The Dark Knight

My recommendation is to watch it on a CD when it becomes available. It was rated PG, but I don't know how, except that violence must not rate as very high on the rating scale.

The Chicago scenes were fun to watch as Chicago stood in for Gotham City. However, if you watch close,
one scene of housing on a mountain side, was actually shot in San Francisco.

Christian Bale did his usual good job as Bruce Wayne but the script made him out as wimpy and indecisive.

Michael Cane did his usual good job as his servant and could have been given more of a role as far as I was concerned.

Morgan Freeman was excellent as the
business manager (CEO, I suppose) and had one really really funny scene with a guy who threated to expose Bruce Wayne and wanted $10 million to keep silent.

And Heath Ledger was, as advertised, a really good Joker. Far far better than Gene Hackman's Lex Luther.

This Joker is the master of chaos and Heath Ledger did an outstanding job of bringing this out and he even
managed to be a very bad dude who could be very funny too.

There is a hysterical scene where the Joker is dressed as a maniac nurse. Absolutely your worst medical nightmare. I might get the CD just to watch that scene again.

The Joker's chaos is also the weakness of this movie. There is simply nothing to hang onto such as, a robbery to prevent, an assassination, to prevent a killing, or to stop some sort of take-over,
for example.

There isn't a plot. The only plot I could detect was the the Joker
wanted to create chaos and make every human being on the planet as unhappy as he is. He did that. Everyone was unhappy or dead at the end of the movie, except the audience who applauded.

So, I am definitely offering you a minority opinion in this review.

However,
I bet not one person in the audience could go home and tell anyone what the movie was about.

Oh, there are the usual subplots:

Unmask the Lone Ranger, er Batman.

Girlfriend, now ex girlfriend in mortal danger.

Gotham City is undergoing massive and unbelievable massive terrorist attacks (blown up hospital, for example),but still hasn't called in the National Guard. We are dying
like flies in Gotham, but we can handle it and the state or national government never seems to even take a peek at the events. The police department is totally corrupt.

Al Capone would have liked this Chicago (Gotham City),but the Valentine Day's massacre wouldn't have rated a scene. The fire rate of Thompson Sub Machine Guns just wouldn't get the job done in a modern movie.

When the movie was over, I had the feeling that nothing had changed for Gotham City except lots and lots of
people were dead by violence. Batman was still alive and so was the movie Joker, if not the actor.

Complaints:

The entire movie is violence in every form that the movie makers could devise. Every gunshot is loud enough shake your body and there are lots of gunshots and just as many
explosions and vehicle collisions.

They use all the cheap tricks of surprise to keep you jumping.
People appearing out of nowhere and there are very large sounds for ordinary events. On one of those, I actually jumped sideways in my seat as a quiet scene suddenly went very very loud.

The camera work was bad. That's my viewpoint. Much of the audience
loved it. Oohs, and aahs abounded and some audience members were actually shouting advice (in the few quiet moments in the film).

The movie would switch from a calm scene, maybe a dinner party, to a violent scene and show extremely close camera angles.

Because of the close camera work, I had zero context for several scenes and couldn't tell the good guys from the bad guys or where the action was happening. It was just more crash bang, bodies and vehicles flying through the air and more explosions than an bad day in 2003 Baghdad. I was pretty bored by the finish line.

Of course, protagonists and antagonists alike, receive severe beatings and continue the action while still talking calmly (when their jaws should have multiple fractures and their brains scrambled) and handing back deadly violence themselves.

Kind of like the coyote always falling over the cliff and jumping right back up. I know it is cartoon, but watching someone get hit in the face umpteen times with heavy blows
and then keep talking calmly is tough to watch.

Batman continues to handle heavy artillery and massive gun attacks with his fists and only get a few scratches. What a guy. The Joker too. He could run through the car smasher machine and come out shooting and talking and laughing in his evil way. Heath Ledger did not overdo the evil laugh bit. He got it just right. A pleasure to watch his work.

The entire movie is extremely noisy in the theater. To do it over again, I'd wait for video and control the sound.

Speaking of that, sometimes the Batman theme music is loud when the main characters are speaking very
softly. I lost a lot of the words and perhaps there was some plot cues that I missed too. I'm sure of it, actually. There was a double cross, I think, by a policeman, that I never did understand.

I think you will want to see the movie, sooner or later, just to keep up on the present condition of Batman(he ends the movie taking the fall for some murders and is
now Chicago's, er Gotham's, most wanted as a killer vigilante)setting up the next movie.

According to today's paper, the movie just broke all previous
opening day records. I believe it.

My local theater was playing
it in multiple rooms and starting new showings every half hour and the parking lot was jammed, I had to park out in East Boomdockia, and the theater itself had people sitting on the floor in long lines, waiting for
the next theater to open. I fortunately, went just early enough to avoid the largest mess of people, but still had to sit next to a lady that took up even more room than me. We agreed before the movie started that we would have to be friends for a couple hours and I spent most of the movie leaning to the left like the Tower of Pizza so that both of us would have breathing room. I'm still walking sideways this morning.

Harrison Ford was doing Indiana Jones in several other rooms,so the movie house was raking in the dough last night.

Oh, this may not happen to you if you decide to attend the theater version, but it happened here. They played nonstop violent and loud previews for a solid half-hour before Batman even started. I could have walked out after the previews only, worn out from the noise and violence.

I came home and watched half of a Tom Baker Elizabeth Slaydon
Doctor Who just to get my mental balance back before bed. For physical balance, I leaned to the right for the whole half hour.

I'm not sure it worked. I looked in the mirror this morning and saw a human pretzel.

YO, I SAW DIS DOPE MOVIE AND I WAS AMAZED! BATMAN BE PIMPIN!