Astonishing, gripping, epic......everything it should've been

Rating: 10/10 (23 July 2008)

I had to write a review to tag on the later part of this thread cause it was being bombarded with crappy wannabe critics who think a movie has to be an utterly depressing Sundance Film Festival winner to be considered "good".
I've seen some people on here saying this movie was too cliché and not real enough. How much more real do you want it, people, without clipping out the gripping action scenes? Christopher Nolan did a PHENOMENAL job of making Batman and Joker as believable as possible. Obviously, there's always going to be a degree of fiction when you're dealing with a guy that dresses up as a bat and parades around the city stopping crime. And the dialogue was perfect. It was believable, yet engrossing. Passionate when it called for it. Silent when need-be. There's a fine line between "cliché" and "profound".....and this movie rides the latter perfectly without ever shifting into the expected on a cliché level.
Then there's the other degree of people who think it's not comic-book style enough. Well, there-in lies my point. Nolan had to meet you nit-picky people somewhere in the middle. He had to create a movie that would give you something that you didn't expect, yet not stray to far off blockbuster material. C'mon people.....you have to understand that creating an amazing movie is like creating a great song. You want to write something original that's never been done before, yet if you stray to far off a mainstream sound, you're not going to get much of an audience and it will bomb.
If you didn't want to see the movie and had these preconceived notions that the movie was "over-hyped" before you even went into the theater, why the crap even see it? The movie was beautifully crafted from start to finish. Was it more than two hours long?....yes. But if you can't pay attention to an ACTION/SUSPENSE flick for that long, then maybe you should stick to romantic-comedies and Nash Bridges reruns. It wasn't like the third Lord of the Rings long, where they did ending after ending that just drew it out for no reason. If TDK stopped the movie about 20-30 minutes short, then yeah, it couldn't stopped there....but then the same people would have been complaining that the loose ends weren't tied up and you don't know what happens to certain characters.
Ledger was perfect. Period. Anyone on here that says he didn't do an amazing job is a friggin snob. Put down your $10 latte and quit acting so self-righteous. Just cause it was a comic-book character doesn't mean it can't be a role worthy of an award, which Ledger is definitely worthy of for his performance. If you think you can pick Heath Ledger peaking out from underneath his character at any second....please point it out. Cause I NEVER once saw Heath Ledger at any instance. I saw the JOKER. It's by far, some of the best acting I've ever seen. And believe me when I say it had nothing to do with him dying in real life. I would've praised Ledger all the same for his performance should he still be alive.
The Dark Knight was everything a movie should be. It was a crime movie. A comic-book movie. A suspense-thriller. An action flick. A tragic love story. And the jokers kill-or-be-killed scenarios were reminiscent of the SAW movies (though on a less gruesome scale). How could you possibly ask for better? This movie has every right to push it's way forward and replace Titanic as the number-one grossing movie of all time (which never deserved that privilege in the first place). There's a reason this movie is riding around the top of IMDb's top 250 movies ever (when I posted this, it was actually THE top movie.....above the Godfather.....). It will go down in history as one of the greatest movies ever. My hat is off to Christopher Nolan and his brother for creating the essence of a masterpiece.