This Saturday night me and my girlfriend decided to go see the new Batman movie on a whim. I didn't really want to go because I thought the crowds would be enormous. We saw the 10:30 showing, it was pretty easy to find seats surprisingly.
I'll try not to give away spoilers, though I might mention a scene or two. Has anyone else seen this movie yet? Overall I sort of liked it. Spiderman 1 and 2 were definitely better. Heath Ledger was pretty damn good as the Joker and he definitely made the movie. The best parts of the movie were definitely the Joker and the Hong Kong sequence, which included probably the most awesome/ridiculous get-away method ever conceived. Gary Oldman was a chameleon as usual, hard to believe this is the same guy who was the villian in the Fifth Element and Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK.
Things I didn't like: The music! In every scene where Nolan wanted to create tension, he used this terribly annoying technique of having this tense droning sound (pardon my lack of music terminology) that he kept turning slowly up. It starts as this slight drone and is slowly turned up as the scene gets more tense, but he used this EVERY single time he wanted to create tension in every scene. I started making a motion like I was turning a knob/dial whenever this music would start, and by halfway through the movie me and my girlfriend would just start laughing whenever the droning knob-turning noise started. Ugh.
Also - It felt like there were a lot of little missing fragments of scenes that maybe got cut for time. Something would be going on with a character and then it would suddenly cut to the same character somewhere completely different and the audience is left to extrapolate "oh I guess he managed to get away." Especially after Batman rescues the girl from the party. Hold on a sec, wasn't the Joker still holding everyone else hostage at the party, what about them? Oh well, it's the next morning now, I guess everyone's ok(?).
Finally, I think the movie suffered a bit of the Spiderman 3 syndrome. It tried to cram too many bad guys into one movie. In my opinion, they should have left the rest of Harvey Dent/Two Face's story to the next movie. I really didn't care about his villain, and I thought his CGI looking face stood out too much to the Joker's more authentic looking smeared makeup. They could have shaved a good 45 minutes off the movie without Two Face. At least he was better than the awful Sandman baddie from Spiderman 3.
Oh, and did I mention that Gotham city is now Chicago? I've never even been to Chi-town and even I could tell you that was it. It practically even had the whole Von Steuben Day parade, I half expected Ferris Bueller to pop out and start singing Danke Schoen.
I have not seen it yet, given that my current tendency is to avoid the opening weekends of highly anticipated blockbusters just to show that my life does not revolve around Matrix/Pirates/Harry Potter/Shrek/Rush Hour 3/whatever and to prove that I am some cool rebel/nonconformist guy. But I also wasn't THAT impressed by Batman Begins, so surely that's part of it as well. You might be hearing it from Yoggoth, though, who hasn't been too fond of the Spiderman movies and has enjoyed the new Batman films more.
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