I will now attempt to manage a non-spoilery review of
The Dark Knight. In which I not only spoil nothing but that I neither give my opinion on the movie or anything in the movie or the people involved with the movie. No, I absolutely promise. Even
ivy03 can't fault this for spoilers. And if she can, I think I give up because in order not to spoil, I'm not even talking about the movie at all.
Here it is. No spoilers. At all. My thoughts:
The Dark Knight played out more or less exactly like what I had in my head for a fanfic that I started and never finished. Almost. This is very weird to me, seeing almost what I pictured happening in my story happen on the screen.
That is all.
I look forward to seeing it again with some folk. More, I look forward to seeing the trailer for
Watchmen (I guess they dropped the "The") again because of a minor argument I had with
bigscary about whether or not the trailer is indicative of the film's adherence to the graphic novel or else is proof that the film completely trashed the most fabulous story ever in favor of looks. Seeing
The Dark Knight again might help me make sense of it. I think this is also true of seeing the
Watchmen trailer again on the big screen.
Because a trailer is
not the movie. (Funnily enough, nowhere more emphatically have I learned that lesson than in the case of
300, which was done by the same people who are doing
Watchmen.) It might have something to say
about the movie, but I feel trailers more tell a story about the
audience and its expectation than about the film. We see a trailer for a "superhero movie," and we have certain expectations. (One liners! CGI! Romance! Explosions!) Certain films which have broken the mold (
Iron Man, in its way; Nolan's
Batman films) still present trailers that, more or less, sell movies as they've always been. Yet
Iron Man skirted enough hairy issues at large in our world today to put a bit of tarnish on the fanboy polish of the flying armor.
The Dark Knight is...well, impossible to describe what it has done.
So what happens when you
start with a source material that was already subverting the superhero before screenwriters worked it into a movie? Does the trailer say what it seems to say or does it say more? How close are you paying attention? I will be watching it
very closely.