The Dark Knight

[Ghostboy]

In Bale's defense, that voice is at least 50 % synthesizer. It'd be interesting to see some scenes of him as Batman with the original on-set audio.

[matt35mm]

Well I got the voice thing with Batman Begins.  I think it worked better in that movie because he was brief in dialogue, and the shots were quick (making him elusive).  Here, there were a couple of moments where it lingered on him while he was talking and I had a difficult time taking it as seriously as it was taking itself.  He had to take deep breaths between sentences and everything.

I had several problems with the editing in this movie, actually.  It felt sloppy to me.  I wish the shots of the Joker lingered longer (I feel like I didn't even get the chance to be chilled by the Joker), and there were many moments that were just plain confusing to me, simply due to the editing.  So many scenes were shot with just a steadicam swirling around two people as they're talking in order to infuse the scene with a bunch of energy (which is pretty standard and I hoped that this film would be a little more imaginative).  I would disagree with those who say that this film is very well crafted.  I think the film would have played better at 3 hours for that screenplay, or could have had a shorter screenplay.

There were also many scenes where, for example, (SPOILER) After the Joker crashes the party with all of Gotham's elite, and Batman and Rachel fall down and hit the car, they banter a bit and then it cuts to next day.  It just seemed odd to me not to show the Joker doing anything with that roomful of people afterwards, just slipping out quietly, and that we don't see Batman at least try to look for Joker.  There's something so quick and on to the next thing and on to the next thing about this movie.  I had an overwhelming sense of stuff happening and an underwhelming sense of Bruce Wayne (who?) in all of this.  He was sad about Rachel for about 3 minutes. (END SPOILER)

So my favorite parts were when the movie lingered on certain moments.  The hospital explosion is a good example of that, and I also very much like the shot of Joker with his head out of the window of the cop car (though I wish even that shot lingered for longer).  I do like very much what modage pointed out in saying that especially the second half was not very predictable, and the Joker did feel like a real threat.  I kind of wish, though, that he had even less of a plan that he did have.  I would have been interested in how complete randomness and chaos would have messed with Batman, but the Joker was indeed relatively chaotic and unpredictable.

The filmmakers have definitely convinced me that the world of Batman and Gotham is indeed a great way to illustrate these very interesting ideas in a powerful way--but I felt like the ideas could have been better developed and illustrated.  Here, I felt like all the ingredients were there, but the screenplay and some of the filmmaking decisions muddled many of the ideas, or in some cases, over-simplified them (usually in the form of a simple duality).

I DID enjoy myself, though.  I went into the theater fully prepared to gush, and instead of gushing I simply enjoyed myself, was engaged, liked some things and didn't like some things... so I'm a little disappointed, and probably being too hard on it (though I think the movie can take it, what with the heaps of praise it's mostly getting), but I'm glad I saw it and I had a good time.

[picolas]

inspired by an imdb dark knight thread entitled "LUCAS and SPIELBERG: YOU LOSE!"





i love this movie deeply despite its obvious flaws. probably more later.

[tpfkabi]

In Bale's defense, that voice is at least 50 % synthesizer. It'd be interesting to see some scenes of him as Batman with the original on-set audio.

really?
i don't know why they'd even want to do that.

[adolfwolfli]

I thought this was a monstrous improvement over Nolan's first Batman film, which I found quite boring.  My only bone to pick is also the Christian Bale Batman "voice".  What the fuck?  It bordered on the ridiculous and amateurish.  Every time Batman spoke it just took me right out of the movie, it was just so silly and unbelievable.  It's amazing to me that with all the money, thought, effort and planning that went into such an epic film, that nobody at any point down the line said, "Uh, Mr. Nolan, no one can understand what the hell Batman is saying because it sounds like he's been gargling with shredded glass and smoking 12 packs of menthols a day."  At first I thought, oh, OK, Nolan is trying very hard to make all of this believable and is striving for a high level of realism, so the thinking is that in order to hide his identity Wayne puts on this gargoyle voice whenever he's Batman.  But he uses the voice with people who already know he's Batman!  He's hanging out with Morgan Freeman, not in the suit, and he's talking like normal Christian Bale, and then he goes over and suits up and suddenly it's dragon voice... It was just so silly in a movie that was overall very serious, almost even portentous.  Anyway, other than that, I enjoyed it immensely, despite being confused by a few plot points that felt rushed. 

[72teeth]

yeah. and his voice was dumb too...

[MacGuffin]

The Dark Knight's Final Tally? $158.4 Million!
Source: The Hollywood Reporter, Variety

On Sunday, Warner Bros. Pictures estimated that The Dark Knight had earned $155.3 million its opening weekend. Turns out, that was low! The final figures show that Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins follow-up took in a record-breaking $158.4 million over the Friday-to-Sunday frame, easily beating the $151.1 million opening of Spider-Man 3 in May 2007.

One of the big reasons for the lower estimate was that the studio expected the movie to do about $39.4 million on Sunday but in actuality it received about $43 million, again beating Spider-Man 3's previous record of $39.9 million for the day.

The film earned a record-breaking $67.8 million on Friday alone. Of that, $18.5 million came from midnight shows, besting the previous midnight record set by Fox's 2005 Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, which grossed $16.9 million from 3,663 theaters.

It also set the record for an IMAX opener, earning $6.2 million from 94 IMAX theaters.

The studio estimates that The Dark Knight, which opened in a record 4,366 theaters, could gross as much as $220 million in its first week. That's more than the entire domestic gross of Nolan's Batman Begins, which earned $205 million domestically and $166 million overseas.

The big opening allowed the box office to take in a record $250 million in ticket sales total. The previous weekend record was $218.4 million, set in July 2007 when Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest opened to $135.6 million.

[tpfkabi]

(from imdb)
Knight Director May Shoot Next Film In IMAX
21 July 2008 10:30 AM, PDT


Director Christopher Nolan, who shot the action sequences in The Dark Knight using gigantic IMAX cameras, says that he "would be very interested in shooting a whole film in IMAX" since it would allow him to provide a theatrical movie that would "be distinct from the home theater experience." In an interview with the Collider website, Nolan said that the principal problem is the noise produced by the IMAX camera's mechanism, which apparently cannot be adequately contained by the usual soundproof "blimp" used for most studio cameras. "It's very, very hard to see how you do dialogue scenes," he said. "And the lenses are so wide, you're shooting this conversation, the cameras go 18 inches from your nose, basically, and it sounds like one of those small portable generators -- that's about the level of volume of it. So to just speak over that and to act as if that's not there is very tough."

[abuck1220]

spoilers, i guess.

the only things worse than his voice were the convulated, wtf cell phone/sonar subplot which made no sense and the transformation of dent into two-face in the span of like 20 minutes. also, i thought the makeup/effects for two face were terrible.

ledger was really great, but it felt like he was in a whole different movie. like he was trying really hard and taking the role really seriously, but no one else was doing the same. i thought eckhard was terrible and bale, freeman and caine had pretty much nothing to do.

[brockly]

spoilers, i guess.

the only things worse than his voice were the convulated, ... and the transformation of dent into two-face in the span of like 20 minutes. also, i thought the makeup/effects for two face were terrible.

i didn't like the voice either. it's been a pretty common complaint since begins. two-face's makeup was pure cheesy wonderment, i thought it was great. the campiness also helped ease the implausibility of his transformation, which was probably the biggest problem i had with the film too.

[abuck1220]

spoilers, i guess.

the only things worse than his voice were the convulated, ... and the transformation of dent into two-face in the span of like 20 minutes. also, i thought the makeup/effects for two face were terrible.

i didn't like the voice either. it's been a pretty common complaint since begins. two-face's makeup was pure cheesy wonderment, i thought it was great. the campiness also helped ease the implausibility of his transformation, which was probably the biggest problem i had with the film too.

but the campiness of two face just didn't jive with the super dark joker. like i said, it was like ledger was in a completely different movie than the rest of the characters.

and the asian guy? that whole subplot was stupid and confusing.

[brockly]

but the campiness of two face just didn't jive with the super dark joker.

but there was nothing campy about two face outside of his appearance. i actually think the character jived brilliantly given the joker's satiric mien. as ive already said i could have done without the character altogether in this film but regardless i loved the way they approached him.

[Kal]

i think the voice is to show that Batman himself still doesn't know his identity very well, and he is just trying so that people won't recognize him and also think he is tough. It's not very good but I think they left it maybe because they want to show that he still did not figure everything out in terms of his Batman alter ego. In the first one he was trying too hard, and he kinda left it the same, but its the same reason why he is very clumsy sometimes. It has flaws in that aspect cause there are scenes like at the beginning when he is trying to stop the car and cuts himself and then crashes into a column, but then he is not clumsy when jumping off a 120-story rooftop in China or doing a 180 with the bike.

I also did not like the make up / effects of two face. Of course I wasn't expecting a Halloween Tommy Lee Jones two-face, but that was just creepy in a bad way and not very good.

[hedwig]

i loved it.

semi-spoiler, kind of.
this movie is Lisa the Iconoclast. you know what i mean.

i'mmmm sleep deprived. good night.

[jtm]

this was great. not the masterpiece i thought it would be, but still great.

spoilers

my biggest problem with it was the length. it didn't need to be this long. the last half hour is what really changed my opinion of the film. i was so sucked into the joker as the villain of the film, and then they just brushed him aside and set-up two-face as a villain waaaaay too quick. should have saved him for the next film. didn't buy the fact that at one moment he's gothams next hope for cleaning up the city, and the next he's killing innocent people left and right with no remorse what-so-ever. his last scene in the film should have been the scene in the hospital with the joker. they shouldn't have even showed the left side of his face in this one. i was pissed when they did.

and we didn't get enough resolution with the joker. i'd of loved it if the film ended with a shot of him in a padded cell. looking happy.

i also agree about batmans voice. uuuggghhhh! way too over the top.... but this is funny: