>> comparing this movie to the godfather? That is simply crazy.
This is correct. The Godfather is a cinematic masterpiece that regular vies for the Greatest Film Ever Made on many film lists. The Dark Knight, while a film that I thoroughly enjoyed, is never going to make it. It's good, yes, and what they did with the Joker was fantastic, but it had some serious shortcomings as has been noted by others.
Can we compare them, though, truly? Well, according to every source of criticism or acclaim, yes. Ever since the Greeks, all entertainment has been split into two essences, Comedy and Drama, and anything within one area has to be comparable to others, else the entirety of the Academy Awards would be nothing but one big epic fail. The Godfather is a quintessential drama and, the Joker's witticisms aside, The Dark Knight falls quite neatly into that same category. In fact, the two have something more in common in that they are, essentially, gangster films.
Anyways, from your statement it is fairly obvious that you agree that this film is not a piece of cinematic legend in the making, though Ledger's performance and its box office performance will keep it remembered.
lets see....how good did the movie do in the movie theaters? If if it was a crappy movie it would of done **** in the theaters so the numbers speak for itself end of point.
The film that previously held the record for most money in one weekend was Spider-Man 3, a film which everybody on the face of the planet agrees was the worst of the trilogy. The Star Wars prequels also made fantabulous amounts of money in the theaters. I think we can pretty safely say that the profitability of a film has very little to do with the quality of a film.
I, like Genia, think the film was too long and too preachy... And it isn't just due to time: I have no problems sitting down and watching 2001 or Solaris (Russian version) or any other number of excellent lengthy films. I simply think that they made one very simple mistake:
They tried to put too much in one film.
Once you had the aftermath of the Choice, that was an excellent place to call it quits and save the final act for the third film. Instead, they wound up rushing almost the entire story of the film: the fall of Harvey Dent. This is, frankly, my biggest complaint: thematically speaking, the entire story of the film was the build up of Harvey Dent as the white knight of Gotham (as if you could miss it, the other characters went out of their way to call him that as often as they could) and then the corruption of that by the Joker. I actually think that this was the reason they had it end the way they did, with Dent's fall turned literal (very nice work by Nolan there).
The problem is, they spend so much time telling us about how great Dent is that we don't really see it. What we
see is Dent butting heads with Gordon repeatedly, Wayne being taken in by some pretty words, and we get a couple very tiny scenes with Dent in the courtroom. Likewise, we see almost nothing of a full blown relationship between Harvey and Rachel (in fact, up until the letter, it seems like she's still meant to fall for Wayne in the future), so his proposal looks rushed and then he goes to pieces over what appeared to be just your standard casual office romance. In fact, I felt that his Fall happened way too fast and based on too little; for a great White Knight, his principles and morals fell apart pretty darn easily.
The thing is, I see so many hints of a well-crafted and well-executed story, something that truly could be marvelous and with lasting critical acclaim, and they skipped over it. They should've spent more time with Dent, should've really endeared him to the audience, make the audience believe in him the same way that Wayne did... And then have the Joker methodically break him down over a series of bits. No "single incident and he goes crazy" but a real series of mind****s. I think it would've been better, for instance, if Dent had been the one to have to make the Choice. Here you had a guy who constantly claimed to make his own choices and fix the odds, and then give him a real Kobayashi Maru incident to cut his teeth against.
That should've been this film. The next film, then, could be the Joker's victory and Dent's vigilantism and Batman having to deal with it all.
'course, if they'd done that, then there'd be huge problems with the next film, for obvious reasons. At least with the current ending, they can put Joker away and not worry about finding someone to fit the role.
Now, this is not to say I didn't enjoy the film, mind you. I thought it was great. But I don't think it's the best thing around... Heck, I'm not even sure it's better than Batman Begins. Yeah, it has a better villain, but I really felt that the titular character was really underused in the second film. Also, as a friend of mine pointed out, Batman really comes across as more of an action flick hero in the second film, while in the first they did an excellent job of having him be a dark terror that snatches his foe from the shadows, striking terror in his enemies.
I will say this, though, the thing I like the most about this film is the standard that it has set. This is the first time that people are looking at a superhero film and saying "Wow, that had some really great acting". With all the hype and the resulting acclaim and profit, the big studios are going to pursue this kind of thing more, and I have a lot of hope for what that means for the future of the genre.
So long as it doesn't mean more monotonous soliloquies.
