Dark Knight

If you are keeping score at home, Dark Knight is currently ranked ahead of every other movie ever made on the ubiquitous imdb.com.  Your average movie-goer loves this film.  So does your average critic (with the exception of my favorite contrarian, Nick Digilio.) 

Frankly, I think 9.5 out of 10 is too high.  It feels like a hype wave.  "This movie is GREAT because we ALL keep saying its so great." 

I saw the movie and it is a solid 7 or 8.  The story was well written, Heath Ledger is as advertised, some of the themes are provocative and the featuring of Chicago is a big plus for this movie watcher.  I wanted it to be great but for me, it was good, not great.

Here are some of my takeaways:

• "We thought we could be decent men in an indecent time."  That's a great line from Harvey Dent.
• The Joker is a very provocative type of Satan.  His only real motivation is chaos with destruction.  He has no interest in anyone, including it seems, himself.  He simply wants everything to be wrong.
• I love Michael Caine as Alfred and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox.  These two characters provide wisdom and direction to Bruce Wayne that is often truly profound.
• One of the things running through my mind as I watched the film was the similarity between Gotham and the tone of the book of Judges.  In fact, Batman reminds me of the flawed heroes of the Judges.  I want to explore this more to help people appropriate our Judges series this Fall.
• The idea of Batman as the anti-hero who absorbs the anger of the people for the greater good reminds me that all great stories draw from biblical themes of sacrifice and redemption.  I think these grand themes are embedded in us through the image of God and that is why people write such stories.

One final note--this movie is fairly dark and violent.  Kids should not be seeing this movie. 

Comments

[Mo]

Definitely not a movie for kids.