I saw it this afternoon, unfortunately not with John Gallagher, since he had a speech class. I'd love to have had a fellow Brokie with me.
I found that the violence didn't bother me much, because I never got into the story enough to forget it was just a movie. I winced at the more creative stuff, like the pencil moment, but it seemed like a logical thing for the Joker to do in order to establish his cruel persona. Frankly, when he first appeared, I could see why the other crooks didn't take him seriously. He seemed nebbishy and even whiny, and he had this clown outfit on.
Heath was a delightfully creepy and enthusiastic villain, but I couldn't believe the Joker had the chops to get all the stuff organized that he had to do throughout the movie: plan and execute a big bank heist, wire an entire hospital to explode, wire two huge ferries to do the same, as well as a number of crooks and Dent and Rachel, send out any number of teams of hoods to corrupt cops, kidnap people, and assassinate a judge and police commissioner, crash a party in a protected penthouse, arrange gangster summit talks, cadge a nurse outfit and give Dent a therapy session, ambush a police caravan in an endless tunnel with an arsenal of weapons and accomplices at hand and then get caught on purpose, prepare a trap for a helicopter so it crashes onto a city street, set a fire truck ablaze, call in to a TV show, make announcements to the populace---have I missed anything? And all in the space of what seemed to be about 3 days, thanks to the relentless pacing.
I gave up trying to follow the story pretty quickly. Muddy doesn't begin to describe it. I had to take the characters' word for it that Harvey Dent was a big hero, because Aaron Eckhart wasn't given much help by the script or the director to establish the difficulty and challenges of what his job entailed. He seemed rather cocky and flip a lot of the time. Gary Oldman at least had a sense of gravitas and you knew he felt the burden of the job he was driven to do. Maggie Gyllenhaal tried to give Rachel some sort of intelligent presence, but ultimately she was only there as a pawn. The whole love triangle thing didn't work for me, since Dent and Rachel, though already a couple at the beginning, had no chemistry, and the brief scene with Rachel and Bruce was dead in the water. I agree with the others that the choice of the actor who played the Mayor was mystifying. I guess I have to remember that it's a movie based on a comic book, and depth of characterization is not a big priority.
I enjoyed the thumping rhythm of the score, especially in IMAX, since you feel it physically, and there was plenty of it. But it covered up a lot of the dialogue, especially at the end when the platitudes were coming thick and fast. I caught some sort of stuff about Batman having to be hunted because he wasn't a hero, but he was a protector or something. Whatever.
It's a good thing Christian Bale is hot, because he wasn't able to give much more to Batman than a glowering intensity and some sort of Darth Vadery delivery. As Bruce Wayne, he was okay, but if you compare him to, say, Daniel Craig in the Bond movies, you realize that his inner life was not communicated very well. The shots of him brooding on top of buildings and soaring among them were absolutely gorgeous, though. Michael Caine (who had the best lines in the film along with Heath) and Morgan Freeman didn't disappoint, but their roles were hardly a stretch. Did anyone else see Cillian Murphy's (The Scarecrow) cameo at the beginning? I only just realized the guy with bag on his head must have been him.
I'm sure if I go back to see the movie again that it will make more sense, but really I don't think that's the point. I'm not the target audience by a longshot, and that audience seems just fine with it. I'm really glad I saw it, because Heath was just the greatest, and I kept wanting to hug him, streaked makeup, greasy hair and all. I loved when, after the semi flipped over (wow!) and Batman was on the ground, he just jumped on him and did this crazy whoo-hooing flipout thing. And as the nurse trying for that last pesky button on the phone that made everything blow up, then walking off like some dotty drag queen, he was just hilarious. Another brilliant moment was when he realized that the people on the ferries had opted not to blow each other up; he had this dawning sense of somehow having misjudged them, and was kind of awed and saddened by it. I was sorry that they left him hanging at the end; I felt he deserved to be seen one last time, whiling away the time in solitary or something, planning his next quirky, marvelous move.
