Hot Take: The Dark Knight feels like Oscar Bait with Batman
I rewatched the Dark knight a few weeks ago, and I have to say, I don't think I like it very much. No shade if you like the movie but to me it just felt like a mess.
For starters, the pacing felt really bad. I'm no expert on making movies, so I might be talking out of my caboose but the pacing felt so rushed and dragged at the same time. There were so many plot points that the movie was constantly explaining to you that it started to give me a headache trying to follow everything. My sister straight up didn't understand what was happening (but she was on her phone playing some match 3 King game so that's her fault lol). I feel like a lot of the plot could have been trimmed, for example, why did Batman go to China? This was so unnecessary and uninteresting, this movie is quoted so much with so many iconic lines and scenes but does anyone ever think about the first arc of this movie? They could have just replaced the Chinese businessman guy with some random corrupt Gotham salesman who gets arrested instantly and the movie would have been exactly the same. There was just so much crap they shoved into this movie that it just felt bloated. There were so many different stories and themes they wanted to shove in here, that they had to make most of the dialogue just exposition.
I'd say once the Joker gets arrested the movie picks up a lot and I started liking it a lot more. While the movie up until then felt really unfocused and dull. The Joker interrogation scene really turned it around. This scene is a masterpiece, it does such a good job at pushing the plot forward while also being fun and tense to watch. Unlike the scenes of Commissioner Gordon and Harvey Dent talking in an office about how they're going to fix Gotham which plagued the first act of the movie. From that point on the movie felt way more tight and focused and I started to understand why The movie is so loved way more. I still wasn't a huge fan of the Two-Face stuff and wish it was focused more on the Joker, but a lot of people seem to love Two-Face in this movie so I'll let it slide.
Another thing I didn't like about the second half of the movie was how they kept beating over your head what the theme of the movie was. Like I get it, "some people want to watch the world burn, but LOOK there are good people, look at Harvey Dent, isn't he so perfect, I just love Harvey Dent, I want to orally pleasure Harvey Dent" they really liked Harvey Dent in that movie. Also, when Batman was on the roof with Joker and the boats didn't explode, and he just looks at him and says "You see, people are good" I kind of rolled my eyes a bit. Not everything needs to be said, I think if Batman just smiled at him with one of those jerk off smiles he does rarely that would have been a lot more effective in my opinion. Because I just hate it when themes are explained out loud to me. I love thinking about movies and coming to my own conclusions. But it felt like everything was explained out loud so the braindead Oscar people would understand and give The movie a reward.
And that was another thing I didn't like, the dialogue felt really off. Nobody talked like real people they were either spewing expositio, making quips, or trying as hard as they could to get into a quote book and it just felt really off. You can tell Christopher Nolan really wanted this to feel like a deep intellectual film that just so happened to have Batman, but it just felt kind of tryhardy. I got nothing against cool quotes and monologues, but only when they're done sparingly. I really liked the Jungle speech by Alfred, I especially liked how he doesn't tell Bruce how they found the guy until closer to the end of the movie, it made it more impactful. If that was one of the only quotables from the movie I would have liked it a lot more, but it wasn't. Harvey Dent, Batman, Rachel, they were all constantly making deep quotes about how mad this world is or how hard it is to lose someone and it just got annoying.
Every character felt the same, especially Harvey Dent, I did not like Harvey Dent at all, and believe it or not I really like the character of two face, but he just felt so boring in this movie. He had no personality outside of "noble politician who is now mourning," what made no sense is how he started doing the coin flip to decide people's fates BEFORE he became two face and Rachel exploded. That made no sense to me and it felt way less impactful. It makes way more sense for him to start doing chance afterwards as there was literally a 50/50 chance if him or Rachel would have been saved. It could have helped emphasize how him being the one that was saved broke him. I think I just don't like the Noble characters with no personality. I've never liked Knight or Paladin characters because they all feel the same, and that's kind of how Harvey Dent feels in this movie. I know the whole point is about how he snapped and how there's no truly good men, but it just felt out of character, especially with how he started killing people at chance before he became Two Face, he snapped two early and it felt unnatural. I also thought the acting felt really cardboard, but I saw someone else say that the guy who played Harvey Dent was a perfect comic book character performance, so maybe that's a hot take that I didn't like the acting.
Now with that being said, I think the Joker is amazing, and singlehandedly carries that movie. In a way, every character feeling like a trope with no personality made the Joker stand out so much more. He almost feels like an ironic jab at the rest of the movie. To explain what I mean, in the dinner party when joker breaks in and tries to scare Rachel, he explains that he got his scars because his dad beat him. He gives a generic speech about how he had a rough time growing up so he's crazy now, pretty typical backstory for a movie. However, later in the movie he explains it again, but this time, it wasn't his dad, it was he himself who did it, and he did it because of his annoying wife. The movie never confirms which story is true, personally I don't think either of them are true, but still the fact he changes the story is such a cool detail. I like how both stories feel so generic, like something I would have heard in a million different movies, because that's how every other character feels, they feel like a walking trope I've seen a million different times. So in my opinion, it feels like Joker is mocking them in a way. I doubt that's what was intended, but you can't deny that the Joker brings so much life to the movie. If you remove the character (and ESPECIALLY Heith Ledgers performance) you just get a lifeless generic crime thriller full of pseudo-intellectual try hardy quotes with a theme that gets beat over the top of your head.
Because this movie doesn't feel like a story that Nolan was dying to tell. It felt like he had to make a Batman movie, so he wanted to make the most "intellectual" and "deep" movie where Batman is basically a side character, because this movie does not feel like a Batman movie. You replace batman with any vigilante and I doubt it would feel that different, because this was the Harvey Dent and Joker movie, I barely even talked about Batman because he was one of the least memorable parts of the movie. Joker was hilarious and intense, Commissioner Gordon did a really bad job at suppressing his accent, Harvey Dent pissed me off, Rachel was woman character, but Batman, Batman was just there. I don't dislike Christopher Nolan, I watched Memento fairly recently and loved it, that felt like a cool idea someone had one day and decided to make into a movie, instead of an idea that was made up just so it could be made into a movie. In my opinion, (one that I don't expect anyone to agree with) the Dark Knight just felt like Oscar bait with Batman.