i finally watched it, and i have never been so disappointed in a film. this was a complete piece of crap. i wish dc could get out from under the binds of warner bros, because they don't know how to make a comic adaptation. i used to get excited when i would read about a possible Green Lantern movie (which have been stuck in the rumor stage for nearly 10 years or more), now i just want to read somewhere that this film will never be made. Sorry to randomly vent, its just that being a long time dc comics fan, i'm totally disgusted by this film. needed to let it out....

wow..you're really wrong. I mean i know it's your opinion so you can't really be wrong, but if there is an area where an opinion can actually be incorrect then you're right there.

I have to somewhat agree...
Keep hearing how great it was, but to me, it was only ok.

right on. and i've expected to be alone on this. it's just that dc based movies are like the equivalent to marvel's 'what if?' garbage.

I liked it... no katie holmes.

Ha ha! Wow, I just watched it this weekend for the first time with a friend who had already seen it. After the movie he was yelling (he drank half my bottle of bourbon that I was planning on nursing over the next week or two!) about how great it was. I just looked at him and shrugged - "It was ok, but the first was better." That really got him going! On and on and on - my wife left the room - about how it was so deep, how Batman was an anti-hero, blah blah blah. I said to him "That was right on the surface of the movie." And it's not revolutionary - many super-heros are vilified by the public/media (Spiderman?).
I'd say this is the 3rd best "comic book" movie behind Batman Begins and Ironman (I found Ironman to be far more enjoyable). But yeah, after what I had heard about the movie I was pretty disappointed.

I 100% agree with you.

Really nothing to add to the above - I wouldn't say it's total crap, but I also had very high expectations and definitely felt let down. Far from what it's hyped up to be.

My expectations are LOW but I'm gonna rent it and give it an open shot soon. Interesting to hear a lot more of "it was only OK" reviews vs the "BEST MOVIE EVAR GARGH!" ones when it hit.

Howard the Duck is the best comic movie ever, btw!

My favorite comic book movies have been V For Vendetta & Sin City. Iron Man was pretty good, and since i don't read marvel anymore, there was nothing to upset me.
super-hero movies just don't translate well in my book.
and the anti-hero thing has been so overdone that it's not even amusing anymore.
take Punisher, for example. One of the best anti-heroes, and we all know how well that translated into film. not only did they f it up once, but they had to go ahead and ruin the character 3 times.
christain bale just doesn't feel like batman to me.
and the whole dirty marilyn manson look of the joker was just stupid.

i thought it was great and even liked the joker performance even with the hype. that said i thought the previous one was better but think so far the two films work nicely as a body of work and am really curious to see where batman's role in society falls in the next film. opinions and assholes...show 'em if you got 'em...BOOM!

The live action special effects and Imax sequences are miraculous.

How they got that 18 Wheeler to flip ass over head in downtown Chicago blows my mind.

That became another part of my friend's rant - that this wasn't a comic book movie, it was a graphic novel and so you can't compare Ironman to it - Ironman is cotton candy and Dark Knight is NY strip (or some such crap). Well, if that's the case Sin City blows Dark Knight outta the water! (Didn't care for V...)
Dark Knight might be a "better" movie than Ironman (whatever that means), but for my money Ironman was more enjoyable.
Yeah, try to lower your expectations - that's why I hate seeing these movies late, expectations ruin it even when I try to set them aside. I thought Pulp Fiction was dumb the first time I saw it because I had heard that it was the second coming of Jesus for so long before I finally watched it.

LOL, I like how some people try to act like they're not total dorks or somehow better if they call them "graphic novels."

hahaha. wow, that sounds like one heated conversation about something as trivial as comic books & movies. but trivial arguments are the best kind! i don't get into that whole "this is a comic book and this is a graphic novel" crap. there all comic books. i mean, i've never been to a comic shop that hasn't sold 'graphic novels.'

I really enjoyed the movie. it's a batman movie. I thought it was a good batman movie. Best movie ever??? nah. but cool for what it was. Heath's Joker was a breath of fresh air--something over the top was a lot of fun to watch.

Spoiler ALERT! (this late?)

I liked Iron Man, but I did't like how it turned out with IM's boss suiting up and going for an all-brawl. I was like WTF?...you know, Iron Man takes the suit OFF sometimes. whoop his ass/shoot him then. why throw away millions of dollars in weapons and damages just to end up in jail even in the event that you did stop Iron Man? I know I know..."because it would make a shit movie--that's why". RDjr made that movie IMO.

I personally didnt watch it as a comicbook movie and I felt more people should have been able to see that with the trailers and promotions. Burton's was "comic-book" enough for me and I wanted something different. Im more than happy how they both have turned out, you really needed to watch it knowing it was a different take on Batman, a dramatic, darker take. Almost all the complaints I heard on radio and elsewhere was that it wasn't a "fun comicbook movie". But I still dont see how people were shocked, I thought it was obvious it wasn't going that direction.

Loved The Dark Knight, saw it twice in the theaters. The good guy loses and the bad guy ends up being right about almost everything.

Iron Man was very paint-by-numbers, it didn't bring anything new to the table but what it did, it did very well. I wouldn't see it again, though.

I never read the original V for Vendetta, liked the movie a lot but I heard that the spirit of the original comic was ruined. Guess it makes sense when you give a couple of Americans the task of making a movie about England. (Brits, did it work when Cuaron did the same thing?)

Sin City bored the hell out of me, but again I never gravitated to the original comic so that's probably why.

I won't bother seeing The Spirit but I think it's ironic that Frank Miller, the guy who has howled for the past 20 years about how Hollywood mangled his work, has no problem doing the same to Will Eisner's creation.

it doesn't have to be all kiddie and fun to be a comic book movie. after reading a few issues of detective comics or batman, you can see how dark the character is. for me, i don't think The Dark Knight was dark enough! Gotham was too clean, to much cliched cheesy dialogue (which i will give the movie credit to the Joker character for not having any, but that's it).

and as for a different take, some characters don't need a different take. i mean, that shit godzilla flick with ferris beuller was a different take, but in the worst direction possible....

silver_lining_man, did you like Batman Begins?

i liked it more. The guy who played Ra's Al Ghul was phenomenal! the scarecrow was pretty descent too. still hated bale's performance though...

and as an added note:
i'm not saying this movie was bad. there was a good chance i would have been disappointed in it. i've been following batman and dc since i was 15, religiously. i've read every issue of Batman, Detective Comics, The Outsiders, and the other bat books (Birds of Prey, Robin, Nightwing) within that time frame. Following the ins and outs of these characters so deeply for so long, no movie can pull off what a character with such depth is. and maybe that's a bad thing. i mean, the joker didn't seem dark enough for me, neither did batman. but i keep forgetting that this is pre-shit i've read. before the murder of jason todd, the paralyzing of barbara gordon, and the other craziness that has gone on and on between these 2 characters. the tension and story is so deep and dark with the continuity of comics, it's hard to see these guys before all that shit went down. does that make sense?

What made you see this one?

I watched "Iron Man" for the first time a few days ago at a bud's home theater, right after "Dark Knight" (his first time for that one.)

We agreed that the real strength of "Iron Man" is Robert Downey Jr. Without the personality he brought to that role, I'm not sure the script etc. would have worked so well as a solid entertainment. That's all that movie aspired to be, really, so it worked. There was no big moral message (I mean, the guy was an arms merchant) and weirdly but somewhat originally, he doesn't even get the girl.

Dark Knight has probably been over-hyped for those just getting around to it now. I've gotta say, having seen it in a theater, on my Mac a few times, and then in a friend's huge home movie theater, scope is everything for the visual impact of that movie. The bigger your viewing screen, the better. The movie got hyped because it is probably the most "serious" of the superhero movies yet. Although the "good and evil in all of us" moral construct may have been a bit overwrought, it mostly worked. I was totally captivated by Heath's scary/creepy method acting, but also really impressed with Gary Oldman (the anti-Heath ... very subtle, no major "indicating," but believable) and also Adam Eckart. To state the obvious, Dark Knight is a much more heavy and serious movie than Iron Man. In my opinion both worked very well at achieving what they aspired to do, which was two completely different things (with the exception of "being entertaining.") And yeah, those physical stunts were amazing.

They're both good films. Surprisingly, two of the best mainstream American movies of 2008.

i try to watch at least 1 movie a day. this one was the only one in the house that i have not seen yet.

I hate how Bale talks as Batman.