Sorry there have been no reviews of recent. I was off backpacking in the Highlands of Virginia (yes, Virginia has highlands) with my father and brother, and then went with the wife to Chicago for her best friend’s 30th birthday. Before all of these fun adventures, the wife and I did manage to check out the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight. I will keep this review brief because everyone has seen this movie, but I do have a couple of points to make.

1) The Dark Knight is the best movie I have seen so far this year, but it is not the revelatory masterpiece that some have proclaimed it to be. It is a very good superhero movie, but does not transcend the genre. I imagine it will end up toward the bottom of my top ten list at year’s end.

2) Heath Ledger is very good. He is exactly what you want out of a supporting actor–you want to see him when he is not on the screen. Part of the reason he is so good is he got the best and most profound dialogue.

3) This movie is exhausting. I am glad it did not end before it did, especially since the second half of the movie is better than the first half of the movie, but this movie is as relentless as a serialized story can be and is about 20 minutes from needing an intermission.

4) Maggie Gyllenhaal is about a 1,000 times better than Katie Holmes in the role of Rachel Dawes, but is still very much wasted. As a general, but not absolute, rule comic book writers do not write women characters well. They lack nuance and depth and tend to be relegated to the love interest role, and that is unfortunately the case in The Dark Knight. This is particularly frustrating because the Nolans are very good writers, and they have to skill to address this classic comic book problem.

5) The reason The Dark Knight does not transcend its genre to become a broad cinematic classic is because it lacks much in the way of layering concepts and ideas. It does not have much new to say about the plight of our society (don’t get me wrong, I am always fine with a subtle to not so subtle critique of the Bush White House, but beyond fiscal greed and the roll of power in corruption, what, at a societal level, is this film dealing with?) and falls back heavily on the metaphor of light and dark and good and evil. These are fine things for a movie to deal with, and The Dark Knight does a good job with them, but it is nothing terribly profound.

6) There are a lot of characters with not a lot to do, including, at times, oddly, Christian Bale as Batman.  

7) The special effects are pretty amazing (I still prefer the visual wonderment of Hellboy II, though)–I wish I had seen this on an IMAX–and I appreciate the role they play in the psychology of Batman, but they tend to be too much the focus of the film. There is a lot of action in The Dark Knight, but not a lot of story.

It is a good movie, and everyone should see it, but I really feel its brilliance has been overstated. Perhaps, we are just starved for good cinema and we elevate accomplished work to the realm of genius in the hope that we can trick ourselves in to believing in what we just saw.

My score…80