Better than DARK KNIGHT?? Doubtful, but since Zack Synder (300) is directing, it's going to be as good an adaptation that Watchmen could be given the time restrictions of converting Alan Moore's huge story to film. Really, DK is a hard one to beat and set a new standard for the genre, but I am really stoked to see WATCHMEN!

Really? You liked the Dark Knight? I thought Ledger's take on Joker was interesting, but otherwise not a fan.

Rich Johnston posted this in Lying in the Gutters last week:

Brendon Connelly, good friend of the column and founder of Film Ick disagrees with the entire world and didn’t like “The Dark Knight." He tells us why. Nervous souls should look away now;

I’m not really in the mood for writing film reviews at the moment, and this one didn’t even get started until today, the day of publication, yet, simply put, I felt that I really should write it. You see, not only did I find The Dark Knight to fall somewhat short of its hyped up reputation, I recognized it for what it truly was -- an honest to goodness piece of trash. Junk. Bilge. Garbage. Drivel. Hogwash. Indeed, it’s not entirely unlike Batman Begins, just even more over-extended.

This is probably going to be read as a kill piece, so l might as well just go for it and make with the knife wounds in quick succession. Here is a heap of bullet points, each of them a serious fault in this godforsaken mess of a film -- but even in total only serving as an introduction to my criticisms. As I said, I don’t want to spend all day on this, I just think there needs to be some sense spoken about this ridiculous film. I’ll keep each flavour criticism to a single example.

* The dialogue is excruciating, pretty much top to bottom. For one thing, it is laden with countless slabs of pointless exposition -- for example: a shot of a mobile phone inside a man’s skin is effectively titled by the line “It’s a mobile phone". And it keeps happening. This film spells out so many of it’s images it often feels more like an episode of Dick Barton than, say, a good Batman film (you know -- like the one from the 60s, or the two Burton made).

* Great wedges of this dialogue are heaped into tiresome “refresher scenes" -- for example, the press conference -- in which the would-be subtext is spelled out for us, effectively rendered text. Sub, sure -- but not subtext. Just sub-par.

* And the clichés in the dialogue and delivery were sometimes beyond insulting -- listen to the entire bank robbery sequence for a microcosm of how tin eared the Nolan brothers have proven to be.

* Nolan doesn’t have the first idea how to film cinematic space. The action scenes are jumbled in the extreme and there’s any number of problems in even the dialogue sequences. Watch the interrogation room sequence with Big Ears and the clown -- hideous. Even worse is the dangling Joker scene, in which he’s been flipped the right way up. Thinking for a moment about the processes by which we read and interpret images on the screen, this sequence is so disconcerting for the mind of the viewer, and to no useful end, that I have no idea how or why Nolan and his cronies came up with it.

* The whole IMAX scenes farrago is fuel for a dozen bullet points in itself but, suffice to say, Nolan is not up to the task of composing images in multiple aspect ratios simultaneously. Why this has gone unreported, I have no idea but I’ll kick in. Nolan pretends to have composed images in IMAX that work perfectly for the purpose of the shot needed at that moment -- and then, that a scope-shaped slice can be taken out and that will work just as well. More stupidly still, the image is to be recomposed again for the eventual Blu-Ray release. Masterful image composition is not about point-and-shoot, nor is it about making pretty pictures -- it is about balancing the elements of the frame to create the desired relationships between them and the most effective emotional or psychological effect on the viewer. If you reckon Nolan can do this thrice in a single shot set-up then you’re either incredibly gullible or don’t understand the issue in the slightest.

* And that’s saying nothing of the sideshow gimmick of the IMAX version cutting to a different aspect ratio anyway. Not the choice of a filmmaker looking to immerse his audience in a hermetic and fully dimensional diegesis.

* The plot makes little sense for most of the time, and no sense at all at several junctures. The Joker seems capable of accomplishing incredible feats in incredibly short spaces of time, for one thing -- though I can swing with that, to a degree - but there are any number of holes, Batman leaving a penthouse full of innocents with the Joker and his cronies being one particularly disturbing example.

* The technology is somewhat reminiscent of CSI, from the bullet reconstruction to the city-wide Sonar scanner. And that is, I think, about the harshest damnation I can pour on any scene revolving around scientific principles without evoking Heroes.

* The anti-Chinese drive is head-shakingly pathetic if not outright offensive (the mention of buying American in the courtroom scene pushes it beyond an incidental factor of the Hong Kong gangster plotline).

* This film does not take place in any kind of universe where dressing up as a Bat and putting on a hilariously silly voice makes even a drop of sense (unless as an adolescent power fantasy, which for many viewers I suppose it is). Indeed, much of the film does not belong in the world Nolan seems desperate to ground it in, particularly the biological details of Two Face’s disfigurement. All of this could have seemed at home in a universe that played by these rules -- another lesson to be learnt from the Burton films.

* The “tension inducing" soundtrack is crassly simplistic.

Essentially, what I’m saying is that The Dark Knight is, almost without exception, a series of incredibly bad filmmaking choices strung together over an unbearable running time. About as far from a masterpiece as I’ve seen in the cinemas in a couple of years at least. On the other hand, I think Gary Oldman was incredible and Eckhart, Ledger and just Gyllenhaal fine. I look forward to their next projects -- Ledger’s in particular -- with keen anticipation.

I'm almost scared to say this after reading the rest of the comments but I was bored by The Dark Knight. To me it felt longer than it's running time and I was glad when it was over. It's probably worth mentioning that I haven't watched Batman Begins again. I found them to be 'serious' superhero films so I guess I like my superheroes to have a bit of fun about them.