Guest Author - Vance Rowe
I just went to see the Dark Knight yesterday afternoon, July 22, 2008, and I highly recommend it for those who have not seen it yet. However, be warned, it is not your father’s Batman. I would not bring any children under the age of fifteen to see it and if you are prone to epileptic seizures with flashing lights like strobes, then I wouldn’t recommend you to see it either.
There is a fight scene in the midst of strobe lights and there are a couple of other scenes with wild flashing lights. Heath Ledger, as you have heard, was outstanding as the Joker and like Jack Nicholson’s Joker, he really stole the show. Eric Roberts has a few appearances in it as a mob boss as does Michael Jai White. He plays a mob boss as well.
When Harvey Dent, played wonderfully by Aaron Eckhart, became Two-Face during the last hour of the movie. His make up was very disturbing as one side of his face was a cross between melted skin and skull. Maggie Gyllenhall reprised Katie Holmes character as Rachel Dawes and she is Dent’s love interest in the movie and the former love interest of Bruce Wayne. She even bared a striking resemblance to Katie Holmes in this movie as Rachel Dawes, in my opinion anyway. The special effects are very good and there are a lot of explosions and one scene where the Joker was blowing a building up and it only worked partially. He sighed and pounded on the remote detonator and the building blew up as it was supposed to.
Morgan Freeman reprises his role as Lucius Fox, Bruce Wayne’s Research and Development man at Wayne Industries and makes “some more wonderful toys” for Batman. The Batman is a bit more psychotic during some scenes than normal, especially when the Joker is incarcerated. The Joker has a few one liners that he rips off quick when he is set up with them and does it without laughing or smiling. He tells a couple of people that he is about to kill, how he got the scars on his mouth to make it look like a never ending smile. One story is about a drunken and abusive father that did it with a knife when he was a little boy and another story he told someone is that his wife became disfigured so he disfigured himself out of love for her and she thought he was hideous and never wanted to see him again. They never really said how it happened. One fact they got wrong was calling Jim Gordon's wife, Barbara, when Barbara Gordon was his daughter and she was "Bat Girl" in the original series.
The movie is approximately two hours and forty minutes long, give or take but the time goes fast and you don’t really realize how long it is. It definitely is a good two and a half hours in any event and I recommend you go see it while it is in the theater so you can get the full effect of the surround sound for certain scenes. The ending left people guessing if there was going to be another Batman movie. They really didn’t leave it open for another like they did in “Batman Begins” when Batman and Gordon looked at a Joker playing card in the end. I will buy this movie when it comes out on DVD and I give it four out of five handcuffs and any Batman fan will certainly not be disappointed if they see it.
