Posts Tagged ‘batman’

Saturday it was time for a movie that’s been making waves on IMDB: The Dark Knight, a direct sequel to Batman Begins. After watching Batman Begins at Christian’s place to remind ourselves of what happened before, we went on to see The Dark Knight at the Colosseum.

There’s still a lot of crime in Gotham City, but Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is wondering if it isn’t time for him to give it all up. Not everyone is happy with his Batman presence, and some are wondering if it wouldn’t be better if he weren’t there at all. But when a psychopatic criminal called The Joker (Heath Ledger) enters the scene, Batman is the only one that can help.

He also faces some problems in his life as Bruce Wayne, since his maybe-girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggi Gyllenhaal, way better than Katie Holmes in the previous movie) has hooked up with an ambitious district attorney named Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhard).

As has already been mentioned in a lot of reviews on the web, Heath Ledger is a revelation as The Joker. His role simply makes the character so much more realistic (and scary) that it’s easy to forget Jack Nicholson’s clownesque appearance in the old Batman movies. The way he walks and talks, and his little nervous ticks all seem to fit perfectly together. Christian Bale seems even more comfortable this time in his role as Batman and Micheal Caine is still a perfect choice for his butler, but their performances are completely overshadowed by the loony Joker.

The story is dark and moves reasonably fast, even though the movie lasts two and a half hours. There are some cool action scenes to watch, and Batman has a new shiny toy to play with (did you ever see a motorbike with wheels that wide?). Although I liked the movie a lot, I can’t see the reason for its current top spot at IMDB (I guess due to Heath Ledger’s death and too many fanboys on the Internet). It was an extremely good comic book movie, but there surely are better movies around than this one, right? .

This was a fantastic movie to finish off my run on the SMEx Board. I’ll be moving to Sweden this week, where I’ll hopefully be able to setup a new SMEx chapter. A new member of the Board will be revealed soon. I’d like to thank the Board and every SMEx-er out there for organizing this event and for being at all those events we organized on all those Sundays (36 events already!), it was absolutely great! Thanks all!

Hoff says: “The dark knight is almost as tough as a Baywatch night”