Can 'The Dark Knight' live up to the hype?
Posted: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 7:00 AM by Paige Newman
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Movies
It’s still two weeks off, but reviews of Christopher Nolan’s Batman sequel are already starting to appear. Rolling Stone reviewer, Peter Travers, was one of the first to be allowed to post an early review. He wrote, “A thunderbolt is about to rip into the blanket of bland we call summer movies. … The haunting and visionary ‘Dark Knight’ soars on the wings of untamed imagination.”
That’s a lot of hyperbole for one movie review. Can you trust it? Web site efilmcritc.com often refers to Travers as a “quote whore.” They wrote, “Everyone knows here at Criticwatch that we named our top whoring award after Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers for writing up more positives than Deepak Chopra at an integer seminar and doing so with enough hyperbolic superlatives to guarantee his less-relevant-than-ever magazine appears in the ads.”
Warner. Bros. |
The late Heath Ledger stars as the Joker in "The Dark Knight."
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But a few other positive reviews have surfaced as well, primarily from fan sites.
RopeofSilcon.com reviewer Brad Bevert wrote, “If we could call this ‘The Godfather’ of comic book movies I wait anxiously for what may/will become the film that caps off the trilogy.” And a
Collider.com critic wrote, “I am here to report ‘The Dark Knight’ is a masterpiece.”
Reading reviews like that, it’s hard not to get a little excited about a movie that almost seems guaranteed to rise above some of this summer’s froth.
And if reading review doesn’t get you excited about the movie, how about Nolan’s recent interview with Wired’s Scott Brown, in which the director talks about how he tried to use as little CGI as possible. After sitting through a preview of “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” which looks like it was created completely in front of a green screen, it’s exciting to hear that Nolan actually used helicopters to shoot star Christian Bale atop the Sears Tower. Director of photography Wally Pfister said, “Here we are with our principal actor standing on the edge of one of the tallest buildings in the world. I think a lot of people will assume that’s CGI.”
But what most excites me about this film is that it will be dark. Yes, it’s rated PG-13, so all the teen boys can go catch it, but Nolan’s Batman is never silly -- he’s as troubled as his evil nemeses. And in this film, he has to confront whether he really wants to fight evil.
Are you ready for an existential dilemma in a summer film? Are you hyped to go? Movietickets.com reports that the film has already pre-sold as many tickets as “Spider-Man 3” did “at the same point in the sales cycle — 21 days from the film’s official release.” But will the grim “Dark Knight” attract families the way “Spider-Man” can? If you have kids, do you plan to let them go see the film? Do they want to? Add to the hype: What have you heard about “The Dark Knight”?
