The Dark Knight (+ Digital Copy and BD Live) (Blu-Ray) (2008)
The best Superhero movie of all time? Quite possibly.
Co-writer/director Christopher Nolan’s vision of Batman is a dark and compelling one. Comic-book movies can notoriously be a bit hit and miss – as the director’s strive to bring a sense of realism into their movie, they compensate by sacrificing plot and/or depth of character.
Not so here. The image of Gotham being a grim, crime-ridden hellhole is as vivid as it can be, and the sense of realism has been superimposed onto real characters that reflect their dark and sober surroundings.
Christian Bale’s Batman is a superlatively flawed hero with human fallibilities – no underpants-on-the-outside cheap gags here. But the biggest kudos, and rightly so, go to Heath Ledger’s Joker. His angst is volcanic, a ridiculous character made real with a performance that exudes evil and malice.
The action scenes are both frantic and hectic, but their notable feature is that they are rarely gratuitous – every scene seems to help the plot along – and its not a short movie, running time is almost 2 ½ hours.
As far as extras go, there are quite a few on this blu-ray disc, although not all of them live up to the high standards of the film itself. Some of the better features include:
The “Movie With Focus Points” is a nice feature where you can pause the movie at certain points and call up information on a particular scene, object or character. You can also watch all the interspersing segments in one sitting if you don’t want to spoil the movie by pausing it every five minutes!
“Gotham Uncovered” is a pretty good insight into the challenges and tribulations that filming a large portion of the movie in IMAX incur. It also gives a fascinating insight into the design of the new batsuit and the new vehicles featured in the movie – for example what a complete nightmare the new Bat-pod was to steer!!!
You also get a “Batman Tech” segment, which concentrates on all the gadgets, and surprisingly shows what they are based on in real life. But by far the most fascinating is the Galleries – check out the huge varieties of the Joker playing cards – intimidating stuff.
There is no yak-trak on the movie itself, and the features, although fascinating, seem a little sparse, which sort of points to an “ultimate edition” becoming available soon. This is a little disappointing, but understandable. The disc is worth buying for the film itself though – it is truly magnificent.
Just wanted to stop by and say thanks. Enjoy reading your stuff.