facade of the movie (more accurately, a world where the unbelievable things are supposed to be technological, whereas the psychology is realistic). It's a shame in particular because Aaron Eckart did a really good job with Dent - giving just enough of a feel of why Gordon's men might have distrusted him at Internal Affairs and of why Bruce Wayne needed so desperately to believe in him.
One theme, in fact, which I enjoyed and which seems to have garnered little attention is Bruce Wayne's status as a moral halfwit. He understands morally good action only in terms of preventing things that are illegal. He won't kill, but he will try to break up the relationship not only of a man he admires, but of a man whose cooperation and total focus he is relying on to tackle the Gotham mobs, because moving in on another man's girlfriend is not illegal, only douchey. Why didn't he do anything when Dent confessed to being Batman? You might fanwank it as being because they were always in cahoots, but I think it's more satisfying to think that it is because it isn't illegal to claim to be Batman, so there was nothing to react to. If Dent had confessed and then dropped his keks, then you would have seen some action. I think that the idea is that he has got the idea of a broader sense of moral action by the end of the film, expressed both in taking the rap for Harvey (that is, allowing the guilty not to be punished, even post mortem) and in outsourcing his moral sense to Lucius Fox with the Deus ex Nokia machine. The implication being, I think, that he was shocked into moral sense by his conviction that Rachel was going to abandon Harvey for him, and his sense of responsibility for his failure to save either Rachel or Harvey - and thus the decision by Alfie the Butler to burn the Dear Bruce letter (which, as co-watcher observed, might be considered slightly tasteless as a method of disposal given the method of her leaving, but leave it aside) was also the action that allowed Wayne to retain his ideal view of the results of moral action, despite its falsity. Bit of a subplot, but a pleasantly underplayed one.
So, yes. Great action movie, great Summer blockbuster movie, great popcorn movie, great Batman movie (up there with Batman Returns, even). Great no-qualifier movie? I didn't think so, but I did have a lot of fun.
Bane is a terrific idea for Detective. I only hope Warner Brothers kept the costume... |
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