{"id":1503,"date":"2008-07-27T19:41:29","date_gmt":"2008-07-28T00:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/?p=1503"},"modified":"2008-09-28T13:39:04","modified_gmt":"2008-09-28T17:39:04","slug":"the-dark-knight-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/2008\/07\/27\/the-dark-knight-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dark Knight&#8211;Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/image\/stars\/4o5.gif\" alt=\"4 Stars\" \/><br \/>\nHow many people remember when <em>Batman<\/em> was a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek TV show about a somewhat pompous &#8220;Caped Crusader&#8221; who battled absurd over-the-top villains? That era seems pretty distant now.<br \/>\n<em><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0468569\/\">The Dark Knight<\/a><\/em> is the latest and darkest in a series of movies in which Batman is a grim, somewhat alienated hero, struggling furiously against a dark world dominated by corruption, inhumanity and madness.<\/p>\n<p>(I don&#8217;t mean to suggest that the lighthearted Batman was the &#8220;real&#8221; Batman who has been lost. The Batman story always had dark elements. Batman, after all, is the guardian of Gotham City, and &#8220;Gotham&#8221; was the name of the English town that was famous in the late Middle Ages for being inhabited solely by lunatics.)<\/p>\n<p>In any case this movie manages to be grimmer than any of its predecessors, and is definitely not for kids.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nThe main reason that I am giving it such a high rating is the performance of the late Heath Ledger as the Joker. I have seen a number of portrayals of The Joker (who is, after all, Batman&#8217;s most popular opponent) but this is the first one that really scared me. Ledger manages to get beyond the usual shtick of laughing maniacally while committing crimes. He creates a character of enormous intelligence and boundless capricious cruelty, a nightmarish being who revels in the destruction of people&#8217;s souls.<\/p>\n<p>If Heath Ledger gets an Oscar for this, it won&#8217;t be a sympathy vote. He earned it.<\/p>\n<p>The other main characters are competently portrayed, though they don&#8217;t rise to the same level. Christian Bale is an annoying smirking Bruce Wayne and a grim, upright Batman. Aaron Eckhart plays the glamorous District Attorney Harvey Dent, a media darling who seems almost too good to be true. Maggie Gyllenhaal looks adorable as the girl that both Batman and Dent are in love with.<\/p>\n<p>Michael Caine gives the normally minor role of Alfred a little extra depth and mystery. Morgan Freeman shines in another secondary role, Bruce Wayne&#8217;s business manager and weapons supplier Lucius Fox, who sometimes seems like the only really sane person in the story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How many people remember when Batman was a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek TV show about a somewhat pompous &#8220;Caped Crusader&#8221; who battled absurd over-the-top villains? That era seems pretty distant now. The&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/2008\/07\/27\/the-dark-knight-movie-review\/\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[181],"class_list":["post-1503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","tag-the-dark-knight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1503"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1681,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503\/revisions\/1681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}