Film culture, especially popular film culture, moves in fits and starts. There’s a lot of money on the line, and the people in charge are responsible for making sure that money stays secure. If something works, Hollywood studios figure that it’ll work again. Audiences get used to seeing the things they like, and they’ll go see the fourth movie in a series even if they thought the third one was only okay. This column has covered a lot of boring, uninspired, formulaic drivel. But every once in a while, the energy changes, and the world feels it, like a sudden drop in barometric pressure. A couple of fresh new things capture the public imagination, and the world rearranges itself around those things.
One of those shifts came in 1977, when twin whiz kids George Lucas and Steven Spielberg came out with Star Wars and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, their giddy and inventive space opuses. Another shift arrived in 1989, when Tim Burton’s Batman reigned supreme and flashy, wisecrack-heavy action sequels—Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, Back To The Future Part II, Ghostbusters II—took over the box office. And it happened once more in 2008, when the superhero movie matured. The year’s two biggest hits, The Dark Knight and Iron Man, took familiar comic-book characters and fleshed them out, making them seem more layered and human without losing the sense of ridiculous spectacle the genre requires. Those two movies became new gold standards, and we’re still living with what they created.
With Iron Man, Marvel took a chance on a B-list character and a star who was recovering from notorious addiction problems, and the studio forged a whole new identity in the process. Iron Man was a breezy, clever early-summer delight, with Robert Downey Jr. unleashing his full rapid-fire charm and anchoring a crowd-pleasing, CGI-heavy missiles-flying-everywhere romp. The movie exceeded all possible expectations, and with its final end-credits twist, unveiled a whole new vision for how franchise filmmaking could work. If Iron Man had fallen flat, the Marvel Cinematic Universe would’ve never had a chance to exist, and I can’t even imagine what movies would be keeping the lights on for the studios in 2021. But Iron Man did work, and it set a template that now rules Hollywood in ways that can sometimes feel oppressive even if you love that stuff.
A couple of months later, Warner Bros. released its own comic-book movie about a traumatized, guilt-wracked billionaire in an armored costume. The tone of The Dark Knight is completely different from that of Iron Man. Christopher Nolan worked to keep things grounded and visceral, limiting his CGI and essentially telling a crime epic, just setting it in a city where Batman and The Joker exist. The Dark Knight was a sequel, but unlike Jon Favreau with Iron Man, Nolan wasn’t trying to set up further cinematic adventures. (When The Dark Knight became a cultural phenomenon, Warner essentially had to beg Nolan to make another Batman movie, and it’s clear from The Dark Knight Rises that he never quite figured out what that should even be.) The impact of Iron Man and The Dark Knight showing up so close to one another can’t be overstated. With those two movies, everything changed.
Superhero flicks had already been doing big business before The Dark Knight and Iron Man; the previous year, Spider-Man 3 had been the box-office champion. But The Dark Knight and Iron Man both moved with a crisp confidence that had been mostly missing from blockbuster cinema for a long time. They arrived after an era when multiplexes were choked with noisy half-cartoon bullshit like the Pirates Of The Caribbean sequels, and they raised standards. Most of the competing summer spectacles couldn’t keep up.
Consider the case of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, the third-biggest hit at the 2008 box office. Crystal Skull showed up right in between Iron Man and The Dark Knight. Like those movies, it had a nine-figure budget and a built-in audience. People were excited for it. Crystal Skull does have a few truly entertaining action set-pieces, but it also has Shia LaBoeuf and stupid aliens and a climax that looks like pure CGI gunk. Where Pirates Of The Caribbean had started out as a fun variation on the classic Indiana Jones tone, the Indiana Jones franchise ended up as a dog-ugly Pirates clone. A whole lot of people paid to see Crystal Skull, and Iron Man only barely edged past it on the year-end box office chart. But Iron Man got people’s heads thinking about what might be arriving next. Crystal Skull mostly just bummed people out.
The Dark Knight, meanwhile, had a rare form of electricity; I can only remember a few movies in my lifetime that had people that excited. Three years earlier, Nolan had introduced the new iconography and visual language of his Batman in Batman Begins. That film was a decent-sized hit. It didn’t exactly become a part of the cultural vocabulary, but it did remove the stink of ’90s slime-green neon cheese that Joel Schumacher had put on the franchise. It reset things, with a Gotham City that looked something like an actual city and with a Batman who never, ever smirked.
As Bruce Wayne and as Batman, Christian Bale was haunted and obsessed, so driven in his quest to become a terrifying ninja folktale that he lost all sense of himself in the process. Batman Begins ended with a truly great tease. Batman’s sense of the theatrical had drawn imitators, and now somebody was out there robbing banks, leaving behind Joker cards as a signature. I can still remember the hum in that theater when Batman flipped over the card.
That was the reset. When he brings us back to Gotham City at the beginning of The Dark Knight, Nolan has made things even less stylized. Instead, an extremely recognizable Chicago plays the role of Gotham. In the opening scenes, we see that Joker at work, and it’s a sight to behold. The heist sequence that starts off The Dark Knight, clearly modeled on Heat, is terse, vivid filmmaking. The Joker cleans out a mob bank, kills his co-conspirators, and escapes the dusty rubble in an orderly line of big yellow schoolbuses. From the moment that Heath Ledger first pulls off his clown mask to reveal his scarred-up clown makeup, Batman becomes a supporting character in his own movie.
In December 2007, that bank-heist sequence ran before some IMAX screenings of I Am Legend, and people rightly flipped out about it. A month later, Heath Ledger died after taking the wrong combination of pills. Ledger’s death was an out-of-nowhere shocker. An actor who was already looking like one of his generation’s best left the earthly plane behind just as he was starting to reveal the true extent of what he could do. Hearing of Ledger’s death felt a lot like learning that Chadwick Boseman had passed away last year. It didn’t seem real, and his absence gave some mystical weight to The Dark Knight before it even came out.
At this point, it seems ridiculous to even talk about Heath Ledger’s Joker. What else can you say about it at this point? Since Ledger’s death, we’ve had two different movie Jokers—or three if you count Zach Galifianakis in The Lego Batman Movie, or four if you count Jared Leto’s Joker in Zack Snyder’s Justice League as being different from Jared Leto’s Joker in Suicide Squad. Last year, Joaquin Phoenix won an Oscar for his Joker, just as Ledger did posthumously. (At this point, only two characters in history have won Oscars for two different actors: the Joker and Don Vito Corleone.) And yet all these baby Jokers still labor in the shadow of what Ledger did with his turn as the character. Ledger’s Joker instantly became a cultural touchstone. After 13 years of memes and bad impressions, we should all be sick of him. And yet any time I watch The Dark Knight, I can still feel pulses of electricity whenever Ledger is on screen.
Ledger’s Joker isn’t a human being. He’s a mystical force, a destabilizing agent. He has no name and no background, and he tells different stories about his scars whenever anyone gives him the chance. He has nothing in his pocket but knives and lint. He likes stabbing people to death so that he can savor the little subtleties of emotion. He manages to nonchalantly fire a bazooka from a moving truck. He sets impossible chains of events into motion, and they all mysteriously seem to work out in his favor.
Nolan surrounds Ledger’s Joker and Bale’s Batman with an absurdly overqualified cast: Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman—all wizened Oscar winners, all given great little character moments even though they’re mostly there for exposition and background flavoring. Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent gets a full tragic arc, starting off as the kind of incorruptible prosecutor who will punch out a courtroom gunman in the middle of a cross-examination and ending it as a half-melted monster driven mad enough by grief that he’ll force Jim Gordon to pick which kid he murders. Even in the roles that only get one or two scenes, Nolan makes sure to pack in people we’ll be happy to see: Eric Roberts, Michael Jai White, Anthony Michael Hall, Tiny Lister.
The Dark Knight moves like a machine, never lingering too long on anything, never giving anyone a chance to get bored or to register how little sense the story makes. Nolan’s hand-to-hand action filmmaking is as frustrating and chaotic as ever; the close-quarters fight scenes in last year’s Tenet might be the first truly effective ones that Nolan has ever staged. But the widescreen moments—the shots of Batman posing on rooftops, the bodies crashing through windows, the truck flip—are breathtaking. For me, The Dark Knight falls apart at the end, a victim of the cluttered and chaotic storytelling that would doom The Dark Knight Rises. But up until then, it’s a relentless blast.
The Dark Knight and Iron Man might’ve been the two biggest films of 2008, but the race between them was not a close one. At the domestic box office, The Dark Knight earned $534 million to Iron Man’s $319. Commercially, nothing was touching The Dark Knight. Nolan’s film became such a part of culture that its big quotes immediately became cliches. Other filmmakers took the wrong lessons, trying to tell pulpy tales with square-jawed stoicism. (Marvel, smartly, went in the opposite direction, jamming every movie with bright colors and quippy yammering.) But on that grand operatic scale, nobody else, including Nolan himself, has managed to fully recreate the feeling of immersion that he brought to The Dark Knight. It’s the movie where everything clicked. There have been bigger, more lucrative movies since The Dark Knight, but there hasn’t been anything that resonated in quite the same way.
Six months after The Dark Knight opened and shattered box-office records, the Academy nominated five films for Best Picture: The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, Milk, Frost/Nixon, Slumdog Millionaire, and The Reader. A couple of those are good movies. A couple of them were hits, too. None of them had a cultural impact anywhere near the level of any random five-minute chunk of The Dark Knight. Quite frankly, none of those nominees are anywhere near as good as The Dark Knight, either. The popular outcry was swift and loud, and the Academy, faced with its own dwindling relevance, panicked and changed the rules. From the next year on, the Academy could nominate as many as 10 movies for Best Picture. These people did not want another Dark Knight to go by unrecognized again, and that, specifically, was why they altered the playing field. The Dark Knight literally changed the game.
The runner-up: There was another popular masterpiece in the summer of 2008. Pixar, after a historic run of success, put itself to the test with WALL-E, its beautiful little apocalyptic fable about a lonely robot on a garbage planet. WALL-E’s near-wordless first act is a beautiful little silent romantic comedy. Things change when the robots get to space and the humans come into the picture, but that part is great, too. (It also remains relevant, especially after so many of us just spent a year lolling around our houses and doing jack shit.) Up against stuff like Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa and Horton Hears A Who—all big hits—WALL-E works as kid-movie hijinks, and it proves that kid-movie hijinks can still be poetry.
493 Comments
The Dark Knight is a wonderful, awe-inspiring film, though I maintain that Memento and (especially) the overlooked Prestige are his best works. Both movies are built around mysteries where you don’t really know you’re watching a mystery until the final sequence, when everything clicks together and the horrible truth of the protagonists’ lives is revealed. The way those revelations are filmed and edited is hair-raising – to the point where I can’t think about a field full of top hats or the words “you’re a John G – so you can be my John G” without getting chills. Hell, when the British mystery show Endeavour did a shameless full-episode Prestige homage, it ended up being the show’s best episode.
Something I love about ‘The Prestige’ is that it tips its hand in a way you don’t notice until you know the twist. Once you discover that (SPOILERS, if you still haven’t seen it) Christian Bale is playing identical twins that pretend to be one man, you can see he’s playing the brothers as two entirely different characters. One brother is brash and condescending, the other is far more solemn and introspective. As much effort as they put into the illusion, they can’t hide that they’re separate people, especially from those close to them.
I call them Alfred and Freddie. You can see him shift from scene to scene, it’s an astounding performance.
The Prestige flat out tells you the trick behind everything in the movie, sometimes repeatedly.
But like Angier, we don’t want to believe it’s that simple.
At the beginning of the movie, Christian Bale in voiceover literally says “We were two men.” But as he says it, the camera pans over Borden, then Angier. Absolutely phenomenal misdirection.
Do you think that the “twins” discovery was THE twist? The film keeps twisting – in either direction and back within itself. It’s fun when we think we’ve got it all figured out though.
Are you sure they’re…brothers?
Indeed, its genius is that it’s one of those movies that lays all its cards out on the table and then with a sleight-of-hand appropriate to its theme it successfully pulls you away from all the obvious guesses and conclusions until revealing (during the film’s own prestige) that you could have been right all along.And it effing begins with the question. “Are you watching closely?” The movie actually taunts the audience. Taunts us.Gods, I adore that film.(As I’m typing this, my laptop is sitting underneath a print a local artist did of a movie poster for The Prestige in the style of a mid-20th Century book cover. Ack, I’m overdue for a rewatch.)
One great thing about Prestige for me is that I get so wrapped up in the movie and I always remember the Hugh Jackman reveal, that I forget the Bale twist so it hits every time.
Agree completely – that twist is brilliant.The problem with The Prestige is that the brilliant twist is overshadowed by an incredibly silly twist that (SPOILERS again) Hugh Jackman keeps cloning himself to pull of the magic trick.One twist is as ham-fisted as the other is sublime, and the film really suffers for it.
The Prestige might be my favourite film, let alone Nolan film, but at this point it’s reached Jackie Brown levels of being always described as ‘overlooked/underrated/might actually their best work’ despite most people agreeing.
Yup . Prestige is also probably my favourite film ever , but it wasnt exactly overlooked on its release . (It also has that weird thing where nearly every major character* had already , or would go on to , play a superhero(or villain).The Christopher Priest (not that one) book its based on is worth a read as well , its actually quite different , and has a framing device with the two magicians dependents that was jettisoned for the movie , but its quite interesting..*(Despite not playing him , or being named as him , or having anything to do with the show , Bowie is Venture Bros The Sovereign , and I will hear no naysaying)
Bowie is not The Sovereign, he’s just a shapeshifter who just takes his form.
That is him on the cover of Diamond Dogs, however!
NO NAYSAYING!!!
That’s just a hefty retcon when they realized they wanted to use that character….But yes, it is canon.
His real form is said to be that of the creature on the cover of Diamond Dogs. I read it in one of Robert Christgau’s consumer guides.
The Prestige is my favorite movie of the 21st century thus far. I find new little nuances in it almost every time I watch it. It took 5 viewings before I realized that Borden and Angier both essentially allowed themselves to die in the exact same manner as their wives (Angier by drowning, over and over again, but also Borden by hanging).
I really like Insomnia and I have never been able to shake the feeling that The Dark Knight is to some a extent a flashier remake of it; with Ledger’s Joker being a more gonzo version of Robin Williams’ Walter Finch
The original version of Insomnia is better.
Those are definitely much better than TDK. I don’t want to say “Dark Knight is overrated” because I’ve heard it so much from hipster-types, but….shit….it’s got issues… much if it is Alfred’s dialogue and Bale’s stupid Bat-voice. The dialogue sometimes is a bit too on the nose about the theme of the movie, but then again, I can’t imagine the film without the “burning down the jungle” speech.
I think you just mentioned the reason why The Dark Knight is going to be seen as the better of the three, because we already know the mysteries beforehand and the story doesn’t require a twist.
We know who the main villain is going to turn out to be, and we know exactly what’s going to happen to Harvey Dent…but the agonizing labor that Batman has to go through to get to the finale is heartbreaking. Ultimately, we know the main characters in Memento and Prestige will continue on in their odd ways. But Batman? Who knows. We just see him fulfilling his destiny as a suffering hero.
I don’t love everything of Nolan’s, but the Dark Knight and the Prestige are two of my favorite movies of all time, and I think the Prestige is criminally under-acknowledged. Like TDK, it works on lots of levels without hitting you over the head with “this is deep.”
The Dark Knight is the single greatest comic book movie ever. Period.It has none of Marvel’s no one stays dead or magic maguffins cliches. And is not woke SJW Mary Sue trash. It literally had enough material for 2 or even 3 standalone blockbuster movies, but Nolan held nothing back and just made the single best movie he could at one time without the endless Marvel dick tease of something better next time. Even Marvel’s best, in Infinity War, is all undone in Endgame and doesn’t even need to happen if Thanos just doubles the size and resources of the universe instead halving the number of all living things, because once again magic makes everything irrelevant.
I recently re-watched The Prestige and was pretty much blown away after completely writing it off the first time. The first time, I was unfairly grumpy about Hugh Jackman’s “secret” violating the regular rules of realism, which to me seemed to violate the entire premise of a show based on the formula of a magic trick. But the thematic implications attached to that violation of the realism “rules” were so damn rich…I mean, I say this as someone who is still relatively skeptical of fantasy and sci-fi as genres (while also recognizing that several of my all-time favorite books and movies are works that somehow managed to transcend the realism/sci-fi binary—sorry, fantasy, outside of LotR, you’re still somewhat suspect).
Ohhhhhhhh GOD Memento doesn’t get anywhere near the love it deserves!! And damn if Guy Pierce didn’t deserve at least an Oscar nom.
Interstellar is up there too for his best work IMO, for different reasons. While he might have better ‘works’, TDK is probably his best movie.
With movies like Dunkirk and Tenet obsessed over playing with time, Nolan has become a bit more style (or should I say structure) over substance as of late. But pre-TDK he was hitting his sweet spot. Why both Memento and The Prestige work better is that their structures (telling the story based on his memory/telling the story based on their magic acts) are intrinsically tied to the protagonists, so the plots- and therefore the mystery- are super effective.
Memento especially, which I still consider his best. I go numb when I see Carrie Ann Moss’ character bait Teddy into a fight, only to go sit in the car, and wait… The backwards structure means we already saw what happens next, but putting it together is an amazing viewer moment and it’s unlike anything I’ve seen a movie do
I fucking love this movie and the entire Dark Knight trilogy. It delivers everything I wanted for a Batman story and more. Great actors, beautifully shot and entertaining from start to finish.There’s so much to recommend and it remains my favourite live-action version of Batman**Though I’m also a big fan of Keaton and Affleck, who I’ve gained a strong appreciation of after a recent viewing of the Snyder trilogy, including the recent Justice League epic.
This seems as good a place to mention how damn good Gary Oldman is in The Dark Knight. Every part of his Gordon – his confidence, his professionalism, his frustration, his desperation his anger – all feel real. If put his work here above his Oscar-winning/nominated work in Darkest Hour and Mank.
His Oscar-nominated work in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy still comes out on top, though.
True. That should have been his win.
I think one thing that I like is the main theme where it asks wether or not a vigilante like Batman is something Gotham really needs and, more or less, admits that he really shouldn’t be.The movie frames Batman as, at best, a bandaid to Gotham’s real systemic issues and, at worst, a vigilante who violates civil rights of his victims and the only thing that separates him from the gun wielding copycats is that he’s “Not waring hockey pads!”. Hell, the moment Bruce drops a crook off a building and brakes his legs, his next immediate thought is that he’s gone way too far in looking for the Joker and that he needs to turn himself in. That’s why he and Lucius agree to destroy the surveillance tech once they catch the Joker. That’s why Bruce needs Harvey to be Gotham’s hero, because he’s a civil servant with the authority and the gumption to actually help Gotham within the system. Though the movie tries to have it both ways at the end with Batman saying “I’m not the hero Gotham needs. I’m the only one it’s got.”.
One little scene that gets this idea across nicely is when Bruce asks Alfred, who was once tasked to find a bandit in a situation that always seemed to me to not be entirely legitimate, how he succeeded. Alfred responds, “We burnt the forest down.” Once you start on an extreme path, an extreme solution is essentially inevitable.
I needed to drink a gallon of water after that scene cuz my mouth was so salty from the ham-fisted metaphor.Of course the whole fucking movie is a pork store.
Heath Ledger delivers a really great performance, but the Joker also makes the biggest impression because it seems like he’s pranking the self serious movie around him. It’s a clever touch, like having Bugs Bunny show up every few minutes. My favorite part of the movie is that Scarecrow is out of jail and selling fear gas to some guys in a parking garage. It’s reactionary as all get out, but the villain going to jail, getting out of jail, and immediately resuming villainy is the most Batman part of the whole movie.
I’ve often felt that the Joker’s appearance in that mob meeting scene is almost a meta-textual parody of the character. His face make-up looks like someone taking the piss out of Joker’s distinctive white skin/red lips/green hair combo. The “blow this out of proportion pun”. Offering his card, which is a Joker card. It feels like the character somehow knows what the Joker from the comics is meant to be and is playing it up, only to reveal himself as much more frightening and dangerous as the movie goes on.
Scarecrow was still at large after the events of the first film.
You could argue that the biggest thing The Dark Knight brought to the superhero genre is self-consciousness. Hamfisted explanations of the superheroes’ social relevance have become a pretty standard part of the genre in the past decades. That’s been a feature of comics for ages, but it sits weirdly when you’re trying to shoehorn any kind moral ambivalence into a tentpole blockbuster about guys punching each other.
There’s a fine line between self-conscious and stuff that real people wouldn’t say that Dark Knight walks. A few times it took me out of the film and made me ask myself if people in this ridiculous situation would really talk like this. Maybe they would in the age of mission statements, personal brands and personality tests
Oh I didn’t mean the characters are self conscious, I mean the movies are self conscious. It’s all about how they fill the time between fights and explosions. It’s become a pretty standard trope to have characters spend that time barking or snarking or waxing rhapsodic about their weakness and the world’s moral failings.
One bad lesson learned: I think after TDK a lot of superhero movies felt the need to apologize for being a superhero movie. I’m reminded of the “it’s not an S” scene in Man of Steel. We don’t need you to lampshade the S, we all know it’s part of his design. And they don’t even call him Superman. imo it’s always super-lazy; they’re aping the self-seriousness of The Dark Knight without earning it or deserving it.
I needed to drink a gallon of water after that scene cuz my mouth was so salty from the ham-fisted metaphor.Of course the whole fucking movie is a pork store.
Indeed. To quote Iron Man, once people start putting on masks and beating up muggers, “subtlety’s kinda had its day.” Superheroes are all about making the subtext the text, and then making the text in bold in size 80 font.
Absolutely agree with this. It’s also an incredible character moment for Alfred; it fleshes him out in so many ways. Like, the mercenary who burnt the forest down in what was pretty obviously a black op in a foreign country was the surrogate father for the child billionaire who was traumatized by losing his parents to crime. That fills in a LOT. And it’s not even what that scene is remembered for; it’s remembered for it’s characterization of the Joker as the man who “just wants to watch the world burn”. Well done writing that does double service there. It’s mind-blowing to me that David Goyer is one of the guys credited with the script for this movie, and he went on to write Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman, two movies that are particularly breathtaking for misunderstanding their main characters and making them morally void. It just highlights that the Nolans are so, so good.
Alfred’s response is the embodiment of US foreign policy.
I gotta be honest; I’ve never really been convinced by this kind of deconstruction. I mean, I get why people do it, why people feel the need to dig into characters like Batman and see what makes then tick and question them. But frankly, questioning whether Gotham City really needs Batman or whether he does more harm than good or whether he’d be better off doing something more constructive with his millions than dressing up as a bat and punching criminals is the kind of thing works better and sounds a lot cleverer when chatting about it in a comment section than it does when people actually try to put it into practice in a story.And the reason for that is because trying it is always going to end with the kind of vaguely unsatisfying “trying to have it both ways at the end” thing you allude to, for the simple reason that the only possible answer to the question is “yes, of course Gotham really needs Batman, because otherwise there’s no story.” What people forget / ignore is that for all the trappings of realism, Batman and Gotham City are as much fantasy creations as Gandalf and Middle-Earth. Of course the things in Batman stories don’t work in the real world — they’re not set the real world. Gotham will and ultimately always must be too crime-riddled for the police to handle, too corrupt for the system to work, too insane for the forces of rationality to handle. Solve those problems, there’s no need for Batman — and so there’s no Batman story, which is a bit of a problem if, well, your main character happens to be Batman. (For what it’s worth, this is also why “why doesn’t Superman solve all the world’s real problems instead of focussing on silly stuff like beating up giant robots all the time?!” isn’t as clever or insightful a critique as people think either. It’s because the real answer once you get past all the navel-gazing is that Superman lives in a world where giant robots actually are a real problem that only he can handle, just like Batman lives in a world where the type of crime people face is a problem only he can really handle. The citizens of the DC universe are just as capable of solving their other real problems as we’re capable of solving ours, they just choose not to like we do.)
To be fair, Batman was fighting organized crime when organized crime was a substantial force in American cities upon his creation. Batman exists in 1920s-30s NY/Chicago/KC mob rule world, his 1970s/80s resurgence is in part a reflection of lower-level organized gangs that were never that powerful but were a media reflection. But in the 2000s and beyond crime just doesn’t largely function like that anymore, so the question of Batman’s point in crime is more complex, it’s why his villains now are more focused on terrorism and in the Nolan films, organized crime. This constant question of his position in society is the shifting context of his identity facing the new challenges in his world.
All true and fair, but there’s still always been that element of fantasy that people can kind of seem a bit too determined to strip away these days. True, Batman emerged in an age where crime and the mob were fixed presences in American urban life, but even at its worst you never saw people dressing up as winged mammals to take battle to them. Batman has always been a fantastical character and has always required an element of the fantastic in order to actually function. Strip away too many of the things that make Batman Batman, you’re not making him work better or more realistic, you’re just making him not Batman. In the context of a Batman story, the situation in Gotham will always be thus that it requires Batman to solve it. The nature of crime may change — mobsters, gangs, terrorists, what have you — and thus the nature of Batman may change in some ways, but the question of “does Gotham need Batman” will always be a bit of a false one, because it will always ultimately be answered with “yes”. Because if the answer is ever “no”, then by definition it’s not a Batman story.
Exactly. He’s fighting the concept of evil which is why the hot takes of ‘Batman beats up poor people who only do crime because of poverty’ is such an internet hot take that it hurts. In the comics he actually almost never fights street crime in any practical manner, it’s sort of background noise for the main story of him fighting somebody who’s doing serious terrorist-level acts or organized crime.
Agreed. In the source material, the most you really ever see of him when it comes to fighting street crime is usually a few panels of him coming to the rescue of some random schmuck who’s getting mugged or assaulted, which in terms of crime-fighting vigilantism is on the more acceptable side of the scale.
Exactly and mugging isn’t all that common in the 21st century according to our own stats. The proliferation of cameras on exteriors really cut down on it.
Yeah nowadays Batman would be taking on human trafficking and the shady business criminal fascists that took over the GOP. Can’t exactly Pow! Zap! Bang! High Fructose Corn Syrup or for-profit prisons or the military industrial complex.
To be fair, there are a TON of classic Batman tales of him taking on shitty capitalists…They’re like half his one-off runs. But when your owner is a shitty capitalist, kind of hard to do that on the big screen…
There’s nothing about Superman that suggests to me that he’d be uniquely qualified to solve issues like global poverty, climate change, or any of the other ills that plague society. It’s not like he has super sagacity. But if Solomon Grundy is tearing up the city, get Superman on it, because he is uniquely qualified to punch that hulking zombie in the face.
Just once I want to see a story where the United Nations hires Superman to advise on, like, wealth inequality, and he’s like “I’m not qualified for this, but okay” and then eventually realizes that they’re just using him to get media attention and don’t actually care about his ideas (which, he not being a sociologist or economist, don’t actually help).
Kind of like what they did with Captain America in First Avenger. Or, if Superman wasn’t so moralistic, Dr Manhattan, in Watchmen. I think one of the major failures of the Snyderverse, is that it never went deeper than the world’s awe, and the governments fear of Superman (based on what we see from BvS he’s never made a public statement, or really given much of an indication of his intentions, aside from what we see in Man of Steel, he has almost no real character aside from angst and affection for Lois and his Mom). Seeing Superman resolve his morality, with the machinations of the machine of international politics, and the things the world would want from him, is one of the more realistic and dark things that could be explored.
Seeing Superman resolve his morality, with the machinations of the
machine of international politics, and the things the world would want
from him, is one of the more realistic and dark things that could be
explored. That could be interesting… as long as it’s someone qualified to explore it, as opposed to Zack Snyder.
There’s a bunch of stuff in between those two that Superman would be really good at. Like, he could single-handedly operate NASA, if not actually lift payloads into orbit he could certainly guide them, oversee repairs, survey lunar geology in ways that would save trillions of dollars. Similarly, he could be a global missile defense that could basically negate an arms race strategy. Or he could generate enormous amounts of electricity…
Social questions, yeah there’s no reason to think he’s more insightful but with physical questions, it’s absolutely ridiculous that he doesn’t have more productive hobbies.
Agree on Batman, disagree on Superman. Superman is so close to being a god that when he decides not to interfere somewhere, that’s something of an endorsement. He’s too big to dodge the “gotchas.”A version of Superman who literally never helps humanity unless an alien force is threatening it would be radical at this point in the character’s history. It’s been done in the comics I’m sure, but it’s never gotten any real traction in popular culture. And how does that shake out when humanity adapts to the fact that Superman himself is alien, and so aliens exist, and so maybe humanity can communicate with them and/or steal their tech, etc.? Pertinent questions are still raised! Where’s the line? Does Superman become a zookeeper at a nature preserve whose responsibilities include aggressively enforcing the Prime Directive, except, like, kinda in reverse (and with an obvious exception for himself?) It’s heady stuff.Again, it mostly boils down to Superman being functionally a god. It’s completely unfair to create a character like that and then hand-wave everything as “well that’s not the story so you’re not actually clever.” At that point you might as well create an actual shitty religious cult instead, for how smarmy and annoying you’re being.
Hey look man, I gotta be smarmy and annoying somewhere. It’s not my fault the cult is taking it’s time getting off the ground, okay? Turns out it’s not as easy as it looks.That said, though, you make a good point about Superman.
A version of Superman who literally never helps humanity unless an alien force is threatening it would be radical at this point in the character’s history.On the flipside, I want a Superman story where when he’s not stopping Luthor or Brainiac or other superpowered threats, he just has his daily routine of saving cats from trees and stopping kids from falling over cliffs. And then some guy figures out what area Superman most commonly operates in (presumably near Clark and Lois’s apartments, and near the Daily Planet building), and goes there and starts deliberately putting himself in harm’s way over and over to see how many times Superman will rescue him before getting fed up with it.
That was kind of done in a Robot Chicken sketch.
Of course the things in Batman stories don’t work in the real world — they’re not set the real world. Gotham will and ultimately always must be too crime-riddled for the police to handle, too corrupt for the system to work, too insane for the forces of rationality to handle. Solve those problems, there’s no need for Batman — and so there’s no Batman story, which is a bit of a problem if, well, your main character happens to be Batman.This is a good post. It’s something I think about when that comic strip with Alfred and Bruce Wayne gets posted in one of these discussions — the one where Alfred keeps suggesting other ways for Bruce to spend his money, and Bruce keeps coming back to dressing up as a bat and driving a cool car. And it’s definitely funny, but I think it fails as a critique because, as you say, it ignores the fictional “reality” of these stories.Specifically, the villains Batman fights just aren’t the kind of bad guys who can be addressed through socially conscious urban investments. The Joker’s trying to blow up Gotham City or cover it in laughing gas or something — Bruce Wayne funding some needle exchange clinics isn’t going to cut it. I do think there are clever ways of integrating those two ideas. I can imagine a story where, say, Bruce Wayne makes transformative investments in mental health care, and that makes Batman’s job easier, because Joker doesn’t have the same pool of desperate, troubled people to draw his henchmen from. But at a certain point as a reader you just have to acknowledge that the thing you’re reading is fiction and not reality, and the things that are good and right in the real world don’t really apply to the fictional world.
Bruce keeps coming back to dressing up as a bat and driving a cool carOne thing the Nolan movies firmly convinced me of is how fundamentally impractical the Batmobile would be for his mission. Like, there’s no way for it to be useful to him getting where he needs to be quickly without him also being a force of chaos and destruction.
One of the good things about Superman is he explicitly limits himself in what he can do, which puts him at odds with Batman, who is usually the one more likely to abuse his power or not cooperate with the authorities. Of course, sometimes that means Supes becomes a pawn of the government, but in his eyes he’s doing what society as a collective decides he should do and not acting unilaterally. Also, I might be wrong here but it seems like Batman directly creates/enables his villains, where Superman just responds to them.
Fair points all. I would perhaps disagree a little bit with the idea that Batman directly creates his villains, at least in all cases (though there definitely is a case for a form of “escalation” where the presence of Batman in some ways inadvertently inspires the presence of increasingly lurid forms of crime to match him, though IMO this can maybe be a bit overblown a bit at times). I tend to think it’s more that (or at least works better when) Batman is paralleled in his villains a bit more than Superman is with his, in that the villains that Batman fights tend to act as darker reflections of himself and his motives.
Batman is paralleled in his villains a bit more than Superman is with his, in that the villains that Batman fights tend to act as darker reflections of himself and his motives.It’s kinda crazy how many of the Rogue’s Gallery so explicitly serve that narrative function. Joker for the paladin, Riddler for the detective, and so forth, right on down to Killer Croc for the urban legend.
I’ve been thinking about your comment here ever since I read it this morning. I realized something, which is that all fiction is to some degree (sometimes a very small degree) speculative fiction: what if the world were different in this way?Usually spec fic is different in a discrete but distinct way, like, what if magic existed, or what if we had faster-than-light travel, or what if superheroes were real. Even more “realistic” stories still speculate about people who don’t actually exist, who have more dramatic, eventful, and narratively-structured lives than anyone in reality. As the degree of speculation in a story approaches zero, fiction approaches documentary: if a story contains nothing that doesn’t happen in the real world, it’s no longer fiction. This may seem tautological, but I think it’s an important baseline.Superhero stories speculate that extraordinary threat actors exist who can only be countered by heroes with similar extraordinary abilities: the Joker of The Dark Knight has supernatural luck and logistical abilities, while Batman has superhuman endurance, strength, planning, reflexes, and willpower.But there are less obvious speculative elements. What if there was a large supply of people who could function the way Joker’s henchmen do? People who are emotionally unstable, but also capable of carrying out complex, detailed plots; willing to put their lives on the line for a madman (with no hope of any personal gain, and a high likelihood of death); willing to commit heinous crimes with no qualms; so extremely loyal that they’ll never have second thoughts and go to the police; so competent that they never make mistakes that can be taken advantage of by anyone who isn’t Batman. This is no less speculative an element than the Joker or Batman themselves.What’s more, it also speculates that law enforcement and government can’t do anything about this, as if the 1920s/30s era of organized crime that almost literally controlled entire cities was still in force today. It’s fine if you accept it, but it’s understandable that some people look at the story and see the trappings of modern society (modern dress, technology, vehicles, buildings, hairstyles, lingo) as conflicting with the social, political, and economic structures that made widespread organized crime possible.(Note that I’m not criticizing TDK for this. I think it’s one of the best movies ever made.)
Yeah, Batman still gets away with his actions, particularly monitoring everyone’s cell phones. And they try to prop up a lie to give the authority to lock up the criminals….which blows up in their face in the next movie, something I do love about Dark Knight Rises
Though the movie tries to have it both ways at the end with Batman saying “I’m not the hero Gotham needs. I’m the only one it’s got.”This thread kind of got hijacked in a different direction, but I’ll point out that this is a bit of a misread. First of all, it isn’t Batman saying that, it’s Gordon, and while Gordon functions as a proxy/support for Batman throughout the story, he’s not actually Batman’s point of view. Second, what Batman actually says (and does) at the end is say “I’ll be the villain.” He takes the wrap for Harvey’s death and (as the third film reveals) quits being Batman, and tries working on trying to solve the world’s problems with his money (which doesn’t work, because that’s easier said than done). The next film kind of has it both ways, both by introducing the Joseph Gordon Levitt character to argue that yes, Gotham still needs Batman, and by having the League of Shadows lure Bruce out of retirement. But TDK’s ending works on its own terms.
Thanks for the correction. I haven’t seen the movie in years so I guess I got some stuff mixed up.
I get where you were coming from, because in the movie it isn’t quite clear that framing himself for Harvey’s murder means that Bruce is going to quit being Batman. The feeling coming out of the theater was that he might continue fighting crime while being chased by the police. But what we learn in the sequel is that he seems to have quit immediately. And with Gotham’s organized crime broken (leadership of the major outfits killed by Joker or Harvey, and half their money gone up in smoke), the Joker in custody, and Harvey set up as a martyr, there’s a fairly good argument that Batman’s mission is accomplished at the end of TDK, until the enemy he’s forgotten about, The League of Shadows, shows up.
The Dark Knight Rises could have been a chance to really dig into that contradiction, but again it does it half-assed with its faux-populist Bane. It would have been *really* interesting if they didn’t have that whole dumb *stop the nuke* scene at the end, as it neuters Bane’s whole message; that the people of Gotham really are fed up with the wealthy. And how the heck do you reconcile Batman being a billionaire with that?
Yep. These are weighty ideas that mean the movie wasn’t just stylistically grounded (which is all everyone talks about)- it was narratively mature, asking questions comic book movies hadn’t really tackled yet.
The conceit of the movie to me is Bruce Wayne’s lack of self-awareness that he’s not any different from the copycats, he can just afford more expensive hockey pads.
You are a true master of listing things without understanding them. Here’s your participation trophy.
Hearing of Ledger’s death felt a lot like learning that Chadwick Boseman
had passed away last year. It didn’t seem real, and his absence gave
some mystical weight to The Dark Knight before it even came out.
I hadn’t mentally compared the two deaths, but I can strongly agree with the same shock and feeling of a bright light being extinguished too soon for both.
Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull is one where I’ve never really got the hate. I grew up with the first three and absolutely adoring them. While yeah, Crystal Skull isn’t as good as Raiders or Last Crusade, it’s fun as fuck to watch.The crowd at the cinema I saw it at absolutely went off for scenes which tend to get mocked online – the fridge and the monkey stuff. I haven’t rewatched it for a few years but the two times I have seen it, it’s still light, breezy fun.
Crystal Skull is the kind of movie that works gangbusters in the theater when you first see it, but curdles in memory. Our theater, too, cheered and laughed at all the expected places (including me!) but the more I thought about the movie afterward, the more hollow it seemed.
its the ending, Indiana jones always had this great ending despite the comedic bit parts in the movie. The tank scene, the “no papers”, etc etc.
I saw it in the theater, and have not watched it since. I can still remember the exact moment the movie lost me. The Spiderman 3 Jazz Dance moment if you will.It plays well for a while as I recall, but it never recovers from Shia Labeouf swinging through the trees with the bunch of monkeys like Tarzan. Tom’s right, it does devolve into pure CGI gunk from there. Saw it on my birthday and it did indeed bum me out.
I’d say the worst moment is when Indy is in quicksand and Shia LaBeef tries to pull him out with a snake. It’s supposed to play on his fear of snakes, but you don’t need to be unusually afraid of snakes to think that’s a pretty bad fucking plan.
I never liked the aliens being the big “thing” of Crystal Skull, it just felt off when compared to the first three films’ hooks.
I can see that to a certain point but for me, given the shocking amount of actual biblical magic and supernatural stuff in the earlier films, aliens aren’t really that much of a jump.
If I remember right, the movie calls them “interdimensional beings” in the hopes that that will make some kind of difference. But they’re aliens.
See, for all its faults, I didn’t mind that bit. I don’t think it was a good movie, but if Indy is based on pulp comics from the era— sure, in the ‘30s and ‘40s he’s going to be fighting Nazis and dealing with magical artifacts, etc (or, worse, a, er, “tribal” type story like Temple of Doom). If it’s the ‘50s, Communists and aliens is a logical progression. The aliens don’t seem any more of a stretch than God melting people’s faces off, IMO.
Yet the X-Files movie that came out a couple of months later didn’t have aliens.
That was what bothered me too. The other three were all about ancient religious artifacts. They were mystical and stuff. Aliens just seemed like a weird left turn. It just makes me think of that meme of the Ancient Aliens guy with the crazy hair.
Yeah, Indy’s thing is ancient mystical artifacts, not Chariots of the Gods.
I kind of enjoyed the first act, including the refrigerator/atomic bomb, which was appropriately silly but also fit weirdly well alongside the scene in Indy’s office where he laments that all his family and friends are dead.I even kind of liked the fistfight in the diner. Except that my wife pointed out that that Indy loses his hat during that fight, and we never see him get it back. He’s just wearing a new Indiana Jones Hat in the next scene. The CGI jungle with its CGI ants and monkeys was lame, but the suggestion that Indiana Jones has a second hat just ruined the whole thing.
“but the suggestion that Indiana Jones has a second hat just ruined the whole thing”Huh? He’s got the grey dress fedora on when he boards the clipper plane in Raiders…
That part is bad, that is true. But I think at that point I was forgiving because, well, it was still new Indiana Jones movie. But then they went over a waterfall three times and it just felt so unnecessary.
Yeah, I can’t believe “nuke the fridge” became a thing more than that stupid monkey swinging scene.
I remember once reading a term for that sort of experience but I can’t recall it off-hand. That feeling when you just step out of an action movie, and you’re pumped up and enjoyed it, but later you stopped and thought about it and were like “Wait, I liked that?” Like, it’s not ‘fridge logic’ or anything like that, but the concept is something similar.
see also: Rise of Skywalker
Naw man, I was already going “wtf is this crap” halfway through that movie.
This reminds me of a story I heard on a podcast. One of the hosts talks about how he went to see The Village with his girlfriend and her parents. They enjoyed it alright and as they were leaving they were like, “Okay, that was pretty good.” Then on the car ride home everything slowly came apart. They thought, “Oh wait, but what about..” “And that other thing!” Until by the time they got home everyone was just mad and thinking “That movie was garbage!”
“That was wonderful!”
“It was great!”
“….It was pretty good.”
“Well, it wasn’t BAD.”
“Well, there were parts of it that weren’t very good though.”
“It wasn’t that great.”
“I didn’t really like it.”
“it was awful.”
“It was TERRIBLE! TAKE IT AWAY!”
“HEY BOOOOOO! BOOOOOO!”
I watched the movie in stunned, silent disbelief as it unfolded.I kept silently chanting to myself, “I”m sure it’ll get better, I’m sure it’ll get better.”You know, just like how “Raiders of the Lost Ark” starts out as a total piece of crap and only eventually rights the ship at the halfway point.Oh, wait, no.KOTCS was pure crap from the first frame to the last.
I saw that movie at the Brooklyn Academy of Music theaters, which mostly shows art house and indie flicks, and the theaters are pretty small. The crowds there usually raced to laugh first at jokes in Woody Allen movies (this was a decade and a half ago), but they had no idea what to make of Crystal Skull. Me either. The whole memory is just sort of surreal now.
It works in the theater if you’re an idiot.
I think Crystal Skull’s problem is that it’s kind of forgettable compared to the other three movies. Like, Temple of Doom has Indy basically survive jumping out of an airplane by sledding down the Himalayas in a life raft, that entire dinner sequence, and Mola Ram ripping out a dude’s heart while he’s still alive (Which is partly why the PG-13 rating was created in the first place.). All Crystal Skull has is the fridge nuking scene and that’s about all everyone remembers from the movie.
What everyone also forgets about it is one of the more subtle yet egregious instances of racism in this series. There are not one but two groups of indigenous people that are just inhumanly murderous and insane for no explicable reason. One of them emerge from cocoons in walls like goddamn xenomorphs, like they just live there all day waiting to pounce on visitors to their centuries-abandoned city.
Yeah, I just brought that up, too. In the first few movies, the locals that Indy killed were either Nazi henchmen or people who were established to be part of a death cult that kidnapped a village’s entire child population. In Crystal Skull, he’s casually busting caps in native tribesman after he intruded on their grounds. They weren’t hired by the KGB goons to kill him or slow him down, and that’s a difference from the other movies that kind of jumps out.
That and Shia Labeouf basically cosplaying Armin Tamzarian.
The other day I was thinking about that that early jump scare in Temple of Doom, where Short Round finds the mummified remains of two children behind a rotting wooden door. Like, somebody locked those kids in a room so long ago that they turned to mummies and the door rotted? And then their remains almost fall on top of a Chinese war orphan who just wanted to see what’s behind that old door? The casual orientalism gets a lot of press, but Temple of Doom is first and foremost a really grisly horror movie. And even that’s leaving aside the reference to a sultan trying to chop off Indy’s dick.
It might not be the best Indy movie, but it is the Indy movie where enslaved children pray for their own deaths.
I don’t think we were quite as culturally aware in 2009, but watching Crystal Skull for the first time in like 2017, seeing Indy casually murder indigenous Peruvians was kind of jarring.
Not to mention that Temple of Doom has the mine cart and killer bridge sequence. Crystal Skull just does not put up anything to match the memorable action sequences from the original three films.
Yeah, I think that’s a big part of it. Otherwise the CGI fencing scene was kind of dumb, and the quicksand snake-rope
And it’s not that Crystal Skull doesn’t try to have those sequences, but it doesn’t deliver on them the way the previous films did. Like, I vaguely remember Shia LaBouef swinging through trees with monkeys, but I absolutely do not remember why he was doing it. I remember why Indy is running from a big rock in Raiders, or crawling all over a caravan of Nazi trucks, or dropping into a pit of snakes, or rafting down a Himalayan mountainside, or riding a mine cart, or falling into the cars of a circus train, or swimming through rats, or falling off a tank. Those sequences connect; a lot of Crystal Skull is just, “hey, this would look cool.”
There’s one small scene I remember – when one of the baddies tells Indy and Marion to shut up, which is exactly what I wanted to do.
This is true. What sets the two best Indiana Jones movies apart is great practical stunts, one overly confident American repeatedly besting groups of well-armed Nazis, and then at the end, this cynical, gruff, sweaty, womanizing, punching machine has a humbling brush with the divine. And God Himself seems to look at Indiana Jones and say “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.” I don’t know how they pulled that off twice.
Crystal Skull is bad because it’s poorly written, acted and directed.
Does the refrigerator sequence get mocked online? I always thought that was considered sort of an outlier in a movie otherwise viewed negatively.
Probably not so much recently but certainly for a few years at the end of the 2000s and in the early 2010s there was a lot of “nuke the fridge” jokes and mockery out there.
I’ll take your word for it. I always figured it was seen more as the closest thing the film had one of the signature sequences from the earlier films. It’s also the only one I remember, so that might be it.
Didn’t South Park pretty much slate Crystal Skull at the earliest available point, with their (oh so subtle) metaphor about George Lucas raping Indy?I’d say the fridge scene was mocked pretty from then onwards.
The phrase “Nuke the fridge” as a new “Jump the shark” was being made a thing on places like the AICN boards as soon as the film opened.
I fucking hate South Park.
And rape metaphors aside, The China Probrem just plain pales in comparison to Free Hat. The commentary is much sharper and the gags (Spielberg as Belloq, the nonsensical ‘chill his hot heart with a fresh island song’ runner) are funnier. God, do I miss South Park firing on all cylinders.
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull might be the worst thing Lucasfilm put out post-1998. Say what you will about the Star Wars prequels, but at least people remember and care about them… Crystal Skull is just the most forgettable thing imaginable. The one and only thing it accomplishes is to fuck up the phrase “Indiana Jones Trilogy.”
The Prequels are getting a huge turn around because of nostalgia. Boomers loved SW’s original Trilogy so hard that it became a cable mainstay, there was literally times in the 1980s and 1990s you could turn on basic cable and see all 3 movies overlapping each other and repeating on weekends. The prequels didn’t get that kind of play for most millennials but late millennials and Gen Z got absolutely slobberknocked with the prequel’s salvaging cartoons and then the prequels started trending again about 10 years ago. So it isn’t really like they were ‘misunderstood’ so much as they had a decade of follow up work laying out nostalgia to fix them.
I read something online just today that suggested people only dislike ‘The Phantom Menace’ because they’ve been told to, and really it’s a masterpiece. Which is certainly a take.
The general consensus at the time was Ep 1 was fine, childish but fine, really meant for the 8-12 year olds they were aiming at (I was 15 when it came out but also a girl..so sort of not their target demo?). It was episode 2 and 3 that were slandered because they were never going to be a happy ending and really kind of suck. But again, 10 years later on cable when Iron Man and TDK weren’t yet affordable on basic cable these guys got trotted out for dirt cheap and the cartoon was running strong so basically if you’re under 25 they’re awesome, if you’re over 30-35 they’re still laughably bad.
Um. The general consensus when TPM came out was that it was absolute garbage
Yeah, I didn’t necessarily agree (I thought it was fine for what it was and I still have some affection for the bits that work) but TPM was seen as a massive disappointment when it was released, hence all of the angry “George Lucas raped my childhood” nerd reactions online. The Phantom Menace became synonymous with disappointing films. It was an instant punchline. By comparison AOTC was quite warmly received simply because it wasn’t TPM (it had more action, less spiritual mythology, more Ewan, less child actor) – I remember it getting 5 star reviews – and ROTS was seen as a success, again partly because of where the trilogy started. I think these days AOTC is seen as the worst of the three, TPM is what it is (it’s almost an artifact of its time now more than a film and ROTS is seen as being solid.
Funny! I remember AOTC being shat on even more than TPM.
I definitely remember there being plenty of reviews going “Guys, don’t worry, it’s not The Phantom Menace!” and giving it an extra star just for that. AICN was going crazy for it and Empire ran a (now infamous – and not archived on their site) 5 star review. Not that I’m saying their wasn’t criticism – the love story was almost instantly picked apart – and that maybe I was existing in a bubble of people wowed by big explosions and fighting Yodas whereas you were surrounded by more sensible voices correctly noting how tepid and empty it is. Though I’d still watch it over Rise of Skywalker.
Empire did eventually put Chris Hewitt’s original 5-star AOTC review on their website – although with an introductory “I don’t know what I was thinking either!” paragraph:https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/empire-original-attack-of-the-clones-review/Their site also hosts a different 3-star review they published at some point:https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/star-wars-episode-ii-attack-clones-review/
Thanks! I wish their default was their original review for every film. That’s a much better and more interesting archive than the years-later hindsight reviews that mostly seem to be on the site.
Yes that’s absolutely correct. Clones got great reviews upon release and it absolutely went off on the cinemas. The backlash against it didn’t really fire off until a few years later.
Also, the whole “George Lucas raped my childhood” thing is one of the silliest takes ever and the people who genuinely believe this deserve to be mocked relentlessly for being fucking idiots.
To quote your name: “Nope” as in “Fine but childish” is far more accurate than ‘absolute garbage.’
Nope. It was pretty much universally reviled
Thanks, I accept your concession. ^_^
Yeah, I like the film but it was definitely seen as a disappointment at best, hate crime at worst (again, the “George Lucas raped my childhood” reactions online) as soon as it was released. “It’s fine but childish” was the defence some tried to use to defend it but the overall opinion was that The Phantom Menace was a huge letdown.
Just to be clear, you know we can all look up resources and it turns out the most basic reviews show the same fucking thing I said and that you’re wrong. If you want to talk about nascent internet reviews and hot takes from the asshole fringe of SW’s fandom, be my guest. The professional 1999 critics largely gave it positive to middling reviews. https://www.metacritic.com/movie/star-wars-episode-i—-the-phantom-menace/critic-reviews
You think the 36 reviews on Metacritic represent the whole of 1999’s reaction to the film? Even there look at the “middling” ones – they’re condemning it as soulless, saying it lacks story or character, “The Empire Strikes out…” Look, I don’t know how aware of this kind of thing you were in 1999. I don’t know if you’re just misremembering. But the negative reaction from the public and most critics to The Phantom Menace on its release was infamous and real – again, I like the film (I have no agenda against it) but it became a pop culture punchline as soon as it came out. That’s a fact. Honestly, the weird take of “The Phantom Menace was warmly received upon release!” is revisionist history of the most bizarre kind. Its just… not true. Its just a very silly thing to argue. But, going from your “I’m definitely right!” tone, its something you clearly believe and some stranger on the Internet like me isn’t going to change your mind so hey, go for it. Honestly. If you think that the world greeted The Phantom Menace with a “Hey, pretty good job, George Lucas!” then where ’s the harm?
Can you quietly go fuck off? I’m genuinely at the point where outside of the hardcore SW fandom the Ep1 everybody else felt it was fine…but whatever, you do you. I’m just exhausted with you basically DENYING FUCKING REALITY.
You are very strange. ::shrugs::
Yes, you were soundly defeated by reality and then doubled down because that’s what white nerdy guys do when reality knocks them on their ass for being wrong. Cool story, bro.
I’d written a more snarky reply but hey, all good. Whose got the energy for such silly arguments on the Internet? I still disagree with you but wish you well.
(And with that I shall, as you wish, quietly fuck off from this weird debate of ours. It makes no difference to me what a stranger on the internet believes and I know I can’t change your mind so I feel silly having spent so much energy on something so frivolous. Sorry that my replies seemed to wind you up – that wasn’t my intent. Honestly, outside of the internet shouting, I find it really interesting that you remember it the way you do)
If this is your flounce where you try to put the onus on me for calling you out for being factually wrong, that’s what we call ‘gaslighting.’ I suggest you just stop. Dude, you’re just factually wrong, Ep1 did not get trashed as hard you think it did by the critics, fan forums got upset I’m sure, but in 1999 SW fandom was already a toxic mess. Ep2 and 3 are generally more mocked for the overly convenient plot points and the inevitably of Vader but also lazy writing regarding what was the Lucas’ regard for the Iraq War that started just as he was finishing penning what was essentially a perfect parallel to it.
every critic gave it very positive reviews, so you are wrong
Hm. My feel from the critical consensus was that Phantom Menace and Clones were both seen as poorly acted and written nonsense, while Sith felt the closest to approaching anything good, especially with the gossip that the script was punched up by both Spielberg and Tom Stoppard, which is the kind of backstage minutiae critics go nuts for, even in shitty movies (made for a lot of “I bet it’s the opera scene” discussions and the like).
Agree. Revenge of the Sith was the only one that felt like a proper star wars movie, but the fans were already turned off by the first two. I always said if Revenge came out as a stand alone movie and that was the only prequel, everyone would still be calling Lucas a genius and that film would be right next to the first three, maybe even ahead of ROTJ.
Out of all the hot takes I’ve ever heard, “Phantom Menace is actually good!” is definitely one of them.
Best of the prequels imo. I can handle Jar Jar, and the writing for Anakin was horrible, but the rest of it is pretty good. The podrace is cool, Darth Maul is even cooler, and it has the best lightsaber duel of all Star Wars movies.
That is some wiiiild revisionist history.
I took my boss’ 10 year old kids to see “Phantom Menace” and they freaking LOVED IT. One of her sons thought Jar Jar was hysterical. The entire ride home he did an endless impression of Jar Jar. So us jaded adults were put off by the Prequels, but you’re right, the Gen Z/Millennial crowd were blown away. It’d be interesting to see what those kids think of “Phantom Menace” now…
Well and that and the sequels sucked and forever buried the most common criticism of the prequels which was if someone other than George Lucas wrote them they would be “better”.
and the prequels memes, I think those memes alone have made me appreciate the prequels more. High Ground.Hello there.
I hated it when it came out. Watched it a few years ago and loved it, don’t know what my problem was. I get what other people’s problems were, but that’s stuff that doesn’t, and never has, bothered me personally.
It was the aliens.. Yes Raiders dealt with god and temple had the magic rocks and there was the Nazi melting cup of last crusade but the aliens was just too much.
Agree. It is called suspension of disbelief and it is a hard thing to quantify what is “too much”. I can 100% see, and I am in this camp, how some say how can aliens be “too much” when god, a healing jesus cup and indian magic were in the first three, but for many people aliens did seem to be too much
LaBeef got a bad rap. He was fine. It’s not like a different actor would have made the movie better.
Mutt Williams is a perfectly decent character.Mac was always the problem.
I love the Rifftrax of that film for their relentless ragging on the pointlessness of that character.
Mac, going to his death: “I’ll be fine”
All three riffers: “WHO CARES?!”
It’s not like a different actor would have made the movie better.
Temple of Doom is so much worse than Crystal Skull and I’m honestly surprised this is a controversial opinion,
I don’t know about the crowd in my theater, but I was trying to will the movie to be good or interesting or clever, the entire time, and just kind of getting depressed the longer it went on.
Crystal Skull had some huge issues, but overall it was still fun. And are aliens really that much more ridiculous than face-melting boxes? Of course, Lucas also had to make them inter-dimensional, for no reason.
A touch late I know, but I think a lot of the problem people have with the aliens in Crystal Skull is not that they’re harder to accept it’s that they’re in a different genre. Face-melting-godboxes, mystical jungles and Life-Giving Magic Sippy Cups all exist firmly within the genre of myth/fantasy and aliens exist firmly within the genre of sci-fi. Three movies in myth mode and one in sci-fi mode is jarring and Crystal Skull does absolutely none of the legwork to get us from one genre to the other. It would be like Frodo escaping from the slopes of Mount Doom on a jet-pack not a handy eagle. Also it’s a shit movie, so there’s that.
My theater laughed at that stuff too, but it wasn’t a good kind of laughter. It wasn’t delighted at what was on screen, it was bafflement that George thought it was a good idea
But see, the fridge actually IS fun. It’s stupid, but it’s “sensibly” or “logically” stupid in the same way that God can apparently be mollified by averting one’s eyes, and it’s an entertaining solution to the obstacle in front of Dr. Jones in the moment. Most of the actual problem in the movie comes from the characters doing things that are non-sensical, the stuff that’s not grounded in any actual logic at ALL, or the fact that there’s like 6 plotlines going on at once, none of them ever fully developed or treated with any sense of seriousness.
Mutt tossing a snake to Indy to use as a rope is far more ludicrous than hiding in a fridge from a nuclear weapon. The former requires both characters be idiots in a way that makes you say “I can’t believe the writers think this scene works”. The latter requires the character to do something stupid, but it was also his only option and showed at least a modicum of desperate “here goes nothing” ingenuity, the kind that makes you (importantly, alongside Jones) exclaim “I can’t believe that worked!”.
It’s stupid, but it’s “sensibly” or “logically” stupid in the same way that God can apparently be mollified by averting one’s eyes,When Hera found out that Zeus in mortal guise had knocked up Semele, she went to Semele and manipulated her into doubting that her lover was actually Zeus, convincing her to demand that Zeus appear to her in his full divine glory to prove his identity. As Zeus had promised to grant Semele a wish, he had to comply, even though he knew exposing her to his full divinity would incinerate her. Which she was, leaving the embryonic Dionysus behind.So no, it’s not so much “stupid” as it is mythologically normal for mortals to not fare well when directly viewing divine power.
I’m an extra in the college campus car chase scene in Crystal Skull! That’s all I have to say about that movie.
I like deliberately campy action movies like the Fiennes & Thurman The Avengers, Batman & Robin and some of the later Pirates of the Caribbean installments, but although The Crystal Skull has some parts that veer towards that territory, it also sometimes try to play it straight and that combination doesn’t work, especially not in combination with the crappy cgi.
These kinds of movies also tend to be box office poison, because blockbuster audiences generally are no connaisseurs of things cult and camp. I get mostly blank stares when I try to explain that Birds of Prey is the closest Hollywood has ever come to making a late period Takashi Miike film.
It’s not as bad as people say it was but it doesn’t really click. Blanchett and Winstone are good actors given characters that don’t really work, Karen Allen hadn’t work in a while and it showed, and LaBeouf’s Mutt got annoying pretty quickly.The first 3 films felt like Lucas and Spielberg’s love letter to the genre. Crystal felt like old friends trying to find a project where they can work together and settling with the least bad idea.
Bringing back Marion & acknowledging her as the only woman in Indy’s life who was worth a damn was literally the only good thing about Crystal Skull.
Just as long as you don’t think too hard about the whole statutory rape subtext.
It sucked.
There were some silly moments for sure, but my main problem with it wasn’t even really the movie’s fault. The idea of ‘updating’ the movie to reflect the pulp sci-fi of the 50s was actually pretty clever, I just drastically prefer the 30s-40s pulp-adventure aesthetic. It’d be like if the fourth movie in a noir-inspired series suddenly turned into a Cold War thriller. When sequels just do the same thing that worked the first time, people complain because its boring. But changing what worked the first time *is* a risk, and it’s not always going to work.
I’m sorry, but what the heck? “Crystal Skull” was a epic shitshow from very start. I was like film length car crash that kept getting worse by the minute.The whole production crew should be banned for life from participating any movies.
Only positive if one really wants to get one is that it shoved how good actual props look next to CGI.
With Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time, James Cameron turns his Dances With Space Wolves idea into a virtuoso spectacle.Did you just compare Avatar to the Space Wolves?*This is not meant as an insult to the author. Just wanted to post a gif from If The Emperor Had A Text-to-Speech Device because the Space Wolves are a Space Marine Chapter in Warhammer 40k.
Seriously. Everyone knows Cameron was ripping off Ferngully.
And Last Samurai…..
Ugh, Avatar.
If you’re able to cite numerous movies another movie supposedly “ripped off,” chances are those other movies weren’t exactly original to begin with.
When this came out I saw it three times in five days. Spider-Man 2 was a great superhero movie but the Dark Knight was an EVENT. It broke the rules of a superhero film in ways never done before or since. Rachel dying was a complete OH SHIT moment, something Marvel has never had the courage to pull the trigger on. I left the theatre elated and breathless, in the closing minutes Batman becomes the bad guy?!?? “I can do those things, because I’m not a hero.” Holy fuck are you kidding me!?!!? The Avengers film might have been the first time we’ve ever truly seen a graphic novel put on screen, but The Dark Knight remains superior because it’s a god damn film! It’s big and bold and not wearing hockey pads.
I love Ledger’s Joker and TDK in general but in the end I don’t like the legacy that his portrayal has left behind, in comics at least. Joker’s gone from a character who does joke themed crimes to a psychotic mass murderer who also laughs occasionally.
Curiosity question in that case as were you reading the comics before the movie? As that had been Joker’s portrayal far before the movie. The shift to that started already in the 80s.
He kills a bunch of people in his first appearance, and not in particularly funny ways. The iconography was much more harlequin than circus clown.
Yeah I was about to say, this is more or less how he was played post-Crisis. The late 80s particularly have got everything from Death in the Family and Killing Joke to Arkham Asylum. There’s several major 90s and early-mid 2000s pre-Dark Knight storylines, including his key role at the end of No Man’s Land, Hush etc which all display him indulging in extreme violence and all that kind of thing.
Actually I forgot to mention Grant Morrison had been doing some weird super dark shit with the Joker during their lengthy Batman run starting in 2006.That’s a run that I like various parts of but also struggle with other bits of it (Particularly Grant’s lengthy indulgences of 1950s-era Batman post Golden Age/Pre Silver age stuff.Final Crisis is really good fun though, as is the Batman and Robin stuff with Dick and Damian.
I started very briefly before TDK, but I have gone and read older stuff. And I do agree the shift towards darker stuff had started a long time back, but I just feel like post-Ledger things turned even sharper towards the grim.
Like when he cut his own face off for no reason? That happened right after TDK in the comics.
True , but he can be both (actually he can be a lot of things including a Morrison-esq totem of chaos, but thats a whole other story).Its just TDK kind of just made the ‘damaged clown oriented serial killer’ the default setting. Fuck it of all the modern on screen versions of him I like the Zach Galifianakis one best as at least its different.
I enjoyed Morrison’s takes on Joker and was super disappointed by the next big version. Scott Snyder’s Joker shows up and cuts the lights in the police station and somehow snaps like 17 cops’ necks in a minute and I’m just like “what the fuck am I reading?” He can be a mass-murderer, but he’s not supposed to be a horror movie slasher doing ridiculously impossible or at least improbable shit like that. Use some poison, or a clever plan, or something off the wall crazy, but just being a murder machine is boring and could easily be a dozen other characters instead (and it was immediately followed by the stupid “re-attaching his cut-off face” gimmick). I haven’t even gone near the whole “3 Jokers” thing because I’m not a big fan of Geoff Johns and it seems to be building off the last decade of Joker stuff I have not liked (although I really like Sean Murphy’s alternate universe version in his recent Batman: White Knight miniseries).
Wasn’t he introduced trying to poison the reservoir? He was always homicidal.
The best movie/TV Joker is still Mark Hamill from Batman: TAS. He really captures the “psychotic clown” nature of the character.
100% agreed on this. It’s a bit frustrating to see people claim Joker had been like this in the comics for a while- Yes and no. Honestly we never saw anything quite like Ledger’s Joker before
the close-quarters fight scenes in last year’s Tenet might be the first truly effective ones that Nolan has ever staged.
The Inception hallway fight scene is Nolan’s first good one. I think it’s largely because depicting the zero g effect of time dilation required wide shots where the viewer could see full human bodies going through the choreography credibly. It’s strange how long he stubbornly held onto his chaotic, frequently disparaged before that.
I prefer the action in Bourne Identity to what Greengrass did in the sequels for similar reasons. There are obviously still some awesome fight/action scenes, and I know WHY Greengrass chose the shaky cam route and what he was trying to achieve (which he did in a few spots) but I really think there’s diminishing returns on immersion with that technique. MCU action and fight scenes suffer from similar issues though for them it’s typically just way too many edits that contribute. My favorite moments from fights or battles tend to be the more epic shots where we get actual scale (Black Panther and Cap breaking out ahead of the rest of the army in Infinity War to meet the enemy) or in the “standalone” films where directors get more freedom from the house style (the casino fight in Black Panther, for example, which allowed Coogler to play with longer takes and fight choreography, which he’d done to great effect in Creed.)
I think Greengrass’s style has been merged in people’s minds with all of the many terrible imitators that came afterward. Watch Identity’s fights again. Sure, they shake less than the sequels, but they cut like crazy, and the camera is so close that hits are frequently out of frame.Greengrass’s films can look chaotic, but he sprinkles in wide shots to allow the viewers to orient themselves. I also think he’s better as establishing the geography of the scene, and he’s better at highlighting important actions within a fight.That said, Supremacy was a little too chaotic for its own good in parts, but Ultimatum found a happy medium. And I’m not trying to drag Identity, whose fights were very good for the time.
The Hunger Games movies went this route and I think the entire world knew it was to meet MPAA nitpicking about how much of a teen getting opened up with an axe you could show and not get an R rating. The choppy style was perfect for taking out a second here and a second there to meet some unwritten quota of shots of blood and not really making a difference in the overall fight.
I loved the brutality and immediacy of the bathroom fight in Ultimatum. I think that’s one of the scenes where his style achieved what he was going for, and it did end up imitated for that exact reason. But even just the action framing in Supremacy vs Identity, though, is a clear departure. And an intentional one, and I’m not saying one is inherently better. Heck if anything I’m sure there’s more artistic merit to the Greengrass choices. But seeing Supremacy’s brutal house fight scene in the theater, for example, I remember feeling like I had no fucking idea what was happening. I’ve seen it multiple times now obviously and I’ve picked up on it and I can appreciate it, but there’s something to be said for what Liman did with the action and choreography even if it was more conventional.
It’s weird, that casino fight scene was so good, then the proceeding car chase was so meh. The latter used more digital effects and felt super weightless
Yeah I was also confused by that line. The hallway fight owns.
Oh man, that Hallway scene was great. Made me want to have a Joseph Gordon-Levitt Spider-Man movie.
That is a good one. It was really the only time I thought the crazy visuals of that movie actually meant something.
Patrick Willems did a great breakdown on how IMAX forced Nolan to expand his shots, and how it made his films better as a result. It was The Dark Knight that kicked it off and its benefits were definitely seen in Inception as well.
I’ve seen Willem’s excellent essay already and it was definitely an influence on my conjecture about Nolan’s style. An appreciation of physicality is not a natural thing for Nolan (in fact like Hitchcock I think Nolan avoids violence). He only began to understand it as a valuable storytelling tool as an outgrowth of his experimentation with film formats and shot framing.
Example: the final battle of the Dark Knight Rises seems so weird to me. Like it’s an all-out battle between the cops and the gunmen, but it’s still so sanitized. There’s no blood or dirt or anything, and it feels way too choreographed
Yeah you’d think his widescreen approach to filmmaking would translate well to coherent combat scenes more often
That’s why I think the lack of them is an active choice from a very exacting director, though I can only speculate as to Nolan’s motivation.
Back when the movie was originally in theaters, Domino’s offered a little something called The Gotham City Pizza. It had like extra pepperoni and stuff. That was awesome.
Fuck that sounds tasty. I could go for some of that right about now.
What would Gotham City-style pizza be like? Deep dish with extra Smilex? Bat-shaped crust?Would the people of Metropolis be all, “no way, our extra-big floppy thin crust slices with the pepperoni arranged in an “S” is way better, jabronis!”
Everything about that sounds good except for Domino’s
Dark Knight is still one of my most powerful movie theater experiences and I always instantly list this film among my favorites.It is kind of wild to realize it is one of the most influental and impactful films of the past few decades, but here for it.
It’s an important movie in geekland, beause it was indeed the entry point into an era we haven’t left yet (Synder is still trying to do Nolan), and it’s a very pretty film. But.It’s also, like all these Nolan batman movies, a dumb film, with nonsensical plots and characters. And a lot of lot of varnish over it. So there’s the public that goes “ooh, I guess I have felt things, it is awesome”, and the public that is nagged all the long by the diffuse feeling that something is off or lacking. Like a mystery with no resolution, an unfulfilled promise to make sense, and a movie which tone, music, characters declare “there, i made sense” with the same aplomb as an interned kiddo declaring “0wn3d” in a flamewar.I used to think it was an inevitability due to the subject (you cannot make a serious movie about bat men chasing clowns with a cape, gadgets and pointy ears : the premise’s silliness catches you up, and the more pompously you presented it, the more awkward it gets). But then, Telltale surprised me, and removed some of Nolan’s excuses.So it still comes down to self-indulgence, to “it looks badass so who cares”, and to cheap popcorn psychology/philosophy bluffing its way stylistically. What remains is something that will be omnipresent in our era : disjointed movies that are less good than the sum of their excellent scenes. Movies for youtube consumption. I still rewatch bits of it with pleasure. But the whole stays a letdown.Nolan is stylish. He’s very enjoyably stylish. He has the elegance that Snyder doesn’t, he makes music instead of noise. But it’s still a catchy song with cheap lyrics. It’s strangely proto-snyder under the surface (kids comics for adults, absurd plots with gravitas, monologues with pretend meaning). It makes me think of an ugly animal that is still cute before it grows up and its inherent flaws become the dominant traits.
The number of reviews that came out at the time using the word “intelligent” or synonyms thereof about the underbaked and overhyped Ethics 101 horseshit of this film made me so very sad. I loudly groaned in the theater when Dent delivered that fucking “see yourself become the villain” line. Like…. Jesus Christ, at least on Hannibal they knew the foreshadowing was arch camp goofiness and embraced it. How Eckhart could deliver that line without dying of laughter or shame I’ll never know.
Clearly you haven’t seen most of the rest of Eckhart’s filmography, some of his earlier work notwithstanding.
Yeah, particularly a certain tale of the modern Prometheus that apparently has an even bigger howler.
Hahaha… Okay. Fair.
“you cannot make a serious movie about bat men chasing clowns with a cape, gadgets and pointy ears”This is so well put, and exactly why we need to stop with the superhero movies. If none of the Marvel characters can die after being thrown 4 blocks into a building, if Iron Man doesn’t turn to goo inside a hard metal shell after 10G deceleration… then why should I care about anything they’re doing? They’re all zombie movies with no rules, pure masturbation. Not that they aren’t art. But they’re so far detached from reality. Escapism is fine, but FFS it’s dangerous when it’s all there is.
I remember that it was the #1 movie of all time on imdb for a while. Maybe I shouldn’t take imdb too seriously, but that bugged me. This movie isn’t all that deep, although it desperately wants you to think it is. Yes, it’s entertaining, and yes, Ledger gave a good performance, but it’s loaded with plot holes, and has a generally messy feel.
Imdb ratings are indicative of nothing but the tastes of the internet, imdb-using, subculture. Expect fashionable action-adventure movies in the first top 1000, and not many films older than the average connected teenager.
That “popular outcry” that shook up the Academy wasn’t exactly gallant, and the internet fanboy hive this movie gave rise to was obnoxious as hell. Score-bombing the IMDb has been pretty standard ever since.
Is “The Batman” part of the same era?
Good question, that remains to be seen. But I think it’s leaning more into a serial killer/detective angle, with hopefully some dark ‘70s psychedelic thrown in there to make it more visually interesting. At the very least it looks a lot less aesthetically sterile than the Nolan/Snyder films. So hopefully not!
I recently rewatched ‘The Dark Knight’, and even prepared myself to think that nostalgia and hype had done its work on me and I wouldn’t enjoy Ledger’s Joker as much. Nope. It really is a great example of a director and actor absolutely getting a character. The scariness, the gleeful chaos, the unpredictability that should all be part of the Joker is all there. You don’t need an origin story for this Joker, because you see what he’s all about from his actions.
That little shuffle away from the hospital! So good.
I love the scene of him sticking his head out the cop car window after he blows up the police station and escapes.
Same. He absolutely loves what he does and being alive in general, and that’s why he’s so terrifying.
You could tell the makers of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker had that scene in mind when making it
everything about Joker just works in TDK, but the part that really gets me is the noisy hum in the music whenever he’s on screen, it’s unnatural and a bit disturbing. in the theater I was just about squirming in my seat when was at the party mid way through the film becuase his presence on screen was just so unsettling.
I got a bit tired of Zimmer’s ticking clock type of soundtrack, but the Joker theme was so unsettling it was perfect, and later Bane’s
I cannot tell you what a relief it is that this article at least acknowledges how bad the writing gets at times in TDK. I felt like a man without a country when the movie came out and I was posting very critical thoughts. I got burnt to a crisp by all the flame responses.
(Sort of) Counterpoint: The Dark Knight, for all its virtues, pushed superhero films right up to the edge of how seriously they can take themselves and how naturalistically they can be treated before they tip right back over into silliness again. And a significant part of this IMO is making Gotham City look like any other city. Begins may have been less iconic, but it did a better job of balancing the “naturalistic” aesthetic that Nolan was going for with keeping one foot in the heightened/exaggerated forms of reality that superheroes need in order to thrive.The Dark Knight, however, is kind of like what Heat would be if you had a guy wearing a bat suit drop in every so often. It clashes a lot more, because a guy wearing a bat suit can’t help but look a bit silly when he’s in a world which is making an effort to look real and naturalistic and outside-your-window, because, well, they kind of do. Which is a bit more of a problem considering that the guy in the bat suit, well, is kind of the central figure of The Dark Knight.The Dark Knight is a fine film, don’t get me wrong. (I’m not quite as in love with it as some people are, but it is still a film I saw twice at the cinema with no regrets either time.) But it teeters on the verge of forgetting that superheroes are still fantasy figures who need an element of unreality, of ridiculousness even, in order to actually function. I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that the nitpicky worthy-but-kinda-missing-the-point critiques about how Batman doesn’t use his millions to improve Gotham infrastructure instead of dressing up as a bat and fighting crime have increased since The Dark Knight; it’s because Nolan creates a Batman where that’s actually a valid question to the point where it almost breaks the story by draining it of any fantasy. Even the fact that the Joker’s plans go off completely without a hitch in the fact of the massive logistical issues they face just doesn’t quite work the way Nolan ends up needing them to in this realistic world, because the Joker also needs that veneer of comic book fantasy wherein he’s a diabolical criminal mastermind who can pull off implausible plots through the power of being just that unrealistically crazy. Sneer at the slime-green neon all you want, but at least Joel Schumacher wasn’t desperately trying to convince us that Batman is a thing that could actually exist in the real world kinda sorta guys, honestly.
I pretty much feel the same way. I don’t dislike it, but I don’t love it. Don’t foresee myself ever watching it in full again (I ended up seeing it 3 times throughout the course of 2008 for various reasons, so I remember it pretty darn well). A lot of that is purely personal; I wouldn’t myself ever wish anything were “more realistic”, or at least not something like Batman.Of course it’s the kind of “realistic” where the Penguin is too absurd, but we’re to believe an entire town would be brought to its knees if *gasp* a politician turned out to be a bad guy! I’ve also never liked how Nolan’s characters often talk like they’re delivering the post-film lecture on the film’s themes; Caine talking about “the point of the Batman”, Eckhart’s “live to see yourself become the villain” and on and on right through to Oldman’s “he’s the hero…he’s not our hero” speech at the end. In fairness, Nolan does seem to be stepping away from this schtick in recent years, or was in Dunkirk at any rate.
Seconded. I watched The Dark Knight, liked it, but never really got how people fall all over themselves over it. I would never really want to rewatch it either, it is way too dark bordering on nihilistic. I always kind of thought it was maybe Ledger’s untimely death that kind of sanctified the film the same way people did when James Dean died with Rebel without a cause.
I think you can make serious films around ridiculous or fantastical element. What Nolan did though was pretend those elements were grounded and serious, and that didn’t work at all (for me, at least).
I’m always interested in this kind of reaction to a movie because while you are entitled to it on a subjective level (anything can not work for anyone, for any reason, and the rest of us shouldn’t have shit to say about it), you seem to be trying to frame it more objectively than that. Not just that it didn’t work *for you*, but that on some level it didn’t work at all. And clearly the vast majority of viewers didn’t feel that way. They’re fine with Batman in a world that is kind of realistic. They ate it up with a spoon.
I mean, I outright stated that I found it a perfectly enjoyable film that I saw twice at the cinemas without any regrets whatsoever, so if you come away from what I wrote thinking that I don’t think this film “worked at all”, I’d respectfully ask that you read what I said again because you appear to have overlooked something.As for subjectivity, you’re correct, of course; my responses to the film are as subjective as any viewer’s, and I’ll freely concede that I’m in the minority in certain opinions when it comes to The Dark Knight. When it comes to film criticism, however, it goes both ways; the majority viewpoint isn’t automatically the undeniably correct one demanding unquestioning deference. If we’re going there, a positive response towards a film is arguably just as subjective as a negative one, no matter how many people agree with it. Lots of people liked The Dark Knight just fine, and more power to them — hell, see above, I’m one of them — but that doesn’t mean that those lots of people are automatically correct (including me), that The Dark Knight is a flawless gem with no fault whatsoever, or that any dissenting opinion cannot or must not be presented in an objective manner. Especially since, if a response to a film is subjective, then there’s arguably very little meaningful difference between “it didn’t work for me” and “it didn’t work at all”, as the end result is the same for the viewer in question.Plus, well, I hate to be That Guy, but calling me up for not expressing a view on The Dark Knight that is counter to the majority consensus in a sufficiently subjective fashion kind of smacks a little of tone-policing (or at least something in that general area). It kind of suggests that if I’m going to dare to speak out of turn about The Dark Knight, I should be constantly apologising for my nerve and reassuring everyone that I’m just being subjective, honestly, and I have no intention of offending the mighty majority by speaking out of turn. Which, well, no thanks. I mean, I really do intend no offence to anyone, to each their own of course, and I genuinely do like the film as well. But I think the things I talked about are problems with the film in a way which is as objective as is possible when engaging in film criticism, I think it’s valid to raise them, I think it’s safe to assume that any conversation around film criticism involves a certain degree of subjectivity on the part of the participants (including myself) even if it’s written in an objective style and goes unspoken, and I see nothing in my post that anyone could otherwise take objection to (I’m not calling anyone objectively stupid for liking this movie or anything). So, to be frank, I’ll present my views as objectively as I like, thank you all the same.
Okaaayyy. I think you took that way farther than I intended to go. Let me reiterate with hopefully some additional clarity. I felt like you were making a case for why the movie is flawed (“Batman in the real world is an idea that goes against the very nature of what makes comic books successful,” or something along those lines) more so than why it didn’t succeed for you personally. And I am countering that if a majority of people found the movie successful despite plopping Batman in the real world, then the flaw you’re proposing might not be a flaw for anyone else.Specifically, sentences like this: “…it teeters on the verge of forgetting that superheroes are still fantasy figures who need an element of unreality, of ridiculousness even, in order to actually function.” But… apparently they don’t need that. That is my only quibble. This doesn’t sound like you’re stating your own preference. An italicized “need” here is a pretty clear reach for some sort of objective (rather than subjective) criticism. Or am I misunderstanding you?I would more broadly argue that a lot of recent entertainment (recent = last 15 years or so) has attempted this “real world version of fantasy thing X” approach, to varying degrees of success. It doesn’t always succeed for me, or for a general audience, as well as it apparently did in The Dark Knight. But I do feel like the whole existence and general critical & commercial success of this as a sub-form of the genre suggests that the public has decided that self-conscious ridiculousness is not a requirement at all, but just an optional feature they can take or leave. And, to be honest, I’m not always sure that’s a good thing; we have reached a place of taking stuff meant for children (broad, basic, rather silly stuff) a bit too seriously, perhaps. But I would make a case that The Dark Knight is the best-case scenario for taking a silly thing too seriously. For me, at least, it works even though maybe it shouldn’t, and even though its influence on subsequent stuff has not been all good.
I may have misinterpreted where you were coming from and, as it turns out, overreacted a bit. Apologies, I do that sometimes.That said, I do think you are, if not exactly misinterpreting me, then at least misinterpreting exactly where I’m coming from. For what it’s worth, I do think that superheroes are fantasy figures who need an element of unreality to actually function (and I stand by that). And I also think that The Dark Knight comes about as close to as you can get away with when it comes to a naturalistic / realistic version of a character like Batman without going a bit too far with it. However, based on your follow-up post, where I think you maybe think I’m coming from in my post is a view that I believe the movie actually crosses this line (such as it is), and thus that I do not actually like this movie, whereas I actually don’t think it does ultimately cross this line (and also like it just fine). I think the movie comes about as close to how naturalistic / realistic you can treat a character like Batman before it starts to be a problem, but at the end of the day I think there’s still enough ‘unreality’, for want of a better term, in it for it to still function effectively as a Batman movie. In short, I actually don’t think that the naturalistic approach to Batman is a flaw of the movie, exactly; what I do think is that if they’d gone a bit further with the naturalism / “realism” side of things, however, it may have become one.I hope this clarifies things a bit.
It does. And no worries, here on the internet we are all here to misinterpret and overreact. 🙂 Good chat.
I do think it goes over the line and remember watching it thinking I bet one of those henchmen has a relative they’d like to live and maybe they shoot the Joker? Or a random cop? (I also liked the movie and saw it twice in the theater too.) What motivates henchmen is the weak link of a lot stuff, and I wonder if there is a term for this kind of narrative dissonance, for when an approach to a story starts breaking too many of the norms of a genre and the scaffolding falls…Anyway, just wanted to say it’s been a pleasure to read in a clear fashion much of what I’ve tried to say over the years.
If anything Dark Knight Rises tipped it too far into “unrealistic” and I think that’s part of the reason they rejected it. People want Batman plowing through Chicago. They liked that quite a bit.
It honestly gets distracting how much Gotham looks like Chicago, then Pittsburgh, then NYC. Like, the city changes its skyline over the course of the series.
The Dark Knight is the single greatest comic book movie ever. Period.It has none of Marvel’s no one stays dead or magic maguffins cliches. And is not woke SJW Mary Sue trash. It literally had enough material for 2 or even 3 standalone blockbuster movies, but Nolan held nothing back and just made the single best movie he could at one time without the endless Marvel dick tease of something better next time. Even Marvel’s best, in Infinity War, is all undone in Endgame and doesn’t even need to happen if Thanos just doubles the size and resources of the universe instead halving the number of all living things, because once again magic makes everything irrelevant.
The late Aaron Swartz discussed the different pendulum swings of the Waynes using their wealth/power in different ways to help Gotham in his reviews of the trilogy:http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/tdkr
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/batmanbegins
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/tdkYes, that appears to be out of order, but it’s the order in which he wrote them and intended them to be read.
The conclusion of the trilogy as a whole is that there is no ultimate fix, because every solution creates its own opposite problem.
I saw a quote from Greg Rucka (I think) who, when asked his opinion on Nolan’s Batman films, replied, “I think they’re very good crime movies ashamed to be about Batman.” That’s stuck with me for a while.
Never leave the cave without it
I dunno. I find this film very over-stuffed by the end. Including Two-Face always seemed like a mistake.
Including Two-Face always seemed like a mistake.
yeah it would’ve worked as a setup, but instead they created its own mini-movie that made the actual movie feel like it was continuing long past its logical conclusion.
Yeah – if they’d left it with TF in hospital after the visit from the Joker, that would have been fine with me. Having him as an active villain was just distracting.
I’m glad the Two-Face stuff was in there for a few reasons. 1) it wasn’t in much of the marketing so it came as a total surprise 2) and a treat, since Two-Face is my favorite Batman villain! 3) There’s never a guarantee there will be another one- Nolan was hesitant to even return after Ledger’s death. 4) It feeds into the themes they’ve been talking about all movie. Not only about the incorruptible, but about escalation. 5) It’s Joker’s win, Harvey’s fall, and Batman’s failure. There’s a complete idea here that’s lost if they leave it out. 6) I don’t really care for set-up-for-next-time plot threads. I know we’re used to franchise movies dangling carrots, but it’s still something I’m never on board with. This isn’t television. This is cinema. Tell your story now, not later.
Thematically, though, it made perfect sense. And it was a clever way to have Batman beat Joker with Joker still ‘winning’.
Well Batman doesn’t change who he is and Joker doesn’t change who he is, but somebody needed to have an arc.
You think Batman doesn’t change? Seriously – huh?
Yeah, TF had a compelling arc that would’ve worked as its own film, at times I enjoyed his story more than Joker but it made the film drag a bit
Nolan justified this by saying, “Why set up another movie, if you have a good story, put it in the movie you are making” or something to that effect, but he wound up with a (very good) movie and a half, instead of two potentially great movies. Then did the same thing with Dark Knight Rises, which should have been three movies, one of which involves the plotline of Bruce and Miranda Tate and the generator and why he retired. After a certain point, if you spend so many scenes talking about something that happened offscreen, you should have just made that a movie. And so you get three movies crammed into one and half of a mediocre movie.
This is exactly my problem with it
The Dark Knight is the single greatest comic book movie ever. Period.It has none of Marvel’s no one stays dead or magic maguffins cliches. And is not woke SJW Mary Sue trash. It literally had enough material for 2 or even 3 standalone blockbuster movies, but Nolan held nothing back and just made the single best movie he could at one time without the endless Marvel dick tease of something better next time. Even Marvel’s best, in Infinity War, is all undone in Endgame and doesn’t even need to happen if Thanos just doubles the size and resources of the universe instead halving the number of all living things, because once again magic makes everything irrelevant.
No doubt Nolan could have handled the plot some other way, but it was necessary for a man – who was believed to be a great man – to die so that Batman must ‘redeem’ himself in TDKR. That and the Harvey Dent/Two Face character compel us to begin the whole “who is the REAL bad guy here” again (and again) because, in Nolan’s world, not every kind of ‘deceit’ is automatically a sin.
I understand this complaint from a pacing standpoint, but I’ve never agreed that Two-Face shouldn’t be in it all, because I feel that misses the entire point of the story they are telling. The Dark Knight is not about Joker, and it’s not about Batman. There is one arc in this film, and it is the rise and fall of Harvey Dent.
I think Batman Begins is the better all-around movie, but TDK’s crazy ambition, and the fact that it sometimes surpasses its ambition, makes it a more special film.My unpopular opinion is that TDK and Iron Man were somehow both the beginning and high water marks of the modern superhero era. I don’t think much else from DC or Marvel comes close, and while I love the humor in Iron Man I can’t stand the quippiness in most modern Marvel films. I always loved superhero movies, so I keep watching and waiting for one to blow me away, and yet the ones I enjoy – Cap and the Winter Soldier, Iron Man 3 – are the least like superhero movies. For DC, I really enjoy the idea of treating superheroes as mythic, especially compared to Marvel’s relatable, they-could-live-in-our-world heroes, but jeez they’re just not good movies. Revisiting Wonder Woman, which I enjoyed in theaters but less later on, made me think it’s just good in comparison. I think it just comes down to the scripts. Marvel’s seem like they’re out if a template – “hold on, we’ve gone too long without a joke!” – and DC’s seem like they’re out of the trash bin.
As outstanding as Heath Ledger’s performance is (and I really do think it’s a monumental piece of acting), I’ve otherwise never loved The Dark Knight all that much. I think it feels incredibly long, and whenever The Joker isn’t on-screen, it crawls along, especially after the initial heist sequence.
It’s never a good sign in a superhero movie when you find yourself rooting for the villain to accomplish all of his plans. A villain can be entertaining but you still want the hero to win something this movie fails at.
Counter argument , TDK was the worst thing to happen to comics movies ever .It basically promoted the idea that the only ‘good’ comics movies were the super grimdark ,brooding, ‘I’m super super serious you guys*” miseryfests, that appeal to 14 year old boys who think that being moody makes them deep and neckbeards. Without it I’d say the DC universe movies wouldn’t have been based on the Snyder murderverse , and would have had a chance at actually being good.*(also while I’m at it , Fuck that hack Frank Miller)
As is pointed out in the article, the MCU went with a different tone from The Dark Knight and was hugely successful.So…no. The idea that all comic book movies had to be dark and grim never got much traction. It was directly contradicted by Iron Man which came out the same year. It’s not Nolan’s fault the DC universe failed.
It’s not Nolan’s fault the DC universe failed. Just look at CW’s Arrowverse. It isn’t perfect by any means, but it is far better than the Snyderverse. It manages to be fun, and hopeful, and colorful, and goofy. Yes, sometimes it goes hokey and nonsensical, or too dark for its own good (come on, Arrow). But in large strokes, the tone and the casting are right-on.If the Crisis crossover had been a movie, it’d be the best DC movie, and it wouldn’t really be close.
I mean, the dark knight would still be better, but that’s just me being a big pedantic ass :p Arrowverse was fun (except flash, it was infuriating, Barry is too much of a moron and there is too much speed people and time travel ^^) but yeah, Crisis was awesome and it would’ve been a close second to TDK as a movie for sure 🙂
I did mean the current DCEU, but didn’t make that clear. You’re right, TDK (as well as Batman Begins and the original 1978 Superman) are better. But Crisis has been better than any of the current movies (…maybe Wonder Woman?).
Oh, then yes, absolutely.
And WW… idk it was great when I saw it, but how much of it is the comparison to the other garbo that they made at the time ?
Like, was it really awesome, or was it that first breath of fresh air after Andy Dufresne crawled out of the poop tube ? I’m sure that was the best inhale of his life, but objectively, he was still covered in crap and right at the exit of the sewer, it probably still smelled like shit.
lol. I’d say Crisis was better.
“Like, was it really awesome, or was it that first breath of fresh air after Andy Dufresne crawled out of the poop tube ?”That’s the greatest analogy I have ever read. I’d like to star it again just for “poop tube.”
Thank you for pointing it out lol, I was so proud of myself writing that 😀
I watched WW recently, and perhaps it was a victim of hype, but I didn’t think it was that good. I feel like the female empowerment aspect of it was undercut severely by several plot beats, there was entirely too much slow-mo, way too much bad CGI, and a ridiculous boring mess of a climax.Some of the fight scenes are pretty good. Diana crossing the battlefield was great. However, by the reception it received, I was expecting it to be excellent and it was simply ok.
Don’t see WW84 then. The original WW, which I enjoyed a bit more than you, is Citizen Kane compared to 84.
“Simply ok” sounds exactly the same as I remember it. I also remember hype being so ridiculously overblown, there were actually talks of an Oscar push. … The sheer thought of it… Now I can only be amused by people’s shock that WW84 was bad when the ingredients for it to be bad were always there. I’ll tell anyone who will listen, but the animated 2009 Wonder Woman movie is the best of these
The majority of the world agrees Wonder Woman was a good movie. The only people who think otherwise just want something else to bash Snyder for.
I would not say it is his fault, but he had a hand in it. He wanted Snyder and thought he would be a good filmmaker to bring out Superman. Snyder can do good films, but he is simply not a good fit for the Man of Steel.
Okay dude, I know the main thrust here is that the DC movies have been bad, but the Crisis crossover was awful – and, in fairness, that might be because it hewed too closely to the source material. Gigantic revelations about the true nature of the cosmos were being dropped on the cast constantly like giant space hamster turds, nobody’s powers made any sense, and the dialogue got so cringey at points that I could see Benoist and Rose blushing from embarrassment through their makeup. That barely scratches the surface of its badness; consider it tasting platter.Literally the best thing about it were all the cameos, and most of those were nothing but cameos for the sake of being cameos.
Wonder Woman – even with its cruddy ending – was better, Shazam was better, and Aquaman would’ve been better if it had explicitly happened when Superman was dead instead of when he was alive again (because, well, Superman existing and Aquaman having helped save the world both made the Aquaman movie a confused pile of irrelevance.)Seriously. Crisis, any good at all? Dude. That’s an impossible sell.
Yes. But Arrow was a full on copy of The Dark Knight in terms of style for a season and a half.
Seeing the Crisis event as a movie with just a Snyderverse-level budget would have been the best thing ever.
Total side note, but did Arrow actually get good? I checked out on that show when they introduced China White as a villain.
Also, let’s not forget that producers actually learned the wrong lessons from Nolan’s Batman films – even though they are more grounded, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are actually fun movies.
Arrow began life as a complete imitator, but the CW universe lightened up once they dove into DC Comics’s more colorful history.
Man of Steel and Snyder’s films never quite found the right balance, it was always pretty self-serious, but I believe that is more Snyder’s hand than Nolan’s influence.
Much like the John Wesley Shipp version of the Flash sprang up as a direct result of – and very much influenced by- Burton’s Batman movie (The series even went for a 30’s retro future Art Deco vibe well before Batman the Animated Series)
I think Michael Bay’s first Transformers movie is the only tolerable one and I think a lot of that is largely due to a couple of key suggestions by Spielberg as producer. I was hoping that Christopher Nolan would serve a similarly tempering role to Snyder’s excesses and and hopefully add a bit of perspective that was not that of a screaming adolescent, like a cool older brother
However, in the first ten minutes of the movie, when Zod and his collaborators are whisked away to prison on personalized, flying metal dildos, I said to myself “SHIT, no one is supervising this dude.”
It’s not Nolan’s fault the DC universe failed. People seem really eager to forget that Man of Steel was written by the exact same team as the Dark Knight trilogy (Chris Nolan and David S. Goyer), Nolan chose Snyder himself, and then Nolan produced all of Snyder’s films in the DCEU (but none of the other ones).A lot of the issues in the mainline DCEU films were already showing up in The Dark Knight Rises, and I think a lot of the ire that gets tossed Snyder’s way probably should be aimed at David S. Goyer instead. His particular brand of “gritty = realistic” writing got him some gigs with the Call of Duty franchise, and I think it’s notable that the Snyder movie without him (Justice League, either cut) is way less dark, while the rest of the DCEU (much of which Snyder produced) has a different tone entirely.The Dark Knight was lightning in a bottle, and The Dark Knight Rises, Man of Steel and Batman v Superman were absolutely attempts by both Nolan and Goyer to capture it again, even if Nolan only directed one of those.
Other than giving the reigns to Goyer and Snyder (which I readily admit was a massive mistake), Nolan cannot be blamed for the films he didn’t direct. The story of Man of Steel isn’t particularly dark saved for that scene where Superman snaps Zod’s neck, and we know that this wasn’t his idea because both Goyer and Snyder said that they had to convince him. And Batman V Superman wouldn’t be that dark either if it weren’t for all those moments where Snyder wants to make sure we all know Batman murders criminals.
Honestly, Snyder’s “dark and gritty” just means “violent and humourless”. That’s not Nolan’s sensibility, and it never was.
I’d argue that The Dark Knight Rises is about as violent and humorless as Batman v Superman (and even more questionable politically), and Justice League had significantly more humor and general optimism than either of the Goyer-penned films, even in the Snyder cut. Frankly, I think DKR, MoS and BvS have far more in common than MoS, BvS and ZSJL do.
And at least with Man of Steel, Nolan still had a significant amount of control. He co-wrote the movie, picked the director himself, and was pretty hands-on as far as producing goes. He was DC’s golden goose and was behaving as such. He did step back for BvS, but Goyer was still in full force on that one, and outside of The Dark Knight Rises it’s where his Call of Duty credentials shine through the most.
Snyder deserves most of the blame for the problems in MoS and BvS, but people act like he was an auteur who busted in with pre-written scripts in hand and made these films to the objections of everybody else in the room, and that just wasn’t the case. Plenty of people agreed on and actively cultivated this direction, Christopher Nolan included, and it was absolutely intended as an extension of what they had already been doing with Batman.
I maintain that Man of Steel isn’t that dark, save for the death of Zod scene. It’s PG-13 and is the one Snyder comic book film that doesn’t have an R-rated or unrated cut.
Frankly, I don’t like to use the term “dark” when talking about his films because I feel like it’s a PR term meant to make his films look cool and mature when they are neither. The only “mature” touch he adds are a bunch of unnecessary violence, like adding a CGI criminal in the backseat of a car that is crushed by the Batmobile, or having Batman “brand” criminals, or explode them. There’s a scene in BvS where Batman tosses a crate to a guy, who falls back and hit the wall. In the unrated cut, he added blood on the wall, to make sure we know the guy is at the very least seriously hurt. This isn’t the work of Goyer, he’s just the writer. And Nolan was able to make a PG-13 Dunkirk film…
Again, I don’t understand why Nolan picked Snyder; to me, it’s like when Spielberg picked Michael Bay to direct Transformers. What did they even see in these guys? But I just don’t think he was influential with what came next. He stayed to help WB catch up to Marvel, maybe as a sense of obligations. He left comic book movies as soon as he could and Snyder is the one who took charge of the DCEU afterwards.
having Batman “brand” criminals
This, very specifically, is the thing that feels like something Goyer came up with. Snyder loves himself some bloody action, but that’s a baffling level of Goyer-style cruelty that Nolan was able to tame (mostly – Batman dropping someone off a building to break his legs reads pretty similar to me), Activision actively courted, and Snyder just kind of left there.
I also don’t think MoS is particularly dark, but it is fairly humorless in a way that feels like an attempt to make Superman Begins, and it tends to get lumped in as “one of the bad ones” (I think it’s mostly fine if rarely more than that). And if the main complaint is that the movie takes itself far too seriously, well, I don’t think Nolan’s exactly a stranger to that particular critique either.
I’ve been thinking about this for a bit lately just because I thought MoS was only okay and BvS was an edgy mess, so I figured Snyder just sucked at DC, but I wound up really enjoying ZSJL. That inspired me to go back and re-watch The Dark Knight Rises (which I was iffy on the first time), which I found far more dour, bitter and generally unpleasant than I remembered it being, in almost exactly the same ways as BvS, in addition to having the exact same contempt for the passage of time and traversal of space. And I realized that one of those felt like it belonged to the DC Grim Movie Trilogy, and it wasn’t the recent one.
In general, I think Goyer can be okay when he has someone to reign him in, and Snyder’s as good as the script allows him to be. They’re good in the right circumstances, but absolutely not people who should be working together.
I did not really like TDKR either. I may be imagining things but I feel like Ledger’s death made the film darker than it would have been, not because the Joker couldn’t be there but because the tragedy sucked the fun out of everyone. The script feels less polished than the other 2 films, as if Nolan was delivering on his contract but his heart was no longer really there.
Again, I don’t understand why Nolan picked Snyder; to me, it’s like when Spielberg picked Michael Bay to direct Transformers. What did they even see in these guys?Bay is fairly revered by some cinematography nerds, for the way he films action and his use of pyrotechnics. I think that one way you can win the affection of big directors is by filming a scene or sequence that the director wishes he had made, or can’t figure out how you made all the elements work. Snyder similarly has a fair number of bravura shots on his resume—the opening credits sequence of Watchmen is one of those things I can see other practitioners looking at and wondering “How the heck did he pull that off?”The irony of this being, they get these directors who are visual stylists over skilled storytellers, and then the movies often don’t look terribly good. Bay’s Transformers films look like the toilet bowl at a White Castle. Bumblebee was the first one of those where I always knew which giant robot was fighting which other giant robot, where they were in relation to each other, and what was going on. No coincidence, it’s the one not directed by Bay. And while Man of Steel was a good-looking film, BvS looked awful for the most part, outside of a handful of really painterly shots (mostly in the Sad Superman Saves Souls montage) and the Batman fight at the end.
I’ll agree that “dark” is an unhelpful term. At least for me, when I use ‘dark’ I’m talking as much about tone / outlook as I am about plot / cinematography – but I can see the value in using more specific language to describe the problem. So: Man of Steel wasn’t as violent and monochromatic as BvS, but it was rather dour and pessimistic, particularly for a Superman movie. Superman stories are allowed to be sad, scary, tragic… but they shouldn’t be depressing.
Christopher Nolan was the WB golden boy. Not just DC. I said ‘was”, ever since his Tenet brouhaha, his ventures in WB seems up in the air.
I feel like everyone involved will chalk that up to COVID and sweep it under the rug.Still, I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a film that has so much going on turn out to have so little going on as Tenet. People say it felt like a big-budget Primer, but I honestly thought it felt more like a big-budget Primer Timeline Meme.
Don’t underestimate the influence of Nolan’s grounded and serious take on other comic book movies. As a result Marvel did try their hand at it with Dark World and Winter Soldier. As well as Iron Man did, the early Marvel movies were not receiving the critical acclaim and auteur credit that Nolan’s Batman movies were getting at the time. Those Phase 1 movies, though very entertaining with great performances, can also be argued to be overall kinda uneven and mediocre films as well.
Before summer of 2013 the expectation was that Man of Steel would continue that serious auteur tradition with Zach Snyder; and before Guardians came out general audiences were saying “wtf are these characters? an anthropomorphic tree and talking racoon and chubby doofus from Parks n Rec?”. Although I really like Winter Soldier and will argue that its the first time Marvel made an actually solid and competent film, James Gunn did save us all in preventing future Marvel (and some DC) movies from becoming the ugly slogs that Zach Snyder’s films were turning out to be.
The MCU has delivered literally dozens of non-“grimdark” superhero movies. If that’s what you like you are well served and D.C. has also made several lighthearted superhero movies like Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Green Lantern. Neither The Dark Knight nor any of the other darker superhero movies are taking anything away from you. These things are co-existing just fine.
This is true if you’re looking at these movies as one huge collection in hindsight, but if you follow the history of how everything played out over time you’ll see how Nolan influences Marvel’s decision-making and how James Gunn influences DC’s.
What about Shazam?? That was a blast!
The Dark Knight is no more responsible for crap like the Snyderverse (come at me) than Star Wars is for the glut of tiresome imitator space movies from the 1980s, or Nirvana is for the entirety of late 90s rock. Innovators are not responsible for imitators.
“Come at you”? Your opinion is shared by the vast majority on this site (and, seemingly, beyond). lulz
To be fair, without Star Wars, we would never have gotten the Star Trek revival that was launched with TMP.
I think TMP had more to do with Close Encounters then Star Wars.
No, they were getting ready to reboot Star Trek as Phase II, a sci-fi TV show with most of the original cast (but not Nimoy). They bumped it to theatrical because of the Star Wars success and all the studios rushing to cash in with sci-fi movies (see Alien, Black Hole, etc)
That isn’t really an accurate description of why Phase 2 became a movie instead of a show, but even if it was Close Encounters being profitable is more likely why TMP was exists as it is. Star Wars might have increased the interest in sci-fi, but Close Encounters proved ‘boring’ sci-fi films could be profitable and popular.
Actually, they did bump it to theatrical not because of Star Wars, but because of Close Encounters of the Third Kind: it proved to Roddenberry that a slow and methodical sci-fi film that was just as much about small human moments of connection as it was about the infinite-but-somewhat-grounded possibilities out there in space could be just as big a blockbuster and (and importantly, a critical darling) as a movie with laser swords.
They just went a little TOO slow and methodical, and despite going pretty high-concept with an honestly neat idea for the film’s antagonist, they still insulted the audience’s intelligence: Kirk literally spelling out V-G-E-R, then V-O-Y-A-G-E-R upon finding V’ger’s core was almost hilariously Blue’s Clues-ian.
Here’s a remixed version of Star Trek: TMP that I really like. It replaces Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic score -a crime, I know -with Daft Punk’s music for Tron. For me , it works REALLY well. And it reduces the first movie’s ponderous almost 3-hour runtime to a short and sweet 22 minutes while losing virtually nothing of the plot; kind of like a live-action version of a ST:The Animated Series episode
Party because of the drugs I was on when I saw ST:TMP, I had the insight that V’Ger is itself a metaphor for the movie it’s in: it’s a 1960s artifact that came back years later, orders of magnitude too big.
I could see Close Encounters being part of the reason Roddenberry wrote the story he wrote, but everyone involved with the production that I’ve heard from in interviews over the years, up to and including Roddenberry, have said that the studio greenlit it for theatrical release because of Star Wars. I can’t even describe how disappointed ten year old me was coming out of STTMP in 1979, that sure as heck wasn’t the Star Trek I was watching after school everyday for as long as I could remember. Making it G rated didn’t make sense, the average episode of Star Trek felt PG, even Disney went PG for The Black Hole. I think the biggest problem was that Gene Coon had passed away by then, and all due respect to Roddenberry for the initial idea, but Gene Coon was really the major creative force behind the show.
I think a better way of putting it is that Nolan’s Batman films are the inspiration for the Snyderverse. The responsible parties are the execs at DC who decided the dark, gritty take should apply to all their properties but didn’t really realize WHY that worked so well for Nolan’s first two Batman movies. It’s a common problem in Hollywood. The executives learn all the wrong lessons from their successes. They think it was a success because it was dark and gritty and don’t really realize that it may have been a combo of a lot of factors that can’t be easily duplicated that did the job. Chris Stuckmann has a couple tangentially related videos on YouTube that touch on these problems in horror and action movies. (There’s also an interesting take in another video from Full Fat Videos about Man of Steel where they argue that the Snyderverse may have been more successful if it had started 2-3 years earlier. Basically, Man of Steel was made on the Nolan Batman model, but by that time, audiences had moved on to a model more like what Marvel was giving us. I don’t think it would have made the movie better, but I do think they have a point about timing.)
The thing is when people talk about the “executives” learning the wrong lessons is that the executives don’t care about whether the movies are good or not, they care about whether the movies make money or not. And sure, there are a lot of bad movies out there, but a lot of them still made a ton of money.To be honest, I think most blockbuster movies are trash. But people pay to see them and that’s all that really matters to the higher ups at these studios.
I don’t think timing has anything to do with it. The particularity of Nolan’s trilogy is that they fit perfectly with the rest of his filmography; he didn’t change or compromise his style just to reach a bigger audience. And what we’ve learned since he’s left the franchise is that his style is still quite popular, even when it’s not attached to any known IP.As for Snyder, his DCEU films were not less-well received than his previous films. He’s just… not very good. In fact, one could argue that timing was the best thing going for him. He would never have been given so much power if WB had not been in a position where they had to hurriedly catch up with Marvel, and he would not have so many defenders if some people were not craving for a Marvel vs. DC competition. I think if he had started 2-3 years earlier, he would have stuck to the Man Of Steel franchise, and be let go after 2 films.
Seeing the squid monster in the Watchmen series, and The Suicide Squad trailer will remind of the infinite truth of Snyder:
He will never figure that shit out, so he just shows his egotism through his characters, and Superheroes are meant to rise above such selfish qualities.
As if the turd of Sucker Punch should be a warning red flag of his capability as an auteur. But everyone at Warner seems turn the blind eyes, and to this days still giving him all the milk.
I do take some comfort in knowing that WB is at their limit with the guy, especially announcing the end of his trilogy BEFORE the weekend even finished debuting his Snydercut. Like they were booting him right out the parking lot of DC.
Only time will tell where he’ll show up again…
Well, Nolan was producer on Man of Steel (with a story credit) and Executive Producer on BvS and Justice League, and David Goyer co-wrote the first two. It neither takes away nor adds anything to his Batman trilogy, but there’s a very direct line from his Batman trilogy to the Snyder films.
It’s such a stupid argument. It was like those pricks who were on here a few years ago furiously wanking on about how they hate Watchmen, not for anything in it but because they felt it inspired generations of other comics which were too grim for their precious tastes. And that’s fine, but how does that make Watchmen shit?
We’ve had decades of sunny, good vs. evil, children’s tales but God forbid comic books take a different direction: one that isn’t quite so sunny, can be morally ambiguous, with flawed heroes, and shaded in “grimdark” (one of the dumbest adjectives of all-time) tones.
I think you’ve confused “grimdark” with “edgelord”. And I’d argue the difference is that the former has a sense of humor. Just look at Warhammer 40k, the franchise that literally coined the term “grimdark”. One of the playable factions is literally a race of sentient fungi who all have Cockney accents, act like soccer hooligans, and their technology only works because they all innately produce a psychic field that makes everything they all believe to be true (Example: They paint their vehicles red because they think it makes them go faster and, because they all think that’s true, it actually works.).
Damn do I love 40k.
DC’s only successful superhero movies post-1989 were Batman films. DC wanted to make more Batman films, so they hired Snyder who made a huge hit out of 300 to do Watchmen, they watched TDK blow up, then Watchmen which was far more afield do alright so they handed him the reins. Blame Watchmen for not tanking if you want to blame anything. It was already in the works with TDK came out and it not blowing up in Snyder’s face like by all rights it should have is why DC handed him Superman which traded more or less on the Superhero rising tide and sent DC into the wilderness for a decade. Plus, if you haven’t read DC comics in the past 20 years, they’ve been up their own ass in continuity issues since Crisis was too good for them to let go and keep going darker and darker with almost all their titles. They’ve got continuity so splintered that Superman exists in like 12 different titles simultaneously. This is really just a DC issue.
“They’ve got continuity so splintered that Superman exists in like 12
different titles simultaneously. This is really just a DC issue.”Eventually it’s going to hit Marvel and I’m not sure what they’re going to do. Falcon and the Unblinking Soldier is obviously an attempt to move on from Chris Evans, but I think they are going to have a hard time dealing with a continuity-heavy franchise overall.I think they would have been smarter to always insert some obvious continuity breaks in every movie to train audiences to accept it, even bigger ones than the Cheadle-Howard switch. They need to push the line that it’s the spirit of continuity that matters more than the letter of the law.
I’m really curious to see how they handle the MCU moving forward with not just famous actors but iconic characters being phased out. A Marvel universe in which stakes matter, where characters like Stark, Nat, and Rogers “die”, as I’m sure Thor will eventually? It’s going to be very interesting.
With Thor and Iron Man, you can have someone inherit the hammer or armor. Thunderstrike, Jane Foster and War Machine are all fan favorites in the comics and they’ve made sure that Don Cheadle appears in every nearly movie involving Tony Stark. With Cap and Widow, I think you need to give their characters and actors a bit of a break and either recast or alter their role. Losing Cap, Widow and Iron Man all in the same movie was really poor planning. Maybe the Black Widow movie will give us a big shock and she’ll be back, but…And if the rumors are true and the next Spider-Man movie is the last one in the MCU, that’s the fourth major hero lost, assuming Chris Hemsworth is sticking around after Love & Thunder.
Upvoted solely for “the Unblinking Soldier.” Well done!
Phase-5 is either Alternate Universe (soft reboot) or using the PoC/21st century alts that operate as a continuation of them. I’m guessing soft reboot with much younger actors because in 2032-35 Iron man will be 24 years old and ripe for a 2nd wave of films using a much younger actor and RDJ will be in his mid-to-late 60s.
Watchmen “didn’t tank” only if we’re grading on a very generous curve. It made $107M domestic on a budget between $120-140 million. It may have technically made its budget back with the foreign take (probably not, the studio gets a smaller cut of those dollars), but it was not that much more successful (relative to budget) than that animated owls movie that was considered a huge bomb.
It was considered a niche movie, the fact that it didn’t implode was justification to give him a shot at Superman which did exceptionally well.
I don’t think it’s anywhere near that difficult. Snyder has managed to fail upward for the same reason a number of white men do so: other powerful white men vouch for them. Apparently (according to Deborah Snyder) Nolan and his wife recruited the Snyders for the DC gig. With Nolan at the height of his power after TDK, it’s doubtful Watchmen’s performance (or that of the Owls movie, or Sucker Punch) mattered all that much.
I mean, sure it derailed DC. We had what, 4-5 bad movies because idiots tried to recreate the magic of TDK without its key ingredient (since, you know, he was dead ^^).
I would’ve been ok if they tried 10 times more but we get to still have TDK. Mostly because I just gave up on DC a while ago lol, and because Marvel’s been outputting some actually fun stuff in the meantime.
People also seem to forget that TDK can pull of a gritty/realistic tone and story structure because there aren’t a bunch of superpowered gods flying around and space aliens and magical macguffins, etc.
Dumb take. For multiple reasons, many of them already expressed here (e.g. there is no shortage of non-grimdark, massively successful comic book movies, including dozens of MCU ones, and a handful of DC ones as well).But I think the dumbest part of this take is that The Dark Knight isn’t actually grimdark. It’s pretty dark, some parts more than others, but it doesn’t FEEL dark for most of its runtime. It’s not portentous; it’s not jokeless; there is absolutely no slow motion. It feels light on its feet, especially given its sheer duration. It moves. There are several reasons for that: Nolan’s crime thriller-derived pacing and staging is the biggest, but also the fact that the script is actually funny. Alfred and Bruce are constantly quipping at each other. Ledger’s Joker, as disturbing as he is, is also still funny most of the time. The movie doesn’t spend long stretches trying to bury you under the weight of itself.
DC may have hired Snyder with a misguided notion of replicating the success and general tone of TDK, but the failure is on them and Snyder, not on a much better movie with a tricky tone that all those grimdark slogs that followed absolutely failed to capture.
So you hit on a piece of the article I take some issue with as well. And it happened once more in 2008, when the superhero movie matured. The year’s two biggest hits, The Dark Knight and Iron Man, took familiar comic-book characters and fleshed them out, making them seem more layered and human without losing the sense of ridiculous spectacle the genre requires.So, I think this goes back further — to 2000. To X-Men. That was somewhat the first of the movies that got us to where we are today: by simply taking the movie seriously. Yes, the first X-Men film was a little dour, but it never forgot it was a movie about people stigmatized by their powers and that those people, you know, had powers and used them. The through-line from that to Raimi’s first Spider-Man to Batman Begins is almost a straight line, culminating in Marvel and DC learning the same lesson (treat the source material seriously) and going radically different routes (Marvel with the unabashedly fantastical superhero route, and DC with trying to ground everything).And The Dark Knight is fucking fantastic — but there’s no getting around the fact that The Dark Knight Rises retroactively makes everything worse, and almost ruins everything good about TDK — much like a Batman-version of How I Met Your Mother’s finale.
I’d also argue that Marvel, for all its CGI raccoons and sky-lasers, often is as grounded as the Nolan films, especially in trying to connect it to real world political and social issues. I mean, Tony Stark is a military contractor, and a huge throughline throughout the films is literally how the government should regulate superheroes. I mean, probably the biggest fantasy of all the films, for better and worse, is not that there are space alien gods out there, but that anyone takes the bureaucratic arm of the United Nations as seriously as both Tony Stark and Steve Rogers do, lol.
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Yeah, I’m surprised this didn’t discuss the obvious effect it had on Man of Steel, BvS, etc. DC saw the profit and audience reception to The Dark Night and took the wrong lesson from it:DC Executive: “All of our films need to be like this!”
Intern: “Um, Batman is a dark and brooding hero. I don’t think most of our other heroes are like …”
DC Executive: “ALL of them!”
This is pretty much literally what happened. From an article dated Aug. 22nd, 2008 (mere weeks after “The Dark Knight”’s release):
“Robinov also touches on the overall tone of each future film, saying that based on the success of “The Dark Knight,” the studio will go much darker in terms of look and story (at least to the extent that the characters allow it).
The original Wall Street Journal article is behind a paywall, so here’s this: http://www.mtv.com/news/2592732/warner-announces-darker-superman-reboot-other-comic-movies-in-the-works/
But that just mirrored where the comics were after the New 52 reset, which is where a lot of the DCEU’s dodgy ideas come from.
That’s not a “counter argument”, because it doesn’t counter anything that Tom says in the article. He doesn’t postulate whether the change was good or bad, merely that The Dark Knight changed things forever, which is unequivocally true,
I blame this more on Miller himself and Batman and Robin. Also perhaps the failure of Superman Returns. DC learned all the wrong stuff from those situations. However I’ll never forgive TDK for what it did to Halloween. All those jokers in Joker costumes, ugh. Only Creed Bratton could pull it off
That’s because Creed was the pre-crisis Joker in his younger days.
People take the wrong lessons from The Dark Knight and misunderstand why it’s so effective. Yes, it’s very serious and gritty, but it’s not like it’s a desaturated, humorless slog. The Dark Knight is incredibly funny, not only because of Nolan’s very corny sense of humor, but because Ledger’s got actual jokes. Not only that, but the look of it is vibrant and crisp. The Dark Knight is a little more muted than, say, an MCU movie, the use of film is clearly bringing out a lot of color. What makes The Dark Knight so compelling—and I bang this drum every damn time—is that it’s tangible and grounded. It deals with, if not real life situations, stakes you can wrap your head around. It’s not the fate of the world. It’s one or two people dying here or there. It feels urgent because we can sort of imagine how someone like The Joker could do what they do. And yes, it’s very silly that the main character dresses up in an expensive bat suit, but it’s still so much fun to watch.It sucks, because the MCU went the opposite way, and the imitators only inflate certain elements on a superficial level. But The Dark Knight still remains a near-perfect work of filmmaking whose legacy, like any monolith of popular culture, comes with a lot of good and a lot of bad.
As I say elsewhere, I think discussing the MCU as a completely ungrounded quip-fest does a disservice. Several of Iron Man’s major scenes involve the protagonist sitting in a reclined position, and there’s only 4 or 5 real action sequences (even if they are all fairly protracted), and it’s at its core a story about a guy having both his heart and his “heart” fixed and having a dispute with his company’s board of directors because of it.
The most popular superhero films are the Marvel quip-filled roller coaster rides. I also don’t think any of the grimmer superhero films have been able to capture the tone or feel of Nolan’s Batman movies, which do occasionally have a sense of humor. They both have had a tremendous influence on culture and, to their credit, no one has been able to replicate what they’ve done.
This comment was predictable.
It’s important to remember that The Dark Knight actually IS fun. It doesn’t get bogged down in portentious mythology, and it doesn’t wallow in darkness (at least not tonally). The Joker does a LOT of stuff in bright saturated daylight in this movie, and he’s genuinely funny, even in some of the film’s most tonally nihilistic moments. Which are pretty rare, actually. I mean, the Joker’s throughline literally ends with Batman giving a small speech about all the “GOOOOOOOOOD” that is deep down inside of people. Not to mention that, for all the CGI-enhanced bombast that is admittedly in the film (and, again, it’s actually fun), its major climaxes involve a prisoner quietly tossing a remote out a window and a philosophical discussion after the villain dies off-camera from a mere 4 story fall.
People like to “blame” The Dark Knight for all the inscrutable CGI-garbled grimdark that followed, but I feel that’s like blaming Bruce Springsteen for all the idiot Republicans that blare “Born In The USA” at their rallies, or blaming that poor French artist who made Pepe the Frog for all the nonsense now associated with his character: we shouldn’t blame the artist when someone else uses their art in ways almost wholly opposite to their intention and with little art themselves.
I didn’t think Matt Furie was French.
Shit, somehow I got the idea he was French, and he is completely not.
Ironically, feels bad man
I don’t actually know what kind of surname “Furie” is. It’s like a cross between Fury & Curie.
You might be right in the sense that TDK’s success convinced the studio “dark” superhero movies could be successful, but the more important way in which TDK is responsible for the Snyderverse is that Nolan recruited Snyder for the Superman gig. That’s one of the things Nolan did with his post-TDK blank check.But let’s be clear, TDK for all its supposed grimdark tone, is Sesame Street sunny compared to Snyder’s viewpoint. The two boats don’t blow each other up. Batman saves the life of his extortionist. When Batman suffers an ethical failing (and not an ethical failing on the scale of “I’m murdering a lot of people” or “I’m branding people and that’s getting them shanked in lockup”), his friend/employee confronts him, and Batman tries to make it right, destroying an extremely expensive and effective system because what it does is wrong. Would we see characters in a Snyder movie do anything like that? In contrast to that last item, when Alfred disagrees with Bruce’s plot to murder Superman in BvS, he disagrees and says a lot of ominous-sounding stuff, but he never says “I’ll quit.”
When it was first announced that DC was going to do a shared universe, but that Bale’s Batman wouldn’t be part of it, I assumed that was because the more grounded, “realistic” Nolan version wouldn’t fit in the brightly-colored, more upbeat world of the other superheroes. Little did I imagine that Snyder would take it the completely opposite direction.
I don’t think that was ever in the cards—the announcements stressed that Nolan was staying on as a producer, and for me that always meant that they were going to bring Superman and the others into a “realistic” world like the one Nolan created for Batman. What we didn’t imagine is that none of Nolan’s storytelling sensibility would make the trip with Snyder.
“Would we see characters in a Snyder movie do anything like that? In contrast to that last item, when Alfred disagrees with Bruce’s plot to murder Superman in BvS, he disagrees and says a lot of ominous-sounding stuff, but he never says “I’ll quit.””This is really the heart and soul of it, right? Snyder doesn’t understand basic emotional stakes or narrative structure—there are never really any consequences for the characters’ actions. It’s just a bunch of shit he thinks looks cool.
Honestly, that feels less like the fault of the film and more the fault of the studio exec cowardice/cluelessness. “Oh that film was our biggest success in quite a while! It looks like the people have spoken! Only deadly-serious superhero films from now on! No way that can fail!”The same damn thing happened with comics in the wake of Alan Moore’s Watchmen/ Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Corporate management never learns the lessons of history; they only see the what is most profitable now and bank on that continuing to be profitable.
It was the one-two punch of Frank Miller and Zack Snyder that doomed DC movies. You got your dark, gritty, broody, hyperviolent stuff, all from Miller – and Snyder took that, filmed it, and added slow motion and bad weather.I’m not much of a DC fan, but what I’ve seen of their tv stuff is more in line with what they could be doing with their heroes. Legends of Tomorrow can be fucking hilarious, but dramatic when it needs to be. Arrow gets pretty quippy even though it’s got its ultra-serious meditations on.. I don’t know, “my city”, as I recall. Saw a lot of the first season of Supergirl and there’s some nice silly workplace comedy stuff in it.So it can be done, and DC knows how to do it – they just bought into the Miller/Snyder idea of Batman & company and honestly I don’t see them moving away from it…
I think “Sin City” being such an out-from-nowhere success is what really started everything. So Frank Miller and unexpectedly, Robert Rodriguez. Who I think should haven been the one directing DC movies all along.
Oh, gosh, Rodriguez would be a great DCU director! He’s got the skills and a sense of humor that would work quite well with some of the more ridiculous DC characters/history/tropes.
It’s not the movie’s fault that people took the wrong lessons from it.It’s not George Lucas’ fault that “Battle Beyond the Stars” was a piece of crap.
I will fight you on this one. Murakami having fun, one of those wild pulpy scripts by John Sayles, and a wonderful soundtrack from James Horner.
Ha. Fair. It was the first obvious SW ripoff I could think of. 🙂
I think that only really applies to WB, and even then only WB’s film division. On the cartoon end of things, we got things like the BatB Aquaman. I’m pretty confident WB would have learned the wrong lesson no matter what tone the Batman reboot had taken.
Wrong. The Dark Knight is the single greatest comic book movie ever. Period.It has none of Marvel’s no one stays dead or magic maguffins cliches. And is not woke SJW Mary Sue trash. It literally had enough material for 2 or even 3 standalone blockbuster movies, but Nolan held nothing back and just made the single best movie he could at one time without the endless Marvel dick tease of something better next time. Even Marvel’s best, in Infinity War, is all undone in Endgame and doesn’t even need to happen if Thanos just doubles the size and resources of the universe instead halving the number of all living things, because once again magic makes everything irrelevant.
Yes, the wildly successive 21+ movie long GRIM N GRITTY *checks notes* Marvel cinematic universe.
Your trolling/counter point is garbage. TDK is one of the best moves ever made. Nolan has nothing to do with Snyder being a hack. The first Batman movie was awesome too.
YSoSerious?:)
Nah. The idea that a movie can’t be grimdark and also good is directly contradicted by the movie we’re talking about here. The MCU making a success out of going in the opposite direction, and Snyder making a dreary, bland pile of faux-pretentious, grim nonsense about adults who run around in tights that was bad for a whole host of reasons is not TDK’s fault, nor a condemnation of that style of filmmaking at all.
But you’re blaming this movie for what others did, which is objectively stupid.
Toxic masculinity was going to have its day with Sarah Palin and Donald Trump no matter what. The joker just ignited the flame. And Rick and Morty, which can’t quite be forgiven.
TDK did something that we don’t see often in movies – a DC Comics live action film that delivers.BTAS gave us the definitive Joker, voiced by Mark Hamill (Troy Baker is also damned good). A Joker who kidnapped ‘family’ for Christmas only to tire of them, then ask Batman to save them before he kills them at midnight. I was in grad school when this came out in the early 1990s, and my thoughts were “damn, this is on at 4 pm?” For 14 years, we were blessed some truly great DC Comics stories from Timm, Dini, et. al. Marvel makes better live action films, but has made nothing in animation to compare to BTAS through JLU, or even many of the DCAU straight to video films.TDK gave us a non-CGI Batman tail-over-nose flipping a freaking Semi! Damned near life sized on IMAX screens. TDK gave us two fantastic arcs in Harvey Dent and Batman with the Joker being the catalyst for “the hero we need or the hero we deserve” (pp a few epic quotes).
The “grimdark” epithet is hilarious to me. DC decided to go down a darker path with their cinema universe then their MCU rivals which, inexplicably, sparked derision from a particular section of comic book “fans”.Nevermind that the road to “grimdark” was well paved by Frank Miller (“the hack”), Alan Moore, Jeph Loeb, and countless others years before.God forbid DC decided to explore a more “serious” tone with their franchise whilst Marvel produced a (just as rigid) formula that was altogether lighter.The constant cries of “grimdark” whine is more irritating and groan-inducing than any DCU movie I can think of.
Give me Batman Begins over Dark Knight every day of the week. So much leaner and less pompous, and Bale isn’t doing that ridiculous voice. One of the only good superhero movies.
He was doing the voice in Batman Begins – plenty of people were making fun of it in 2005 (“SWEAR TO MEEEE!”).
True indeed, though for some reason it doesn’t strike me as absurd. Perhaps it’s because here he’s angrily yelling as opposed to speaking in a conversational tone.
Yup, even in Begins his conversations are limited to small sentences (”Now there are two”, “I’ll look into it”). In The Dark Knight he has to have bigger, sometimes emotional conversations using it. There’s an argument that he should snap out of the voice in those moments but I don’t buy that – actors stay using their character’s accents between takes (and often in interviews for the movie filmed on set), I can buy that it’s such a part of the Batman persona that Wayne would instinctively stick to it in costume, regardless of the circumstances.
I freakin’ love ‘that voice’. It’s my favorite thing about Nolan’s Batman. In fact, Affleck’s attempt at the Batman Voice was so sad in comparison that I’m still hating him in JL.
My favorite Batman is from the Animated series in the 90s.
That’s because that’s the best Batman of the last 30 years. And why he still sounds like Kevin Conroy in my head when I read the comics.
I really have a hard time watching Begins. The action sequence are even less coherent than Nolan usually struggles with, Wayne’s no killing code is taken to contradictory extremes, and it’s more grounded take does not sit well with a villainous endgame out of a 90’s superhero film.
While Begins is still my favorite of this trilogy….yeah, like the evaporation plan would kill everyone before evaporating the water, as people are largely made of water themselves. Also, the League of Shadows states they tried to kill Gotham once with an economic depression, so basically they caused a ton of the corruption. It’s not like corruption just stops when you fuck things up, in fact it gets much worse. London got more powerful and decadent after the fire, etc.
Bale did the voice a bit but where it made sense, and not to people he wasn’t trying to scare/knew who he was already
After 13 years of memes and bad impressions, we should all be sick of him.I watched the movie in theaters opening night. One thing I’ll always remember is the collective moment of breathless silence when everyone in the theater simultaneously realized what happened to the pencil. That’s right up there with ‘Cap picking up the hammer’ for my movie theater memories.But a month later I was sick of the “Why so serious” chat/forum icons, Joker quotes in forum and email signatures, and I was already begging any deities that may or may not exist that I’d never have to hear the phrase “how about a magic trick” again in my life.Also, personal opinion, I think I enjoyed Aaron Eckhart’s Dent a little more than Heath Ledger’s Joker. Ledger was great, there’s nothing wrong with the performance as such. But I wonder how the discourse around the movie would have been different without Ledger’s death looming over the film.
and I was already begging any deities that may or may not exist that I’d never have to hear the phrase “how about a magic trick” again in my life.To which they answered “Ta-daaa, it’s gone”.
Well-played, well-played.That said, I was impressed to learn about the work they did to get the trick right and that the stunt man getting his head bounced off the table got knocked unconscious a couple of times over the course of practice and shooting.
That, and Batman flipping his motorcycle off the lawn were the two biggest war whoops from my crowd.
The truck flip is incredible but the shot after that is Batman driving the Batpod up a wall, rotating it and landing and that’s just cool.
I meant to write “wall” there, no idea why it autocorrected like that. And yes, when he did that it was the most awesome “Holy SHIT!!! BATMAN!!!” moment in the entire trilogy.
I would like to submit Joker’s hostage video with the batlarper Brian, where he says “Look at me….. LOOK AT ME!” was terrifying, as well. Like him yelling that way was maybe the only place in the movie where Ledger lets you in on the deep well of rage that’s under all of the Joker’s antics. He touches on it briefly just before the magic trick when Michael Jai White’s character says he’s crazy, and the Joker gets very quiet and says he’s not, and then repeats it and then abruptly and aggressively changes the topic. I was already on the edge of my seat at that point though because of the magic trick. That was definitely the point at which I was like, this is not Batman as I have seen it yet.
Yeah you get such small yet deeply terrifying glimpses of the Joker’s rage in this. It’s always the understated villains who are most effective
I agree that Eckhart’s performance gets overshadowed by Ledger and that’s a shame. I still get chills when I hear Dent say, “Tell your son it’s going to be alright, Gordon. Lie, like I lied.”
This is why The Dark Knight Returns is the best of the trilogy.Begins: No one remembers a single line/performance from thisKnight: Legendary Ledger performance that can’t be imitated, but people would not stop trying anywayReturns: Bane voice is hilarious and continues to be fun to imitate
But Returns also features the best death scene since Enter the Ninja, that should count for something.
Rises, guys, it’s called Rises. Much as we wish it wasn’t.
Rises was worth it for the Bane from the Harley Quinn cartoon.
Same.Eckhart is terrific in TDK.As for the discourse, I know one thing to be true.If Heath Ledger was alive, Robert Downey Jr. would have an Oscar.
At the midnight showing (HUGE crowd btw, the line was wrapped around the theater), after the movie my cousin stood up and clapped. He said he had no idea what he just watched but was pretty sure it was the best movie he’d ever seen lol
Or just swap it in for Benjamin Button on the nominees list. I am trying to think of another film that had so little to say about its own topic.
The Oscar nomination extension doesn’t give credit to WALL-E – a film which was the centre of just as many articles about its snub (maybe not on message boards) as The Dark Knight and was cited alongside it as one of the reasons for the extension (which was followed by Best Picture nominations for Up and Toy Story 3).
I will go to my grave that Wall-E was the best film that year and the best Pixar has ever done.
I’m right there with you. In agreement, not your grave.
It’s close for me: WALL•E, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Inside Out all jockey for the top Pixar spot in my list, with Toy Story 2 occasionally popping in there.
I caught Ratatouille back on the big screen a couple of years ago and it was so good that it nearly knocked WALL-E off the top spot for me. As it is, it’s a very close second with The Incredibles in third.
The silent opening was amazing. The rest was uninspired. So much so I can’t even remember much of it.Coco was so much better.
Ratatouille is the gold standard for me, but WALL*E is a VERY close second.
I like Wall-E the most, maybe because I’m a hopeless romantic, but also because it feels so radically different from the Pixar formula. It felt truly inspired. The world is way more interesting than the characters, but letting us sit with this character for half an hour in silence watching him do his sad little job is just heartbreaking and you fall in love immediately. So the world is more interesting than the characters but the characters are still fantastic.
I fell off of the Pixar train after Wall-e, mostly because I knew they would never make a better film
No way. Benjamin Button was the second best of the nominees.Going by Oscar year eligibility I would have nominated: Milk, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, WALL-E, Man on Wire, and Flight of the Red Balloon.
Runners-up: Hunger, Waltz with Bashir
I’d throw The Wrestler in there. Simple but beautiful story, and it contains possibly my favorite film performance of all time.
Generally I think Fincher runs circles around Nolan as a filmmaker, but Benjamin Button is one movie where he made something even more pompous, tedious and in love with its own pointless technical achievements than Nolan at his absolute worst. Though I did enjoy Benjamin Button as a bonding experience— I saw it with my whole family as our annual ‘Christmas Movie’ and each and every one of us LOATHED it.
I was watching a shit ton of movies back then, and Heath Ledger was not on my radar as “one of the best of his generation”. I don’t know where this comes from. Before Dark Knight he was a minor presence.
Ledger’s Joker isn’t a human being. He’s a mystical force, a destabilizing agent.And that’s EXACTLY it. When Jack Nicholson or Joaquin Phoenix or Jared Leto play The Joker, you can still see the actor. Heath Ledger was gone, completely disappearing into the character. One of the most disorienting scenes in The Dark Knight was when The Joker tries to kill Gotham’s mayor dressed as a cope, sans makeup, and you think “Holy shit, that’s Heath Ledger!!!”
Ledger was unrecognizable in the best way possible. After seeing the first trailer I actually leaned over to my friend and said “I thought Heath Ledger was going to play The Joker?”.
It sure changed the movie going experience. But as a film, it’s a mess in terms of narrative, direction and even editing. Nowhere near Nolan’s best work (Memento, The Prestige, Dunkirk).
Harvy Dent’s story was really the highlight of this film for me, he actually had a good character arc. Ledger’s Joker was just Nicholson’s turned up to 11.
For all the “Why so serious?” jokes, Ledger’s Joker really is more serious than Nicholson’s. Nicholson actually seems like both a clown and a killer, whereas Ledger just seems like a fantastically warped terrorist.
I’d never understood people seeing a movie over and over again in the theater. Then I saw The Dark Knight 8 times in the theater.
I don’t care much for BATMAN BEGINS because it feels like Nolan is holding back (eg. The Scarecrow never feels as scary as he should be). THE DARK KNIGHT fixes (in a sense) my issues with the first film by leaning heavily into the hyperreal nature of comic book characters. ie. Batman Begins constantly reminds you that yes, this is probably what having Batman around in real life could be like. TDK then makes you realise that none of what happens could fit into our reality, and it’s all the better for it. Like someone else mentioned, you need a bit of weirdness, of fantasy, for superheroes to function. I mean, I really like the start of HANCOCK for presenting a relatively grounded superhero story but even that gives up pretty quickly and devolves into typical punch-up shenanigans.
From the moment that Heath Ledger first pulls off his clown mask to reveal his scarred-up clown makeup, Batman becomes a supporting character in his own movie.Forgive me, but Batman has always played second fiddle to his rogues’ gallery because they are far more interesting than he is. Even when the writers pump him up to 24D chess levels.
Wall-E. Just wow. No words, but I cared deeply for that character. When his battery is replaced and his eyes don’t reset, I lost it.
I understand why the first half gets all the praise but the second half is just as good and that climax of self/loss-of-self is a device I am helpless against. So good.
And let’s not forget the gorgeous end credits that complete the story.
I, uh, strongly dislike those credits both as music and as needless epilogue to an already-complete movie! But I realize I am in a very small minority here.
Hey, everybody has to be spectacularly wrong sometimes, so be thankful that your time is relatively low-stakes!
Good point — this allows me to focus my energies on the 100 percent accurate animation takes, like Inside Out Isn’t That Great and Kung Fu Panda, Regrettably Dismissed Above, Makes Better Use Of Animated Action Than Pixar Does.
Agreed on that second one – the Kung Fu Panda movies are unquestionably the high point of non-Pixar/Disney animated movies in the Pixar era. And the action is stellar.
Unquestionably? I guess we’re forgetting about Laika and Studio Ghibli and Aardman and… ?
Yeah, I was. I suppose I’ll draw that back to only of the “blockbuster”-type releases.
I just saw Inside Out on a plane, and thought its visualization of the mind was clever and interesting, but the characters didn’t do much for me
The dancing sequence is better than the opening 30 minutes, somehow.
Given that Wall-e was the first in Pixar’s “artsy” run (yes, Ratatouille and the Incredibles are good, but they were still “for kids” at the time), I have no idea why I insisted on seeing it in theaters. I had to drag my sister with me, who was eye-rolling at having to see a movie about a robot. We cried through most of the end, it was beautiful. I rewatch it every year or so, easily my favorite Pixar movie.
Without Ledger’s Joker, The Dark Knight… isn’t all that great of a movie.To me, Ledger’s character work was the one time that the DC guys were able to find someone to really sink their hooks into the humanity of something meant for a comic book page. DC, unfortunately, has a terrible overall record with that. Gal Gadot is terrific as Wonder Woman, for instance, but as we saw with WW1984, she’s not dynamic or galvanizing enough to single-handedly elevate a mediocre property.Marvel, on the other hand, got stupendously fortunate to get Downey Jr., Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Chadwick Boseman, Chris Pratt, Tom Holland, Tom Hiddleston, Scarlett Johansson… I mean, that is a serious murderers’ row of talent, and their work has made it so an entire generation will never be able to see those characters with other actors’ faces.
I don’t know if you can call that many successes (and more) just getting fortunate – they were doing something very, very right from the very start.
I think this analysis is a bit off. Take Hemsworth specifically, Thor was not great, Thor 2 was actively bad, he wasn’t anyone’s favorite part of Avengers 1 or 2. What Marvel’s been able to do is succeed enough on aggregate that they could keep trying things to eventually make it work. Wonder Woman was good, it just had a bad sequel.
OK, I’ll take Hemsworth… over anyone in the DC films.Even in his worst movie (The Dark World) Hemsworth had enough charisma to keep it from being wholly irredeemable. The best parts of the original Thor all featured him. And as he settled into the role and Marvel elected to let the character breathe a bit (see: Ragnarok, Endgame), his natural charm really came out strong.I can’t say that about anyone in the DC films – not even Gal Gadot, who can play the badass tremendously well but who otherwise comes across as… well, a bit wooden.
My Batman story is that I was living and coaching in Newark, NJ at that time. A runner called me and his reason for missing practice was that he was “in Batman.” It wasn’t until several years later that I figured out he wasn’t lying and was an extra in The Dark Knight Rises. Several months before that, same runner missed because “there’s a plane in the Hudson.” I didn’t believe him then either.
Mine is that I lived and worked in Chicago while they were filming this, and happened to be downtown one morning when they filmed the attempted assassination scene, so from the spot where they’d blocked off LaSalle Street (if memory serves), I saw the shot where everyone was assembled for the police ceremony and then scattered as chaos broke out.
I find Christopher Nolan (and if Westworld is any indication, his brother as well) to be incredibly overrated. They just don’t work for me. I tell myself I’m not going to watch any more of his films and yet every time I fall for the hype and watch his latest film only to be disappointed again. I find his films cold and lifeless. I think his actual choice of camera angles to be largely unremarkable. He has interesting ideas and that’s why I keep getting suckered into watching his films but he thinks he is a lot smarter and profound than he really seems to be. I think if he just stuck to writing and had someone else direct I might enjoy his films.
and if Westworld is any indication, his brother as well Counterpoint: Person of Interest.
He definitely promises a high-mindedness that he doesn’t end up delivering, and there’s a basic quality of enjoyment that’s missing.
I remember being blown away by the black hole scene in Interstellar, only to have the magic just as quickly disappear when they started explaining exactly was happening. Imagine how cool and Kubrickian that scene would have been *without* dialogue.
I remember being blown away by the black hole scene in Interstellar, only to have the magic just as quickly disappear when they started explaining exactly was happening. Imagine how cool and Kubrickian that scene would have been *without* dialogue.Kubrick had the genius to know that not everything needs to be explained. Or even should be explained.
“Since Ledger’s death, we’ve had two different movie Jokers—or three if you count Zach Galifianakis in The Lego Batman Movie,”
Which we goddamn well better! He, and that movie, are right up there with anything in the higher tiers of the Batman pantheon.
‘The superhero movie matured’UGH. Dark Knight is idiotic. I might as well watch the Teletubbies in a dark gritty crime movie. At least Iron Man knows its a comic book (it’s still idiotic but it’s not a fatal flaw when the movie knows and owns it).
Warner essentially had to beg Nolan to make another Batman movie, and it’s clear from The Dark Knight Rises that he never quite figured out what that should even be.I think he had clear plans (or at least direction) for a third part featuring Ledger’s Joker returning. He couldn’t figure out how to make a fully satisfying Rises when he had to rework his plans.
I know this is beating a dead horse, but Heath Ledger is amazing in this. Most of the time, his performance reads “Jesus, they found a real psychopath and somehow got him to read lines, probably, in front of a camera” than “Ledger is doing a great job here”.
From the moment that Heath Ledger first pulls off his clown mask to reveal his scarred-up clown makeup, Batman becomes a supporting character in his own movie.Tim Burton’s first Batman in 1989 has this same problem as well.
I definitely remember the feeling in 2008 when I saw this and Iron Man. Superhero films had made nods in the direction of prestige, like when the X-Men cast included Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. But these two movies, as the kids say, hit different.I think Iron Man is the more impressive feat in some ways, because Tony Stark had none of the household name recognition and no cultural cache to draw on.
Jon Favreau was able to take advantage of Downey fitting Stark like a glove, and allowing their freewheeling fun approach to inform a lot of the movie’s direction. But Nolan’s movie, and Ledger’s performance in it, were both products of meticulous care and craft. I don’t always think more effort = better effort, but The Dark Knight was an example of effortful success.
Downey was largely considered washed-up and playing a role nobody knew; Ledger had to play one of nerddom’s most beloved villains, after a career of mostly young pretty boy roles and only recently being elevated to quote-unquote “serious actor” with Brokeback Mountain. Two different approaches to really excellent success, both in individual performances and in overall film production, tone and story.And for what it’s worth: The Dark Knight is rightly lauded as a great crime drama/action blockbuster, but for my money, I still say that Batman Begins is the better superhero movie. Again, just depends on what you’re looking for out of your experience!
I don’t know which parts of this opinion are controversial or even hot takes at this point or not, and where the contrarian hordes are these days, but man, I really did not care for The Dark Knight when I saw it. Heath Ledger was good, and a good deal of the supporting characters in their cameos were interesting, but the movie was bloated and didn’t present a lot of its ideas very effectively – I imagine the script being more fun to read than the movie to watch.Batman, as noted, doesn’t do a whole lot in this movie, and maybe limiting his sense of agency is the point in making the audience squirm, I don’t know. There is way too much going on, and I totally lost the Harvey Dent parts in the mix of the whole thing – Why do all the movies insist on having two antagonists? The explosive boat scene is really dumb and static, and to me, totally lacking in tension.
Just about all the action is totally incomprehensible, not just the fighting. The chases are some of the worst, where they are shot and edited in a way that just seems off in space, where you can never tell where anything is in relation to anything else – They also take up too much time (which if they were shot in a way you could understand, wouldn’t be an issue). Nolan’s problem from what I’ve seen is that his storytelling often features too much exposition, and his action scenes often have too little.
I thought Batman Begins was a much more coherent movie, and I like the fun and goofiness of Tim Burton and especially Joel Schumacher a lot more.Warm take over.
I believe Roger Ebert made the point that Wall-E should have straight up been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and not be solely relegated to the Best Animated Feature category, and I’m inclined to agree. Although if there were no The Dark Night that year, I don’t think Wall-E would have tipped the scales for the change to the 5-10 movie nomination slate.
That probably had an influence on the decision to give both Up and Toy Story 3 best picture nominations the following years.
It’s an absolute shame Wall-E wasn’t nominated, and was my first evidence at a young age that the Academy was full of shit
This article is great as Popcorn Champs (and History of Violence and Age of Heroes!) alway is. And Dark Knight is a great movie. “The Dark Knight….has a rare form of electricity” is the perfect way to describe it. There was a palpable energy in the crowd watching it in the theater, and the running time flew by in a snap. It was similar to watching the Matrix in 1999-the whole crowd was clearly taken away by it. I saw DK with my wife and parents-they aren’t traditionally into these kind of films, and even they were enthralled the whole time.In the years since, the movie has been memed and dissected to death (and was followed by a pretty flawed sequel), so it is really easy to forget how awesome and revelatory it was when it came out.Also, I want to give a shout out to WALL-E, both because it is a great film and because it is the first film my oldest son was able to sit through at the movies. I was really worried about the wordless first part, but my boy was just fascinated throughout and we went to see it a couple of times. What a great film.
I remember seeing Iron Man and The Dark Knight that summer and leaving both movies thinking, “Finally. Finally!”I missed the post-credits scene for Iron Man, because the MCU hadn’t yet trained me to wait for one. By the time I watched The Incredible Hulk, though, I knew to stick around. (And I liked how “Thunderbolt” Ross and Tony Stark would reunite eight years later in Civil War.)TDK was a collection of one great scene after another: The bank heist. The mob meeting. The invasion at Wayne’s penthouse party. The Hong Kong abduction. The armored car chase. The assassination scenes (particularly the one when the judge opens the envelope to see where she’s going and the card just reads, “UP.” Boom.) The interrogation room. The hospital explosion. The ferry boat standoff.I think the one character who got short-changed (and Tom doesn’t even mention in his post) was Maggie Gyllenhaal (also an Oscar nominee), who replaced Katie Holmes from Begins. In TDK Rachel exists mainly to serve as the focal point in a half-hearted love triangle, and ends up getting fridged so that Dent has an excuse to become Two Face.
> In TDK Rachel exists mainly to serve as the focal point in a half-hearted love triangle, and ends up getting fridged so that Dent has an excuse to become Two Face.
This, unfortunately, is Nolan’s MO with female characters.Vulture had a good (and hilarious) breakdown of this pattern before Tenet was released: https://www.vulture.com/article/which-christopher-nolan-movies-would-i-risk-my-life-to-see.html “One of Christopher Nolan’s favorite things to do — besides insist beyond reason and science that everyone visit a movie theater during a pandemic to see Tenet, because it is simply too cinematic to be seen in the safety of one’s own home — is to make movies wherein a female character dies tragically, subsequently motivating a male protagonist into action.”
Some would say making it all the way through The Incredible Hulk is a feat in and of itself.
I’ve seen Dark Knight only twice, both times in a IMAX cinema. Not sure i could watch it, even on a huge telly screen, cos the IMAX scenes where mind-blowing. In the opening scene, when the camera tips out the window and looks down the building as the robbers begin to zip-line across to the bank, my head spun. And it wasn’t just the big image – Nolan and Wally Pfister knew to use movement and that big glossy lens to give those images sheen and scale.That would be my choice for first movie back, post Jab.
Inspired by the article, I rewatched TDK last night (probably only the second time I’ve watched it all the way through, although I’ve seen numerous bits and pieces over the last 13 years). It held up. The Joker’s ability to defy the laws of probability (and his ability to plan one giant scheme after another without pausing for breath) did start to rankle a little bit, but it’s all pulled off so stylishly that it didn’t really matter.But one funny thing I noticed was that, because Gordon is head of the Major Crimes Unit, there are numerous instances in the movie of people saying “MCU” out loud. Given the last 13 years’ worth of developments in cinematic superhero storytelling, I thought that was hilarious.
I have been loyally, and stoutly, watching all my previously unwatched Popcorn Champs, even as they have devolved into superheroes/explosions, but I am going to have to draw the line at The Dark Knight. I don’t dispute its artistry or Heath Ledger’s powerful performance – it’s hard to remember that the ”Dark Knight” is not the Joker – but I just don’t want to send myself into the lower depths if I don’t have to. So I’ll watch Wall-E, even though that isn’t a laugh-a-minute either.Great essays. Keep up the good work!
I mean, what’s there to say? All I know is that this movie was huge for me as a teenager. Seeing it in theaters is maybe the best filmgoing experience of my life. I’ve seen it dozens and dozens of times over the years. It’s always magic.
The best superhero movies take the superheroes out of their element and make a different kind of movie with it. Nolan made the Batman into a Scorsese-type crime thriller in The Dark Knight. The Russo brothers took Captain America and made a political thriller in Captain America: Winter Soldier. Taika Waititi took Thor and made a Waititi film in Thor: Ragnarok.
I was in Chicago for Pitchfork when TDK came out. I hadn’t been excited for it since I thought Batman Beyond was a snore. My friends all saw it opening night and wouldn’t shut up about it. I tried to see it before the festival, but every showing was sold out, so I had to wait a week. The worst part is Pitchfork is set in a park that’s right on Lake Street, where the car crash scene takes place (Bruce’s distraction crash). It really was an immediate phenomenon.
Speaking of Indiana Jones &tKotCS, I want to give some love to Hellboy 2. I saw them in a double feature at a drive-in meetup. Everyone who stayed for Hellboy 2, even if they’d never heard of the first movie, loved it. It’s too bad the marketing department couldn’t figure out a way to get people to see it, since Hellboy 3 would have been automatic if they had…
Batman is at his strongest when he inhabits a world very close to our own, and the Gotham of this film is probably the closest it’s ever gotten. There are no people with superpowers, magic, or alien invaders here. CGI and green screens are kept to an absolute minimum. Thomas Wayne’s goofy monorail system from the last movie hasn’t just disappeared from the streets of Gotham – it seems to have been banished from the collective memory. If you didn’t know any better, you might think that “Gotham” was simply another name for Chicago rather than New York.For me, this film is weakest when Nolan gets going with his dime store philosophizing. For example, for all the supposed iconic weight of Alfred’s “Some men just want to watch the world burn” speech, are we seriously to believe that only now, after everything he’s seen and done, does Bruce Wayne begin to realize that there are people who are more interested in crime for the sake of causing mischief than for pecuniary gain?
Also, though the Joker gets all the attention here, for me Harvey Dent is an equally fascinating villain: the classic savior/martyr who’s driven primarily by ego and vanity rather than an honest desire to do good. I think the film does a good job of illustrating how dangerous such men are, and how quickly they can lapse into evil. Again, for me this is the sort of thing that makes Batman the most fascinating of all the comic book superheros: It’s not about people who can shoot lightening from their fingertips, but instead about people who are dangerous because of what’s in their hearts and their minds (that includes Bruce Wayne, incidentally).
I understand that, from a financial perspective, it makes sense to have Batman traipsing around in a world that’s also inhabited by Superman and Wonder Woman. But I really wish we could somehow return to this take on the character.
Where did you get that Dent was driven by ego and vanity? He seemed genuinely passionate about rooting out crime, especially in the form of corrupt cops.
Bravo.
Similar reasons why I’m excited for The Batman; it looks like it’s just about people with varying levels of crazy
Agreed, though in the defense of the “watch the world burn” comment, I think in the TDK timeline Bruce still hasn’t been Batman all that long. A big point of the Joker is that, no, they in fact, have not encountered anything like this before. Also, there is a big difference between mischevieous crime for crime’s sake, and level of chaos Joker wrought that was bringing the entire city to its knees.
“For me, The Dark Knight falls apart at the end, a victim of the cluttered and chaotic storytelling…”That was my problem too. Ledger was great and the movie was building to a dark, but inevitable finale. And Nolan just dropped the ball. It was really disappointing.But that’s about what I expect at this point from his movies. He’ll give you an interesting premise, some cool visuals, and a weak ending.
“’90s slime-green neon cheese” and “noisy half-cartoon bullshit” are two absolutely wonderful turns of phrase.
It’s amazing how the transition from 2008 to 2009 takes us from a couple of movies with high, lasting cultural impact at the top of the box office (TDK and Iron Man), to a movie that made almost as much money as the two of them put together (and more than that worldwide), but has been a fart in the wind, culturally speaking. I really struggle to think of a single memorable quote from Avatar, while I can come up with a dozen for Iron Man and I can probably recite all the dialogue from the Dark Knight from memory. It’s probably the least memorable movie that Cameron’s made.
And from there things will just keep getting worse for this column; it’s franchises all the way down. Not to mention that a bunch of the superhero titles have already been discussed in Age of Heroes, or that others (i.e. the Star Wars sequel trilogy) will end up rehashing unhappy arguments.
How did I never noticed the Joker is wearing a Harvey Dent sticker during that hospital sequence?
Jesus Christ, what a shitty, shitty list of Best Picture nominees that year. Just another example of the soulless machinery of the awards season where these staid, tepid, middle-brow movies are (very briefly) elevated to the status of relevance only to fade away entirely once the envelopes are finally opened. “The Reader”? “Benjamin Button”? Oy….
Yeah, I’ll agree The Dark Knight gets too unwieldy by the end. I remember everyone being so hyped after the car chase (which is still the best car chase I’ve seen in a film) and the semi flipping over, some of the air goes out after an awesome moment like that. Two-Face should’ve gotten his own movie. It’s a great take on the character, but it feels like an afterthought in a climax where so much is going on. I could even feel an air in the theater at the midnight screening I attended of everyone thinking, “We’re still going?”
I think if they’d just tightened up the script a little bit more, the theming would’ve been must stronger too. Batman tackling Two-Face off the edge doesn’t have the impact it should. He didn’t make a conscious choice to break his “one rule”, he was running on adrenaline and instinct to stop someone with a gun from killing people. It was an accident, if anything.
Imagine a sequel where Dent survived and Batman was hunting him to stop his vigilante killing spree. Two-Face being a twist on Batman’s mission is something I really like and deserved to be fleshed out more. And the fact that Harvey just murders people with a gun would hit Batman even harder.
The Dark Knight is the single greatest comic book movie ever. Period.It has none of Marvel’s no one stays dead or magic maguffins cliches. And is not woke SJW Mary Sue trash. It literally had enough material for 2 or even 3 standalone blockbuster movies, but Nolan held nothing back and just made the single best movie he could at one time without the endless Marvel dick tease of something better next time. Even Marvel’s best, in Infinity War, is all undone in Endgame and doesn’t even need to happen if Thanos just doubles the size and resources of the universe instead halving the number of all living things, because once again magic makes everything irrelevant.
I will never get tired of this movie, no matter how many times I see it. Ledger still isn’t my favorite Joker (Mark Hamill), but he’s damn close, and this entire movie is stellar from start to finish. Everything about this movie holds up, and I don’t imagine that that will change.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 2008 Post: The Numbers1. The Dark Knight, Warner Bros., $531,001,5782. Iron Man, Paramount, $318,412,1013. Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, Paramount, $317,101,1194. Hancock, Sony/Columbia, $227,946,2745. WALL-E, Disney/Pixar, $223,806,8896. Kung Fu Panda, Paramount, $215,434,5917. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, Paramount, $177,016,8108. Twilight, Summit Entertainment, $176,922,8509. Quantum Of Solace, MGM/Sony, $166,820,41310. Horton Hears A Who, 20th Century Fox, $154,529,439Wikipedia1. The Dark Knight, Warner Bros., $997,000,0002. Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, Paramount, $790,653,9423. Kung Fu Panda, Paramount, $631,744,5604. Hancock, Sony/Columbia, $624,386,7465. Mamma Mia!, Universal, $609,841,6376. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, Paramount, $603,900,3547. Quantum Of Solace, MGM/Sony, $589,580,4828. Iron Man, Paramount, $585,174,2229. WALL-E, Disney/Pixar, $533,281,43310. The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Disney, $419,665,568
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post:The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Saving Private Ryan (1998)The Dark Knight (2008)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)Jurassic Park (1993)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King (2003)Spider-Man (2002)Toy Story (1995)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Titanic (1997)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Aladdin (1992)Independence Day (1996)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)Spider-Man 3 (2007)Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)Forrest Gump (1994)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)Shrek 2 (2004)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
Initially, the superhero/comic book genre struggled to attain prestige. They were the subject of Saturday morning cartoons, and solely meant for children. While the Richard Donner Superman and Tim Burton Batman films had been well received, they still weren’t taken as seriously as dramas. Then in the early 2000’s a new trend dawned. Between X-Men, Spiderman, and Batman Begins, the genre slowly began to take over Hollywood. After already delivering a critical and financial hit with Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan delivered his magnum opus in the summer of 2008 with The Dark Knight. https://techowiser.com/moto-g8-review/
I thought Tim Burton’s Batman was so realistic and gritty at the time. I was probably 14 though.
Why does it feel like I’m reading the same article again?
https://www.avclub.com/does-the-most-important-year-for-superhero-movies-belon-1830035680
Nolan’s Batman movies are overrated and boring. They feel like superhero movies that are ashame of being superhero movies.Tim Burton’s Batman movies are still the best Batman movies in my book.
Even in the roles that only get one or two scenes, Nolan makes sure to pack in people we’ll be happy to see: Eric Roberts, Michael Jai White, Anthony Michael Hall, Tiny Lister.Poor William Fichtner getting forgotten.
The soundtrack is a banger tho
Random thoughts:
If I had my way, Gary Oldman and Arron Eckhart would have gotten Best Supporting Actor nominations too. They both blew me away
This is my favorite version of Bruce Wayne.
And one of Bruce’s best moments is when he can’t suit up and has to think on his toes- saving that Wayne Enterprises weasel with his lamborghini (my favorite car in a Batman film)
That Wayne guy should have been Edward Nygma.
Speaking on that, I still think there are things they could have tweaked to make TDK feel more like it acknowledges the comic universe, without even needing to make drastic changes (The Hispanic lady cop with Gordon- why can’t she be Montoya? Instead of going to Hong Kong to get Lao, why not make it Metropolis/and Lex Luthor?)Speaking of Lao, for everyone’s complaints that a superhero movie shouldn’t have too many villains, this one effectively has like 6 or 7.
I actually prefer Katie Holmes’ Rachel in Batman Begins. She seemed more important.Wall*E may not have 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, but it has 100% in my heart.
I wanted to see The Penguin in the Nolanverse. I leraned that these days he’s an arms dealer and pretty mobbed up. So in the comics they made him less silly. What little I know about that sounded pretty cool. He totally could have cameod as selling arms to Bane or some other criminal group in the third movie.
That Wayne guy should have been Edward Nygma.
I’ve heard that Mr. Reese = “Mysteries”.
[Edit: Whoops! Wrong conversation. Still applies, though! One of the best parts of the Nolan movies was the break between TDK and TDKR when people got to speculate on the villains. It was Philip Seymour Hoffman for The Penguin, at least according to the pocket of the internet I read that on.]
It always seems kind of crazy to me that Batman Begins and Superman Returns came out a year apart and made almost the same amount of money. Yet one led to The Dark Knight and to Nolan’s career being launched into the stratosphere. And the other led to nothing.
It always seems kind of crazy to me that Batman Begins and Superman Returns came out a year apart and made almost the same amount of money. Yet one led to The Dark Knight and to Nolan’s career being launched into the stratosphere. And the other led to nothing.Part of the problem is that the $260M budget for Superman Returns included everything spent on Burton’s aborted Superman film. So it’s considered a box-office bomb because it didn’t make back all those costs in addition to what Singer spent.Superman Returns actually brought in more money than Batman Begins – $391.1 million to $373.7 million, respectively. But Batman’s budget was a hundred million less, which is the difference between a cancelled sequel and a trilogy.
Shia whatshisname always is the one who gets dumped on for Crystal Skull, but Cate Blanchett also turned in an absolute stinker of a performance. From the bad accent to the campy performance, it was too much. That was the problem, from the aliens to the CGI to every part, it was too campy. The third Indiana Jones (Last Crusade) kind of skirted the camp line too, but barely did not cross it. Every Indiana Jones had supernatural elements in it. (God in the first, Indian magic second, healing Jesus cup with immortal knight third), so I never got why aliens was too far for some people. But the thing that those films had was at least some grounded performances, even if the characters were a little cinematic and larger than life. The fourth one devolved into complete camp.
I goddamn hate Avatar, lol. Saw that in theaters and oy vey, never wanted to forget a film so fast.
The Dark Knight Rises was orders of magnitude better than The Dark Knight. Its a defining movie of the 21st century, showing what happens when you give in to mob rule and people’s vices and weaknesses to save yourself from emotional discomfort of aknowledging your wrongs and admitting that nobody is perfect, not even the opressed and weak who are being put on a pedesral by the true powers that reign us, and what happens when you cancel the true heroes.
The thing I most remember about The Dark Knight is being irritated that the boat scene wasn’t the end. My bladder was about to explode and they still had the whole Two Face thing, which made me wanna strangle someone.
I did not remember the five films that were nominated for Best Picture that year. I don’t give much importance to Oscars or any other awards show – choosing the “best” of subjective categories is a thankless task and will never make everyone happy – but time hasn’t been kind to that selection. Frankly, both The Dark Knight and Wall-E had more lasting power than these films.
Actually it’s a bloated, poorly-written piece of crap, and if Heath Ledger were alive today we’d all look back on that movie, and our reactions to it, with a mixture of shame and amusement, a la American Beauty.