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Batman: The Dark Knight review

Batman the Dark Knight gets a score of 85.

Final score: 85

Goodness: 9.5
Degree of difficulty: 9.0

For those of you unfamiliar with my innovative movie rating system, here's how it works:

• First I assign two subscores:

  1. Degree of difficulty
  2. Execution (i.e. goodness)

  These scores range from 1 to 10 and are assigned in tenth of a point intervals.

• The final rating is computed by simply multiplying the two scores together and then rounding down to the nearest whole number.

• The two subscores are always reported along with the final rating.

Degree of difficulty score

Batman is a established property, and so there's a lot to great source material to work with. There's no reason why we should expect that a Batman movie would be bad. In general movies based on comic book franchises should rank among the better movies (assuming you like this sort of thing). I say this because these stories exist in a very rich, fully realized universe with a strong sense of tradition and and well established ethos (not to mention literally decades worth of characters, storylines, locations, etc.)

It doesn't hurt that the original comics are themselves based on classic archetypes and deeply-seated, emotionally and psychologically compelling themes.

Lastly, the level of sophistication of movie-making today means that it's possible to make these types of movies more believable than ever before.

I have to subtract a few points from the degree of difficulty score ( 10 - 3 = 7) in acknowledgement of all of this (which isn't to suggest that I think it's easy). However, the fact is that quite a few of these comic book based movies are pretty bad, and so I have to give back a couple of points for a final score of 9.0.

Goodness score

The movie itself is fantastic, every bit as complex as it needed to be but not unnecessarily so.

There were funny bits but nothing was comical.

It was a little bit excessive, but in the best possible way. Just what should be expected from a movie based on a comic book franchise.

With a runtime of approx 2-1/2 hours the moviemakers have given us a lot to like and as evidence that they've done their job, the it doesn't seem long. Importantly, the movie is consistently good from beginning to end. Too many movies like this unfold as a very slow build toward a climactic ending; a pattern is almost always disappointing. After suffering through 90 minutes of nothing, it's almost impossible to cram 2 hours worth of excitement/action/drama/revelation into 30 minutes in a convincing way.

If you're a fan of science fiction and comic books, or if you've ever liked a story featuring a superhero, and you don't have some grudge against Batman in particular, then you should go see it. You'll like the movie.

Update 2008 0725 3:27p: 1. Patched up the post a little without affecting the rating or the content of the post. 2. Added jump link.