So I finally saw The Dark Knight on the IMAX yesterday. I was blown away by the IMAX sequences. I forgot just how good 70mm film can look. This isn’t necessarily a review of the new Batman movie, you’ve probably already seen it anyways. If you haven’t seen it yet because you’ve been in the hospital or something then you’d better stop reading because I’m going to unleash some spoilers.

After I saw The Dark Knight the first time I tried to convince myself that it was the best comic themed movie ever. Batman is my favorite comic book character, and I would argue the most important comic character in history. Unfortunately this new movie must be more closely scrutinized than the rest for that reason.

I was never a Make Mine Marvel kid. I read a little Spiderman and X-Men, but Batman was where it was at. And especially Neal Adam’s Batman. Batman, along with Bo Jackson, and Mr. T were my role models. Batman had the detective skills of Sherlock Holmes, the gadgets of James Bond, the fighting abilities of Bruce Lee plus 100 ninjas, and most importantly an insane thirst for justice. Those are all things that are humanly possible if one works hard enough (except if you’re not blessed with being a billionaire I guess the gadget thing is a problem). Batman wasn’t an alien, he was never in a laboratory experiment gone awry, he wasn’t born with any super powers, he was basically a regular dude.

I loved The Dark Knight. No doubt this is the best film in the Batman series, except for maybe this one. Heath Ledger totally ruled as a Joker I’ve never seen before. The closest I can think of is the Joker from The Killing Joke, which I think the new movie borrowed heavily from since in that story the Joker tries to prove that he can make a certain someone insane from just one bad day. The Harvey Dent/Two Face stuff is great too. I hate to say it, but I think that the movie would’ve been better without Batman. His raspy voice really bothers me. Really, I think I’ll save myself some time and send you to this insightful review by Devin at Chud.com. While I don’t agree completely with him, he does bring up a lot of really good points. One of the biggest problems I had with it was the Joker. Although he steals the show, he’s also very poorly written. How can someone that claims he never has a plan seemingly pull off all these really big schemes with less that a day to work it all out?¹

And what’s with this whole thing with the Government helping Batman to spy on Gotham’s people to catch the Joker? It reminds me of Kingdom Come and Frank Miller’s Batman. It’s these half baked plot points that really bring the movie down for me. You could make a great Batman movie where he turns Gotham into a police state like in Kingdom Come. Instead they just glossed over the whole thing and didn’t even take a firm stance on whether or not it’s a good idea to spy on the population in order to take down evil.

I’ve decided for myself that as far as movies go, Iron Man is the clear winner for best all round comic book movie ever. At least until we get to see Watchmen.

1. In a recent interview with Ian Punnet on Coast to Coast AM, Neal Adams explained that the Joker is an expert planner BECAUSE he’s so psychotic, and while I agree with him on that since he knows the Joker better than most people, I didn’t see anything in the movie to suggest that was the case.