The Dark Knight Sucks

The sloppy editing starts to get unnerving.  Perhaps the reason for it is that the original cut went well past 3 hours, or perhaps some scenes needed editing to avoid an “R” rating, but nonetheless the result was a number of places in the movie which suffered from poor or mis-timed editing.

Here’s one:

The Joker crashes a party and clearly is on a homicidal track, bringing along a number of henchmen to help him out.  He threatens Rachel Dawes and then Batman appears and everyone was kung-fu fightin’… So The Joker tosses Rachel out a window and Batman dives for her and, I suppose by the laws of Superman physics, manages to catch her and slow down their fall enough to keep them both from having their bones crushed when hitting a car.  Never mind this physical magic (so magical that even Rachel wasn’t out of breath enough for her to make her singular semi-comical quip in the entire movie), but the next scene we see… Batman standing atop some building looking all… Batman-ish.  Nice shot but, uh, what about the party?  The one with The Joker, some goons, a bunch of guns, and a lot of innocent people whose lives were being threatened.  I supposed Batman just figured The Joker would get bored and leave because we all know the party’s over once Batman leaves.

Here’s another:

The Joker is in the interrogation room, and someone who shall remain unnamed un-cuffed him, and he’s left with a cop standing guard on him.  He’s taunting the guard, obviously to rile him up so he’ll start a fight with him and presumably overpower him to expedite his escape.  The next thing we are shown in that police precinct is The Joker now has that cop overpowered with a sharp object (probably a piece of glass).  So when can the doors in interrogation rooms be opened from the inside?  Who’s genius idea was it to leave a homicidal maniac un-cuffed in a room with a single guard?  Something was missing here and it was a gaping hole which felt that way.

Yet another:

Just before The Joker and some of his goons pour gasoline onto the huge pile of cash, we are shown the Chinese banker tied to a chair at the top of the pile.  The camera pans a bit and we never see him again.  It’s obvious he was set on fire atop the blaze, but it’s never shown or even visually asserted, other than the quick shot of him that is very easy to miss.  Probably there were scenes of him on fire that were too intense for a PG-13 rating, but then why even have him visible in a glimpse in a shot like that?  And why not have the Joker comment later about setting him on fire?  It’s like the editing wasn’t fully thought through for that scene and then it’s quickly forgotten.

Filed under: Editing/Sound Tags: editing, scenes | 73 Comments »

Just about all the fight scenes with Batman in them were too confusing, dark, and too closely shot.  This was one of the only drawbacks of the first film, but seemed to get significantly worse in TDK.  Stuff like this works in horror or suspense files like Alien, but for action movies they are crap.  It’s not like we don’t know what Batman looks like.  We want to see the fighting.  We want to get a sense of where things are happening.  We want to have a 3D sense of a scene.  We don’t want to see close-ups of arms flailing and occasionally blocking punches or bodies tumbling around with lots of hitting sounds. And dark, oh so dark… Yeah, we get it, it’s NIGHT, it’s DARK, and it’s the DARK KNIGHT, but we don’t need to have some of the most enticing visual parts of the movie so obscured that all we can muster is “I’m pretty sure Batman is kicking some ass because, well, I can hear things being smacked around, there’s his blurry head and bat ears and, oh wait, I think I just saw a flash of his bat ninja thingies fly by…”

Filed under: Writing/Direction Tags: fight scenes | 6 Comments »

Tim Burton’s Gotham from his first Batman movie was epic.  None too realistic, but so immersing and cinematic that it filled the role. It was literally one of the characters.  I recall some commentary about how the set design was planned and one of the designers stated, I believe, that they considered what New York City would look like if it didn’t have any zoning laws.  Buildings could go straight up without tapering inward and even jut out while built upward, and the result would be Gothic and dark.  Gotham, in fact, was an old and long-time journalistic nickname for New York.

In “Batman Begins”, more of an above-ground real feel was given to Gotham, but still visually well-crafted enough for an audience to feel teleported to a city where a man such as Batman would be needed and could thrive.  A place where an Arkham Asylum could be found.  A place where grimy streets could exists, mixed with the modern landscape of skyscrapers.

What we got in “The Dark Knight” was (literally) a sunny bright Chicago, and at night a glitzy glass and metallic city of commerce.  The city did not feel like Gotham.. AT ALL.  It had absolutely no character and looked like every other metropolitan city in the US.  Take the costumes and makeup (and burned faces) and gadgets away from the 3 main characters and you have the movie “Heat”.  I didn’t want to see “Heat: The Lost Batman Chapter”.  If I did, I’d want to see Al Pacino in a cape and Robert DiNero doing a trick where he makes a pencil disappear into Val Kilmer’s head.  But it’s not supposed to be “Heat”.  It’s supposed to be a BATMAN movie.  As in, a movie based on a comic book character.

Filed under: Writing/Direction Tags: chicago, gotham, gotham city | 16 Comments »

Apparently, crazy is as crazy does, and needs no further explanation.  The Joker is first introduced in TDK rather brilliantly, as dangerous, psychotic, and reasonably well-played by Heath Ledger.  The problem is, other than his own dialogue in 2 moments of the movie about his father that he hated who gave him is facial scars, and some rambling dialogue about some female he was in love with who seemingly experiences the same fate (it was a bit jumbled), there is no other background about him as a character.  He just exists, and has no rhyme or reason, no motivation, other than he wants to kill “The Batman” — but then later he… uh… doesn’t want to kill “The Batman”.

Perhaps this equates to how the writers perceive people being disfigured as immediately and definitely correlating with them turning into homicidal maniacs.  Harvey Dent was the epitomy of do-gooder, until 1/2 his face burned off.  Insta-crazy!

Filed under: Story/Plot Problems, Writing/Direction Tags: Heath Ledger, The Joker | 32 Comments »

I loved “Batman Begins”, it was an excellent reboot of a series that seriously needed it.  I remember when I was a teenager and went to see the first Tim Burton Batman movie, I was floored at how good it was, and it didn’t get unseated until “Batman Begins”.

When Christian Bale roughed his voice a bit in his scenes as Batman in “Batman Begins”, it was authentically cool because he didn’t take it over the top.  He did it just rough enough so as to disguise his voice and add a menacing appeal.  When he did it in The Dark Night, however, it transitioned into the realm of the ludicrous.

I swear at some moments it was so try-hard that I saw spit coming out of his mouth.  If hiding his voice was so key, why not introduce a device into his costume, perhaps around his neck, which would help mask his voice?  The writers seemed perfectly OK to introduce the notion of 30 million cell phones all of a sudden becoming real-time 3D sonar devices, why not make the need for a rediculous raspy voice moot by introducing a device to handle it?

Filed under: Subpar Acting Tags: Christian Bale, raspy, rough voice | 25 Comments »

I know I wasn’t the only one.  When the Mayor of Chicago (I mean Gotham) was introduced, my first thought was “Hm, seems like a bit of a youngish looking actor to play the Mayor, but OK.” Then as a close-up shot focuses onto his face, my next thought was “…wait… is that… eyeliner?”  It was one of those moments where you see the silhouettes of others in the theater turning to each other to make a comment to the person next to them, and you know what they’re saying.  “Is he… wait… is that?…”

Now, it could be that Nestor Carbonell, the actor who played the Mayor, just has some VERY thick lower eyelashes, possibly due to his heritage (I believe hispanic), but I’ve never met anyone whose heritage affected their lower eyelashes so much that it would give off the appearance of thick mascara.  It totally threw off every scene he was in.

Filed under: Makeup/Custume Tags: eyelashes, eyeliner, mascara, Nestor Carbonell | 34 Comments »

So here we have a courageous District Attorney, Harvey Dent, one who is passionate about cleaning up the city and upholding the law.  Although Rachel Dawes is his girlfriend, we are not shown any real passion or love between them.  Allegedly he loves her, which is shown in the form of asking him to marry him, but the scenes are missing chemistry.  So, when he gets half his face burned off from an accident in which Batman saved him from death, and apparently nobody felt the need to tell him that The Joker tricked Batman and Gordon by telling them the wrong addresses of where he took Rachel and Harvey to, and he learns of his girlfriend’s death, all it takes is for The Joker to show up and push a couple buttons and he’s off on a homicidal killing spree.  True, he’s shown in an earlier scene threatening one of The Joker’s lackeys with a gun, it’s never implied in the scene that he’s wandering into anything near madness – or else every scene n the movie where someone blows their top at a bad guy means they’re just a couple button pushes away from psychopathic homicidal mania.

Filed under: Writing/Direction Tags: 2-Face, Harvey Dent, Rachel Dawes, Two-Face | 16 Comments »