Why so serious?

I'm glad I went to the midnight showing of the Dark Knight, in spite of my reservations.

The movie is phenomenal. The hype that has been leading up to it, believe it or not, is mostly accurate. Sure, the Hollywood machine has it's gears turning and churning to make sure the movie makes tons of money, but this time it deserves it. (Completely the opposite of Madagascar 2, for which the hype wheels are also turning but it is in desperation to milk as much money out of a movie that looks to be an even bigger pile of steaming zoo animal excrement than was the first. Seriously! Every time one of those monkey-lemur-devil animals starts singing "I want to move it, move it," my food tries to move-it-move-it back from my stomach into my mouth.)

I was especially worried that the buzz surrounding how phenomenal Heath Ledger's performance was would prove to be ill-founded. I'm happy to say that I was worrying in vain. While his untimely death does change the way most people are going to view this performance, it does not change the fact that he poured himself so deeply and so strongly into this character that I never once thought I was looking at Heath Ledger playing The Joker. I was watching The Joker. And he was amazing. Were Ledger still alive he would have a very difficult task of ever topping this performance I believe. He was a great actor, but here he has created himself a legend.

The other thought I had about this movie is that it isn't a "Comic Book Movie" or "Superhero Movie," or at least not like any we've had so far. "Iron Man" was a good movie, but if Iron Man hadn't already been an established character from comic book canon, would it have been as good of a movie? Or would it have just been a Rocketeer ripoff? The X-Men movies, particularly the first one, helped show the world that comic book movies can be good...but how good would it have been if the X-Men were newly created characters?

Even if I had never known that such a character as Batman existed, be in in comics, the old movies, the old tv series, whatever.....I honestly think this movies STILL would have rocked my world. It's deeper and more philosophical that any comic book movie I've seen to this point, the themes and ideals would work regardless of the characters. The fact that the movie does not need to be about Batman to make it great is what makes it an even more incredible Batman movie.

The movie is long. Don't drink a lot before you go, because you will not want to miss a minute of this movie. Even the parts that suck compared to the rest of the movie are still better than the best moments of many other movies I've watched.

I may actually see this movie in the theater again. With only one exception, I have never seen a movie in the theater twice, and that exception was Return of the King. And that was only because the second time I got in free.

In other words - Go see this movie as soon as you are able.