Off-topic: The Dark Knight is...very, very dark
I took my team to see The Dark Knight today to celebrate the good work they've done. I might have chosen a better reward.
The movie is exceptionally well done. It is also relentless. Everyone is smeared. Everyone is corrupt (or corruptible). Except, frustratingly, Batman. What I would have given for him to end the movie early by listening to the Joker: "Hit me!" It would have been soooo easy.
Anyway, I only blog it here because I know many of you will want to see it. I don't suggest that you not see it, but that you go expecting something far bleaker and infinitely darker than the first one (which I loved, but which was Christmas by the fireside compared to this). People keep asking me if I liked it. I did, but not like I liked the Spiderman movies or Batman Begins.
This one didn't leave me looking forward to the next one. It left me worried.
You'll probably disagree. It was just a bit too much for me. Two hours after the movie ended and I still feel like I need a hug.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
The first one by Chris Nolan, which is now a standard bearer for perfect comic book adaptations, was also very dark. Were you expecting the disgustingly bad post-Tim Burton movies of the 90's or the camp of Adam West? The Dark Knight is supposed to be dark!
It was a masterfully made movie. No question. At the end I just wanted to see a ray of light. But there was none.
The Dark Knight is George Bush meets Marilyn Manson.
Perhaps it felt darker because Ledger is dead. The Crow(another great movie) felt considerably darker than it really was, although it was quite dark, because of the tragedy that befell Brandon Lee.
To each his own I guess. I really enjoyed the movie and I'm glad I watched it. It may not be for everyone, but neither is Shindlers List, Silence of the Lambs, The Departed, Hotel Rawanda, etc. I think that one of the main issues some people are having with this movie is that they went to watch it thinking it was going to be just an entertaining comic book movie about Batman and it was more than they bargained for, or they were expecting Batman Begins Part 2.
Maybe this movie can be seen as an allegory of a post-9/11 world and some people have a problem with that. If this wasn't a Batman movie, if it was just a crime drama with non-comic book characters, would you still have a problem with it? Maybe it's because Nolan made the world that Batman lives in just a little too close to our reality and some people just don't like it.
If you are familiar with the comic book roots of Batman, you'll know that his story is one of the darkest ones in comics--darker than Nolan's vision could ever be (as a PG-13 film). Batman Begins was a fanastic origin story for an iconic character that all of us have grown up with on the big screen. but TDK is more complex and is different on a fundamental level. TDK is not supposed to make you feel comfortable, this is a "sinister second", where everything goes to hell for the hero. The hero loses at the end of this movie; people he loves, he loses faith in a man that he thought of as the 'White Knight' that would clean up the city. He gets pushed to the boundries of his moral code and starts to make compromises so that at the end of the film, we are left at a very dark place. It is a brilliant film, but like I said not for every one.
- by willum24 July 19, 2008 3:47 PM PDT
- Oh_well get over yourself, and enjoy a good movie without bring politics into it. God, it's like you're five years old with this.......
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