The Dark Knight
I liked The Dark Knight, but not as much as I liked Batman Begins, which I liked a lot, probably too much.
Things I liked:
- The Joker. Everyone likes Ledger as the Joker. His character is extremely compelling in his twisted, anarchical sadism; he is the ultimate super villain. I wouldn't have thought it possible for his version of the Joker to be so different from Nicholson's twenty years ago in what was the only good old Batman movie.
- The theme. The Joker continually tries to make everyone immoral like himself by threatening them with death if they don't first kill someone else. Only the truly good can survive him. Harvey Dent is destroyed and even Batman is afraid of what he may become to try to stop the Joker. This theme was summed up in the repeated phrase, "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain" (as typified by Julius Caesar!).
- Its the sequel to Batman Begins!
- The tone. The movie was considerably darker than Batman Begins, which was itself darker than the original Batman movie (all of which were darker than Silver Age Batman as exemplified by the campy TV show starring Adam West. Some scenes with the Joker were hard to stomach, such as the tense anticipation of his mutilation of a gangster's face (the mutilation itself is off camera, thus avoiding an R rating). More importantly, though, the movie had a much more complex plotline than its predecessor and it jumped from one scene to the next in rapid succession, with hardly a chance to catch your breath. I preferred the slower, simpler plotline of Batman Begins, though this is a matter of taste, I suppose.
- Super planning. The complex web of events set up by the Joker are certainly a testament to his cartoonish super villainy. He rigs no less than five places with explosives ready to go off right when he needs them to. He drives a school bus into a bank, then pulls it back out, conveniently into a line of school buses with an opening at the exact right moment (and no one notices?). Other little things. I didn't mind that the Joker was a criminal genius beyond the capabilities of any real person, as that is what a super villain is, but I did mind when things seemed impossibly well orchestrated (e.g. the bus).
- Dent's madness. How on earth did the Joker know Dent would turn crazy? A lot of people lose loved ones and suffer traumatic losses. They rarely, if ever, turn into super villains! Furthermore, he is taking a huge risk of his life. If it weren't for his coin-flipping insanity, Dent would certainly have killed him, yet the Joker had no idea he would resort to a coin flip. This really bugged me. Furthermore, Dent's makeup was outlandish. It seems unlikely that he could have functioned in that state. More work would have been done on him before he even had a chance to refuse consent. He didn't even have an eyelid. His eyeball would have dried out!
- Gordon's Keystone cops. Gordon has his men shoot at the clowns in the building even though something suspicious is obviously going on and Batman explicitly told him not to because it was obviously a trick by the Joker. I immediately guessed what the trick was, but the police of course did not. I thought Gordon trusted Batman? Why does he starting shooting in a hostage situation that they know is fishy? It seemed like a thin excuse to have Batman fight the cops, which fed into the movie's theme about Batman becoming evil, in some sense, in order to fight evil.
- Sonar phones. Converting everyone's cell phones into sonar devices was totally ludicrous. The cell phone would surely have to be designed with that function in the hardware. Are you telling me that my cheap cell phone could spontaneously become a sonar imaging device because it received a special signal? A magic signal, maybe. Batman Begins had the fantastic water-evaporating device, but at least that seemed theoretically possible as a new invention.
EDIT: I just remembered that Batman Begins contains a ridiculous scene where Batman suddenly summons thousands of bats, which smash through windows. This greatly lessens the import of my complaints about improbable situations in The Dark Knight. But for someone else who agrees that the movie suffered from such implausibilities, see this comment.