The Dark Knight Review (Warning: Spoilers!)

My brother, my aunt, my mom and I went to see The Dark Knight today, and here’s what I thought of it. I’m note going to note all of the negative and positive elements. You can read more about those here: http://www.pluggedinonline.com . I disagree with their review in a few places – the violence and disturbingness wasn’t as bad as it made out.

The Joker is creepy and has no qualms whatsoever about killing people. I suppose you could call him a “good” villain – he’s very villainous. He’s not as disturbing as I feared, but he is icky. I wasn’t sure if I should put this under negative or positive elements. The Joker is certainly negative but he’s a villain and does a good of being a villain, which is bad…*goes in circles*

Same for Harvey Dent. It’s disappointing and a negative element that after being so good, he turns so evil, but he’s a villain from the comics (which I haven’t read), known, I think, as Two-Face or something like that.

Negative Elements:

The most disturbing part of the movie is the side of Harvey Dent’s face that gets partly burned off. It looks horrible.

Batman lies when he takes the blame for the five people Harvey kills, which is for a good reason, but it’s still wrong.

There is a cringe-worthy moment when the Joker impales a man’s face on a pencil. We see the pencil on the table, the Joker slams the man’s head down, and the man falls on the floor with no pencil on the table. The Joker threatens people with knives pressed to their mouths while he makes up stories about how he got his scars (but the only time he cuts peoples’ mouths like his own, we don’t see or hear the act being done, we just the see the bodies of the men and a glimpse of the damage in a darkened room. Not to excuse the movie’s violence).

Positive Elements:

Though there’s a lot of violence, it refrains from showing all the gory details. The camera leaves much to the imagination.

Batman, of course, is noble and heroic for the most part. To keep the Joker from having succeeded in destroying Harvey Dent’s reputation and the hope of Gotham’s people, he takes the blame for Harvey’s actions upon himself (although he lies to do it).

The Joker rigs to blow two huge ships full of people. He gives the detonator to one ship to the other ship and vice versa and tells the people that he’ll blow both ships up himself at midnight – unless one of them blows the other up first to survive. But neither do it (and the Joker doesn’t blow them up either, because he’s hanging from a building about to get caught by the police, thanks to Batman).

Other things are mentioned in PluggedIn’s review.

My other thoughts:

Maggie Gyllenhaal instead of Katie Holmes played Rachel Dawes, and her performance is disappointing. I very much prefer Katie Holmes, which is why *MAJOR SPOILER* I wasn’t mad at the movie-making people for having her get blown up and why, although I felt bad for Batman, I wasn’t too sorry that she was planning on marrying Harvey, not Batman. (If was real life instead of a movie, that would be way different.) That doesn’t mean I’m glad, but I don’t like Maggie as Rachel. Katie Holmes did the part way better.

Again, the side of Harvey’s face that caught on fire after getting wet with gasoline looks really nasty.

The end of the movie isn’t very satisfactory – Batman is running from the police since they think he killed the people Harvey did. Overall, it wasn’t too bad. I might have to see it again to form a more educated opinion.

I’ve been going to bed late and got up early, so if none of that made sense, that’s why. )

Have an amazing rest of your life!

- WM