Great film, but lacks the emotional impact of Batman Begins.

Rating: 8/10 (4 August 2008)

The Dark Knight is a great movie.
Unfortunately, little niggly things keep it from being truly great. Editing choices, pacing of certain scenes, omitted scenes where we are left to assume something has happened, all keep it from being the organic experience Batman Begins was. The story is also a lot denser and cluttered, which isn't a bad thing in itself of course. But I felt that the time taken just to remember who was who (and what they looked like when we briefly saw them 30 minutes earlier in the film) kept getting in the way of me just absorbing the movie.
The one thing that I felt was truly brilliant about Batman Begins was that it was a movie you could "feel", the story didn't get in the way of the atmosphere the filmmakers were trying to create. It felt like they had stripped the dialog down to the bare minimum, and they left the rest of the storytelling to the music and visuals. I thought it felt much more focused and engaging. This focus on atmosphere, and delivering the emotional heart of the film through music, also allowed them to take some, when viewed out of context, fairly cheesy or out-of-place lines of dialog, and somehow make them very powerful and moving, even memorable.
If they release a Director's Cut of The Dark Knight, where they have my permission to gladly add 20 minutes of material removed during editing (gore and violence scenes, possibly small omitted scenes needed to make the story flow better and to make the narrative a bit more clear and engaging rather than feeling like you are just crudely hopping between scenes at times), then The Dark Knight could be as awesome as it might be able to be.
A good example of the problems the movie suffers from can be found when you examine the use of the musical score in the film. In Batman Begins there were many long scenes where the music was allowed to really take its time, to build emotionally over several minutes and really carry the film from an emotional viewpoint. In The Dark Knight, there are almost no such moments. Sometiems there is a touching 20 second scene crammed between 2 violent or chaotic scenes, and the music tries desperately to infuse some emotional support for that scene, which is almost pointless when it happens. 20 seconds isn't nearly enough to take a viewer from excited to feeling sadness or love. Instead it almost feels kind of insulting when you realize what just happened, and it takes you out of the movie a bit as well.
Overall I feel it is a great movie with great acting, great action and a rich and engaging story which is more eventful and dense than the first film. The fact that I felt the movie (already well over 2 hours long) could have benefited from another 20 minutes of material, to sort out some moments of unclarity and just make the story more engaging and connected, speaks volumes about the quality of the quality work represented on screen. But certain issues, with unnatural scene progressions, too tight editing that doesn't allow the emotional message in a scene to fully sink in, editing that skips between events too much rather than taking one thing at a time, and omitted scenes or events, together with a story that I feel could really benefit from extended scenes and more room to breathe at times, keeps it from being as emotionally engaging and essential as Batman Begins was.
I give it 8/10, but the more time passes since I saw it, the more it's leaning towards a solid 7/10.