Garbled Editing and Garbled Audio

Rating: 6/10 (11 July 2013)

I really, REALLY loved "Batman Begins." I thought it was an amazing recreation of the myth established by Tim Burton but ruined by the later, lighter, messy affairs by Joel Schumacher. Batman Returns had a well-structured screenplay, wonderful cinematography, and well-developed personalities and characters. I really, REALLY wanted to LOVE "The Dark Knight," but I just could not. The performances are amazing--wonderful acting. The movie, however, falls flat on some of the technical aspects of the film production itself. Action-packed scenes were impossible to follow. The opening scene of clowns was too long and boring. Batman's excursion into Lau's office building was impossible to follow, either due to editors' shredding the continuity of the scene or simply the scene was played just too dark and too fast. The heroic and intense rescue of the masked hostages suffered from the same fate: camera-work too fast and disjointed and too dark. In both cases, perhaps too much of the action lay outside the camera lens and would have required too much panning back and forth?
Then there is the Batman Voice!! And there are so many others commenting about the Batman Voice--including online spoofs--that I know that I am not alone. I just could not understand him, like one spoof asks, "What,are you gargling marbles?" My inability to understand the Batman Voice in this second movie made it impossible to understand a lot of the dialogue and therefore some of the core plot developments.
Finally, between Batman's garbled voice and the SUPER LOUD MUSIC, it was so hard to hear the last 4 minutes of the movie,even Commissioner Gordon's monologue--the KEY to why Batman is now called The Dark Night. So very frustrating.