Holli Rausch

Best movie of the summer. I didn’t decide that right away, but now it’s decided. Except for one plot hole that wasn’t explained, there is nothing I didn’t like about the movie. And if you think this movie is about Batman, you’re wrong. And you should have gathered that by the lack of Batman in the trailers. It’s all about The Joker. And every plot twist and turn is all about The Joker. And it was amazing.

Only once in this movie did I think, “That isn’t believable” and that’s because it wasn’t explained and for a super hero comic book movie, that’s pretty remarkable. Maybe it’s because Batman isn’t “super” so the things he does are based upon the gadgets that were engineered and so I think, that’s plausible. (I could be fooling myself in this area and lots of the things in this movie could make no sense because after all, I’m no engineer.)

As I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker was phenomenal. I’d say he has a two-part introduction and after his magic trick, all I could think was, “I cannot wait for the rest of this movie to happen”. Luckily, it did. He was super creepy. The licking of his lower lip throughout the movie really added to the creepiness for me. The lack of music in just a few scenes was another major factor in the overall creepiness. Acting aside, the heists The Joker pulls are so insane and intricately planned, you can’t help but be blown away by all the twists and turns. The over two and a half hour movie never once had me hoping for the end of it.

Except for the CG on one character, I didn’t take notice of the visual effects in this movie, which means they did it right. Or, at least I was sucked into the movie enough to not notice and nothing was bad enough to take me out of it. It was good work.

It’s a very dark movie. Things you don’t think would happen (because in most movies they wouldn’t), *do* in fact happen. And the breaking of those “rules” is extremely refreshing.

We saw this movie twice and I still give The Dark Knight a 5 out of 5 stars.