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The Dark Knight (2008): Ten Today.


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I bought advance tickets for me and my Dad to see The Dark Knight 24 hours before general release and in IMAX. I can honestly say I was in the minority who was happy when the news broke on Heath Ledger’s casting as the Joker who deservedly won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The film wrongly missed out on Best Picture and Best Director nominations. What a film for the story, performances and direction. We enjoyed The Dark Knight so much we saw it again making it the only film we’ve seen twice at the theatre.

Ten years on, The Dark Knight remains the best comic book movie and one of the best films ever. This lifelong Batman fan was made up by it. I think back to the times posting updates about the movie with Ligerbusa here. One last thing, remember the awesome marketing campaign for The Dark Knight?

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TDK is probably the best Batman movie made, one of the best SuperHero movies, and an all around good movie, even if it does loose a bit at the end.  It's a shame it was followed by the worst "Batman" movie ever made. (Sorry, just can't get past my dissappointment that Nolan made both the best and worst Batman movies back to back, and with everything he got right with TDK he got totally wrong with TDKR)

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It may have been the first midnight early screening I went to (not counting when I worked at a movie theater and had to test prints before opening day.) We saw it at the IMAX in the Franklin Institute, which really isn’t designed for full length feature films. You have to crane your neck up because the screen is a dome that’s almost on the ceiling, and the aspect ratio is very weird and almost like an oval. Anyway, it didn’t deter my enjoyment of the film, and I probably saw it seven or eight times in a theater, which was a first and last for me. 

The third act isn’t great for a variety of reasons, but it doesn’t kill the movie for me. If anything the thing that kind of weighs the movie down in retrospect is Rises (and the Snyder Bat) not delivering on the promise of TDK. 

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The measure of how good this film is, is that you could take all the DC characters out and replace them with normal people and it would still be an excellent story and an excellent film due to its themes of chaos and determinism. You can't say that about most superhero films.

While the 1989 Batman holds a special place in my heart (and remains my favourite set design from any film ever) this is just pure menace and twists and turns and action and my favourite. One of the few times I've been drained when I left the cinema (the other time was Raid 2).

I will never forget the cinema audience's reaction to the disappearing pencil trick as long as I live too ?

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I hardly go to the movies, has always been that way.  But if there was one movie I had to go see on a midnight showing it was this movie.  Unfortunately that didn't happen because I was in Greece at the time.  Which was awesome and I have no complaints about that.  But it did suck so, so bad going to an internet cafe and reading how pretty much everybody I knew went and saw that and they lost their damn minds.  When I got back the movie was out of the theatres and I had to wait for it to come out on Blu Ray.  I tried a couple torrents but it wasn't to my liking so I would stop after the first ten minutes.  I figured as long as I didn't know any major spoilers and stuck with the memes then I'd fine.  Thankfully that worked out and while I hated seeing it after everybody else did it was so, so glorious watching it on Blu Ray.

Funny  thing is that ten years later I'm going back to Greece (in two days!) and I'm kind of glad there's no absolute must-see movies coming up that I'll be bummed missing out on.  I love most of the Marvel movies I've seen and there's many I hold in the highest regard.  But TDK will forever be my all-time favorite superhero movie.  It's the point that even if I say [insert movie here] is my favorite superhero movie it would still be second place to TDK.  I really should see to watch it again at some point.

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I'm at a wierd place with this, as I have the DVD's for Begins and TDK, and want to up them to Blu Ray, and I can probably get the trilogy set cheaper than the individual discs, but my hatred for TDKR is so complete that I know I won't watch it and don't want to waste the space.

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Things I like:

  • This movie.
  • My memories of the midnight screening. 
  • Similar to @CreativeControl, the audience response to the pencil trick. 

Things I don't like:

  • People who misunderstood the appeal of TDK and think we need more superhero movies that are "gritty" or "grounded in reality."
  • Expanded Oscar nomination fields which still don't recognize movies people actually watch.
  • Steven Spielberg's The Post

Things I love:

  • Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which also turns ten this year!
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One thing I noticed about it years later that I found interesting is that Nolan’s technique of VO over montages furthering the narrative actually gets a lot closer to the style of a comic book than most efforts to recreate that feeling in flashier ways (Ang Lee, I’m looking at you.) 

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