how about we don't camp it up
Jul. 25th, 2008 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jencatOh my god. Dark Knight. Still reeling from it, and to think I'd pretty much decided I wasn't going to enjoy it...
That was intense. And traumatic. Relentless, remorseless.. it's halfway to being very hard to watch, if only because they keep throwing the action and ethics and characters at you with no let up, just wave on wave of cool stuff and trauma.
Christian Bale was somehow much more sympathetic this time around (the spoiled brat thing last time got annoying), even with the whole assault charge thing... like everyone else (except Maggie G) he totally disappears into the character. And he's actually quite adorable, this time...
...Which made what little character arc Rachel got even harder to accept, sadly. They keep miscasting this role-- much as I love Maggie G, she does just play variations of the same character over and again. Her voice, and her face, are just too distinctive to do anything too different. So we got a less bland Rachel this time around, but still not someone they can go anywhere with. Honestly, for all the stuff she got to do before she met a messy end, they may as well have had Katie Holmes back...! I'm thankful they didn't, but they really needed to go somewhere different this time. It needed someone more... grown up.
And hell, that letter was just mean, and made her sound like a bitch. Harvey never quite took off as the romantic hero enough to see that she suddenly made that decision. They needed more dialogue with her and Bruce, and her with Harvey, to show these relationships that we kept getting told about. I think I just about figured out Rachel's choice when I was driving home afterwards, enough to feel better about it, but it sure as hell wasn't really clear in the script.
Borrowings from... well, the tagline "welcome to a world without rules" was from the end of The Matrix, iirc. There was a lot of Inside Man in the hostage situations and bank job, and it amused me no end to see them practically re-enact the Hong Kong base jump/glider suit scene from Tomb Raider 2. Except that DK totally rocked it.
And for all the hellish amounts of time and money they spent on getting everything looking perfect, they really messed up with Harvey's burn make up. Ohhh, it looked horrendously real, yup. But if you're going to model it on Imhotep in The Mummy and still have him talking, you'd better have a freakin' good explanation why it would look like that with no supernatural stuff involved. Burns... contract everything. So, no, you don't get to walk around talking perfectly normally when you shouldn't be able to open your jaw properly, and you don't have enough lips left to form words. I kept getting distracted by the thought that he needed some eyedrops for that completely exposed eye...
It looked horrible. And it was classified as a 12A certificate, when the film it reminded me most of was The Bone Collector, which was rated 15... 12 seems way too young for some of the stuff in there. Hell, I thought some of the stuff in Spiderman was a bit much for a 12 certificate, and Dark Knight goes so far beyond that.
Hah. done with the stuff that didn't quite work, and the rest of it was... amazing. Sickeningly funny... I was worried it would be too serious, but some of it was so outrageous that hysterical giggles were the only fitting reaction. Long as all hell, but you still felt like there were things that had been missed out (I wanted to see more of Rachel, really... would have been interested to see when she realised Ramirez had betrayed her).
And Heath Ledger. I didnt like the look of it from the trailers, but he was so unrecognisable, and fantastic... the scene when he's in drag, oh lordy! Total classic. So scary, on such a basic level. And he didn't die at the end, how ironic...
Think a repeat viewing will be in order, if only to get all the plot straight in my head. Man, that was intense.
Note to self, do not go home and try watching the Tim Burton 1989 version. It's like a frikkin' pantomime in comparison.
That was intense. And traumatic. Relentless, remorseless.. it's halfway to being very hard to watch, if only because they keep throwing the action and ethics and characters at you with no let up, just wave on wave of cool stuff and trauma.
Christian Bale was somehow much more sympathetic this time around (the spoiled brat thing last time got annoying), even with the whole assault charge thing... like everyone else (except Maggie G) he totally disappears into the character. And he's actually quite adorable, this time...
...Which made what little character arc Rachel got even harder to accept, sadly. They keep miscasting this role-- much as I love Maggie G, she does just play variations of the same character over and again. Her voice, and her face, are just too distinctive to do anything too different. So we got a less bland Rachel this time around, but still not someone they can go anywhere with. Honestly, for all the stuff she got to do before she met a messy end, they may as well have had Katie Holmes back...! I'm thankful they didn't, but they really needed to go somewhere different this time. It needed someone more... grown up.
And hell, that letter was just mean, and made her sound like a bitch. Harvey never quite took off as the romantic hero enough to see that she suddenly made that decision. They needed more dialogue with her and Bruce, and her with Harvey, to show these relationships that we kept getting told about. I think I just about figured out Rachel's choice when I was driving home afterwards, enough to feel better about it, but it sure as hell wasn't really clear in the script.
Borrowings from... well, the tagline "welcome to a world without rules" was from the end of The Matrix, iirc. There was a lot of Inside Man in the hostage situations and bank job, and it amused me no end to see them practically re-enact the Hong Kong base jump/glider suit scene from Tomb Raider 2. Except that DK totally rocked it.
And for all the hellish amounts of time and money they spent on getting everything looking perfect, they really messed up with Harvey's burn make up. Ohhh, it looked horrendously real, yup. But if you're going to model it on Imhotep in The Mummy and still have him talking, you'd better have a freakin' good explanation why it would look like that with no supernatural stuff involved. Burns... contract everything. So, no, you don't get to walk around talking perfectly normally when you shouldn't be able to open your jaw properly, and you don't have enough lips left to form words. I kept getting distracted by the thought that he needed some eyedrops for that completely exposed eye...
It looked horrible. And it was classified as a 12A certificate, when the film it reminded me most of was The Bone Collector, which was rated 15... 12 seems way too young for some of the stuff in there. Hell, I thought some of the stuff in Spiderman was a bit much for a 12 certificate, and Dark Knight goes so far beyond that.
Hah. done with the stuff that didn't quite work, and the rest of it was... amazing. Sickeningly funny... I was worried it would be too serious, but some of it was so outrageous that hysterical giggles were the only fitting reaction. Long as all hell, but you still felt like there were things that had been missed out (I wanted to see more of Rachel, really... would have been interested to see when she realised Ramirez had betrayed her).
And Heath Ledger. I didnt like the look of it from the trailers, but he was so unrecognisable, and fantastic... the scene when he's in drag, oh lordy! Total classic. So scary, on such a basic level. And he didn't die at the end, how ironic...
Think a repeat viewing will be in order, if only to get all the plot straight in my head. Man, that was intense.
Note to self, do not go home and try watching the Tim Burton 1989 version. It's like a frikkin' pantomime in comparison.
