Best film ever? You must be batty!

Rating: 4/10 (1 August 2008)

Obviously Christopher Nolan was trying to touch on one of the prominent issues of recent times. That of the environment. He did this by recycling tired old jokes and set pieces from many action films before, and the rest of the plot was salvaged from toilets and rubbish bins. He also comes up with the perfect formula to make a profound sentence, by taking two words that mean complete opposites and shoving them together.
Joking aside, after almost nodding off for the first hour and a half the second half of the movie actually was pretty good, albeit drawn out until the ending which was very frustrating. They literally left the joker hanging while dealing with the completely pointless and irrational side-story of two-face. I'd have thought that a man of dent's resolve would have been made stronger by the events that took place, to get back at the joker and stop such events from happening to other people, instead of deteriorating into the monster of similar calibre to the joker.
I really don't think the film got the best out of the actors involved, probably due to the script. Christian Bale is a fantastic actor, but he is completely wasted as batman where he spends most of his time jumping about in a bat-suit using a silly voice, instead of displaying his incredible character acting skills in movies such as American Psycho and the Machinist. Heath Ledger's performance was the only real solid one in the entire cast, however at plenty of times he guilty of completely over-acting. His introduction to the members of the mob was farcical and the laughter in the cinemas was due to the awkwardness and stupidity of the situation.
The main reason I think the film totally fails is Christopher Nolans approach of trying to make the film really realistic with an explanation for everything. A man running around in a bat costume and a man dressed up in clown make-up is just to surreal to try and be addressed in this manner. This is why I think the original Batman is a lot better because it didn't try to be ultra-realistic and took the comics and had a fairly serious tone with a very comedic undercurrent. Christopher Nolan undoubtedly has talent as a director, memento, the prestige and even insomnia are all great films but I feel his attempts at the batman franchise are far outshone by Tim Burton.
Obviously the film is already a hit and there is nothing anyone can write to stop it from being so, however I must implore you to actually watch the film critically and realise its shortcomings, than get swept away in the hype.