So…. I returned to The Dark Knight, expecting that once I knew what was coming and had some sense of the themes of the film, I could pick a lot more up.
And that simply wasn’t the case.
Unfortunately, the second viewing exposed many of the small holes and overreaches in the storytelling.
That said, I still enjoyed the film and am happy Nolan made it and aspired to so much. So I don’t want to do anything to knock anyone off the horse before the chew on this one for themselves. It’s not fair and it’s not necessary.
In a week, we will have the conversation in depth with those of you who have seen the film. I expect there to be strong positive reactions that have a lot more vulnerabilities to argument than anyone expects right now. But we’ll see. It’s not an Iron Man situation where I am turned off by what turns others on. I just see so much ambition and a story that doesn’t hold up as well as expected.
And I don’t think I am nit-picking the way some did on Momento, where they were looking for any flaw in the film’s logic. My thing is, sit down and tell me the story of the movie and don’t do it without having to double back to explain actions and reach for motivations to make it make sense. Nolan was trying to do so much that he sometimes forgot to tell his story. And as I wrote earlier in the week, more time probably would have helped a lot. But the movie is what it is.
Nolan wanted to make Heat or The Untouchables with costumed heroes and villains. Cool. Mann and DePalma/Mamet did it better and cleaner without sweating so hard. (They also did it with less violence... which is saying something for the hard-R Heat... the only PG-13-saving grace here is that there is no blood or many looks at corpses when knives, bullets, and car wrecks are used to mangle human flesh.)
But a good, ambitious, summer comic book movie that wants to be about something? Huzzah!
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2008/07/no_dark_knight.html