Dark Knight... triumphant!!!

Rating: 9/10 (27 July 2008)

this is NOT a superhero movie. it's NOT a comic book movie. this is a statement about the time which we live in, and how we want to see ourselves, what we could see ourselves as, and ultimately the dangers of what we can become...
put simply: Heath Ledger does for the role of Joker what Christopher Reeves did for Superman. he now owns the role and character, it's his, this is the new gold standard and could potentially forever change joker's image in pop culture. it will be almost impossible for anybody to do a plausible or worthy follow-up-- be it illustrated, live action, or animated-- that will be as effective and taken as seriously as this one... this performance makes Jack Nicholson's's "darker" Joker of 1989-- a performance raved about by Bob Kane himself-- as campy-looking as Caesar Romero's Joker of the 1960's TV show. Ledger's character-portrayal could be called by any other name, put it in any other movie, and it would be the talk of Hollywood as one of the scariest characters in recent memory.
never mind the fact that in this movie, everything and everyone is the star getting equal screen time, including Batman, Joker, Harvey Dent-- in a poetically brilliant portrayal by Eckhardt-- Gotham City, Jim Gordon, Lucius fox, and all the tertiary characters and pyrotechnics..... never mind a couple simple storytelling flaws (among them characters "disappear" while other characters are still, technically, looking in their direction) and completely illogical time lines.... never mind that we still don't get an accurate explanation as to how any of Batman's villains convince and recruit their hired thugs to devotedly do their bidding... never mind anything and everything that you would normally want to nit-pick.
this film's main flaw is that it's TOO good. there was always a secret joy for fans in being unsatisfied, always complaining how the director never got this or that just right-- it always gave us, the audience, a reason to want and demand more.... we always seemed to love the filmmakers' efforts more than any of the products given to us. we always loved that they never quite achieved the Utopian perfection of the characters each of us created in our own minds, which allowed us to then imagine even better films-- the "what could have been...!" but now that the joy of fan-geekdom complaining has been robbed from us, all i can say is: "thanks!!!!!!"
go see it-- you'll be MORE than glad you did.....