Friday 18 July 2008

The Dark Knight

Caught the latest Batman flick first day-first show at PVR mulund and with the knowledge that it's a Nolan movie I had expected it to be good. But it was fantastic beyond belief. Let me make it simple - if you're a cinema fan with a slightly refined appetite that does not restrict itself to a particular genre, set of actor(s) or themes, go watch this one without fail! It shall be worth your money-that's my guarantee. For Batman fans I'd say get your ass in that theater as soon as you can.

For me, the movie has three heroes:

1. Heath Ledger as Joker- With due respect to the legendary Jack Nicholson, Ledger takes the cake by far with the last performance of his life. Ledger's Joker is sadistic, psychotic, disturbing and much more complex than Nicholson's. The scene between Joker and Two-face in the hospital in the latter half of the film is one of my favourites.

2. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard for background music - This is one of the best background tracks I have heard in recent times (the other one being that of Philip Glass in Kundun). The violins kept playing in my head hours after the movie while I kept imagining how the experience would have been, if it were not for the music. The music has a constant sense of urgency to it along with a mood of impending chaos, breaking into a crescendo whenever Batman or Joker enters the scene giving it a flavour that is so much more different than the usual drab monotonic scores of most superhero films (That said, the Superman score remains one of my all time favourites :-) ).

3. Christopher Nolan as Director - This guy is the twenty-first century powerhouse packed with the talent of Hitchcock, Kubrick and Spielberg together. He proved himself with Memento and totally arrived with Batman Begins. His Prestige remains one of my favourite movies of all time. But with The Dark Knight, he leaves his contemporaries far behind in skill not only as a director but also as a master story-teller. The over-rated M. Night. Shyamalan does not even come close.
The performances of all the leads are extremely competent and for one thing, it is a direct result of the shaping of their characters by the writers (points to the Nolan brothers once again). Christian Bale as Batman is good (albeit the look of his lips when he tries to get the Batman intonations working is definitely funny), Gary Oldman is restrained and good as Lieutenant James Gordon, Aaron Eckhart is fantastic as Harvey Dent/Twoface and Maggie Gyllenhaal makes for a good Rachel Dawes though I wish Katie Holmes were around. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are at their usual best. Though Heath Ledger outruns all of them by miles by being more than top-notch as Joker.

The film gets what it deserves from the cinematography front. The aerial shots of Gotham city and the action scenes are breath taking. On the flip side, the movie could have been a little shorter but no one's really complaining :-). There's definitely gonna be second viewing from my side sometime next week!

1 comment:

Anirudh Patil said...

just watched it. and although i am not a batman fan, i must say it was brilliant!