The Dark Knight

POSSIBLE SPOILERS OF THE DARK KNIGHT

So we took our son to The Dark Knight midnight showing. OK, really 12.05 am, but close enough.

This movie is a massive assault on the senses. I loved it. We even saw it at one of the older theaters in our city, so I can't imagine what it would have been like on IMAX.

The Rachel Dawes replacement wasn't a match for Katie Holmes, but everyone else was great. The new girl can act and all, but she looked like she'd lived an incredibly hard life....bags under her eyes, saggy jowls, etc. I know that's really critical, but I had a hard time looking at her and not wishing Miss Katie was still doing the role. Katie Holmes is a bit hard for me to hate, despite her poor taste in men.

Morgan Freeman and Micheal Caine as always are fantastic, and nearly any movie with either of them in it is worth watching just to watch them doing what they do so well.

My real reason for posting about this though is to laud Heath Ledger as Joker. I've read several reviews that pretty much tell Jack Nicholson to sit down and shut up because Heath's portrayal is the new standard by which all future performances will be judged. I thought it was a little much to say this, thinking that perhaps the reviews were due in part to his death earlier this year.

After seeing this movie, I'm convinced they were right. Ledger's performance was a little shy of the mark at the beginning of the movie, but as the character was developed, there was a depth and subtlety, lending themselves to the illusion of a very unstable anarchist. This Joker was scary, not silly.

However, one nitpick I definitely have about this movie is the 'social experiment' of the two boats Joker had rigged to explode. Each had the detonator for the other boat. Joker informed them the first one to push the button would live, and if neither pushed the button, both boats would be destroyed. Social psychology pretty much tells us what would happen in this circumstance. SOMEONE WOULD DIE. There is no way that a boat full of convicts and a boat full of civilians would refuse to kill each other. Even if they were sick of the corruption of Gotham, they would not be THAT noble.

It does make me sad to think that Heath Ledger will never reprise his role as Joker. It's my hope that the franchise will pay him respects by allowing the character to sit out for the next movie, and THEN find someone who can do the role justice Heath Ledger style.