Nearly everyone has been heaping praise upon The Dark Knight, and I’m not going to dispute that. It is a damn fine movie in general, and the best of a string of good and great adaptations from comics that have hit the screen this summer. It had great action, was fast-paced, had a complex story, and fantastic performances from the cast. (Heath Ledger’s joker was excellent, and I’m amused by his “disappearing pencil” trick every time I see it.)
A few people have grumbled about Christian Bale’s “scary growly Batman voice”. Personally, it doesn’t bother me — it makes a certain degree of sense for him to disguise his voice. But I do still enjoy the mockery of it, as in this YouTube video.
I’ve seen the movie several times now, and I do have a couple of grumbles of my own, though. They’re quite minor, I’ll admit — they were just things I noticed after repeated viewing. Since they’re a little spoilery, I’ll put them behind a cut at the end of the post.
In spite of these slight annoyances, I thought the movie was fantastic, as it gives us perhaps the most interesting and realistic vision of a superhero to ever grace the big screen. Here’s hoping they avoid dropping the ball on the third movie, like certain other franchises have *cough*X-Men and Spider-Man*cough*.
So, just a couple of things that bothered me, from the end of the movie.
- The attention paid to Comissioner Gordon’s son in the film seemed unbalanced, since we didn’t even see his daughter’s face or hear her name. I know the focus was supposed to be on the boy, but given his daughter’s well-established role later, it seemed like some really heavy-handed misdirection to so thoroughly avoid the daughter. Even if they never plan to go in that direction, don’t avoid the kid completely.
- When Gordon says that Two-Face has killed five people, including 2 cops, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how that math adds up. He clearly killed the guy cop (Wuertz), but seemed to only knock out the girl cop (Ramirez — was her brother the cop with the shotgun in the car?). He killed Maroni’s driver, which we might assume killed Maroni too, but even if all of these are counted, where is number five?
So, more questions than annoyances, I guess.