I think the film has more an odd melange of nihilism and sentimentality, but of the manipulative, fascist sort. The puns in the chase sequence -- "I didn't sign up for this!!!" -- are manifestly stupid and awful (if George Lucas ever wrote dialogue that bad, there'd be no end to the mockery and complaining). The plot logic of the film is strangulated. The film is aesthetically ugly and looks persistently grubby or overly bright and present-day. There's a sinister, "Saw"-like tone to the violence and an adolescent sense of hopelessness and doom. Yet the violence is awkwardly sanitised or glorified in a macabre way, there's pretty much zero swearing, and some developments are so contrived as to elicit a false sense of grimness or vain heroism. In terms of romance and sexual dynamics, the film is also off-kilter and austere. Nolan is only interested in criminal procedure and psychodrama shenanigans that largely are devoid of the erotic and the bizarre. There's an arthouse polish to the film, but virtually everything in it is either glossy (all surface, no feeling) or kludgy and inane. The world is both a vibrant and a shitty, squalid place, but "The Dark Knight" doesn't capture either aspect very well. Nolan forever pushes a diseased bill of goods. It was painful watching this hubristic turd in the cinema.
I'm going to sit with this for a while and let myself digest it before responding. Lots to think about.
LOL, it's okay. Just getting some thoughts off my chest. Every time I've spoken out about Nolan or his films in the past, the Internet has found a way to erase my comments. The whole Nolan lovefest that cyberspace used to engage in (maybe not so much recently?) is actually a tad creepy. But I freely acknowledge that his films have plenty of fans, and you're hardly the only one on this message board. To be honest, even here, I seem to be the odd one out on this matter. Nevertheless, some prequel fans do seem to share my view. Although it's a tad facile, there used to exist this piquant comparison between TDK and ROTS, written by prequel fan
Jürgen Fauth:
(Unfortunately, the original page has been pulled, and the images, which used to clearly delineate the text and steer the eye, no longer work in the archive link.).
web.archive.org/web/20080807035443/http://worldfilm.about.com/od/christophernolan/tp/darknightvssith.htmI do think it's important to stand up against groupthink. TDK/Nolan fans went on a savage attack against the aforementioned Armond White when he had the audacity to trash the film and imply people weren't viewing it with enough of a critical eye. He wasn't the only person threatened for not being enamoured of the film. So was the author of the piece above:
web.archive.org/web/20080805095920/http://www.filmbrain.com/filmbrain/2008/07/hell-hath-no-fu.htmlFrom the comment section underneath that article, a couple of early cogent remarks zero in on the disturbing trend -- a trend that was already well in evidence by the end of July, a mere two weeks after "The Dark Knight" had come out:
Keith Uhlich's review can still be found online here:
www.slantmagazine.com/film/trickster-heaven-two-faced-hell-the-dark-knight/An archived copy, snapshotted from its original location, can be accessed here:
web.archive.org/web/20080828042445/http://www.thehousenextdooronline.com/2008/07/trickster-heaven-two-faced-hell-dark.htmlThere are newer archival links (that's the oldest/earliest), but what's interesting is, even there, with the review not long posted, many of the comments are already vitriolic and hateful. The extent of the backlash and its uncouth tone is even noted by other commenters. This ensuing selection of comments, in all the various quote boxes below, is merely handpicked from the first 200 comments accessible via the above link. Many more obviously stacked up beyond those first 200. Here, then, is a sub-set of those first 200:
(I've truncated a few comments and indicated as such with the EDITED tag).
As for those negative comments? There's rather a lot of them. Some are at least considered and reasonable, but others are pathetically vicious and inane -- although, admittedly, most of the worst ones look to be the work of the same diseased simpleton:
There's also the threatening way this one ends:
An overwhelming facet of the negative comments is the sheer number of them castigating the author for his eloquence -- as if being reasonably accomplished at expressing oneself is, itself, overbearing or ridiculous in some way:
Finally, a few people come to the author's defence, reminding everyone that a critic is meant to express a unique opinion, and not just rubber-stamp whatever big-budget studio offering comes down the pike. A couple of people also call out the dangerous and absurd one-sidedness of certain topics on the Internet, with the latter commenting on how that phenomenon had already grown more problematic in the preceding ten years (although consider: this was the year 2008, and we're into even crazier territory now):
Last but not least, I love how this one ends:
It's funny, really... We've seen all of this, but in
exact reverse, with the prequels. In the case of the prequels, anyone speaking positively about them back then was frequently met with the same rancour and spite, the same accusations of being pretentious and lacking any sense of objectivity, the same unblinking slander and defamation.
I'm not trying to call anyone's opinion of Nolan's films wrong. You are, of course, a thoughtful and articulate person,
smittysgelato -- if anyone has a decent, readable opinion on genre film, it's you. I present all of this for posterity's sake: to keep the playing field even and to make sure people remember what the Internet was like back then.
The idea that ill words were never spoken (nor frequently spoken, at that) toward people with minority opinions (or perceived minority opinions) on tentpole movies like the Star Wars prequels and Nolan's Batman films is flat-out fallacious. They were. All the time. And when, today, I see people complaining about "Nolan fanboys" online (taken as strongly or as loosely as you like), it's much of the outlined behaviour, shown above, that I think back to. Whether hardcore fans of the man and his output or not, they were incredibly rude and obnoxious, more times than not, whenever someone dissented from the oppressive lovefest, as well as the constant comparisons to Stanley Kubrick and calls for his films to be showered with Academy Awards.
Indeed, the closure of the IMDb boards, and the scuttling of all comments on Rotten Tomatoes, can probably be traced back to the backlash to critics after the release of "The Dark Knight" and "The Dark Knight Rises". The critic Marshall Fine triggered an immense backlash when his negative review of the latter appeared on Rotten Tomatoes in 2012:
www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2012/07/dark-knight-fans-are-not-amused-critics-negative-review/325839/www.indiewire.com/2012/07/dark-knight-rises-critic-receives-death-threats-129612/It got very ugly out there.
"The Dark Knight" message board on IMDb was one of several boards on the platform that even became swept up in a bizarre firewall of trolling:
forumwithnoname.fandom.com/wiki/The_IMDb_Troll_WarsIts descent into complete anarchy is recalled here, too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/g6c25p/who_remembers_the_imdb_message_boards/
I still have personally archived copies of the TDK board on IMDb where almost every single topic was completely bizarre, with nothing to do with the movie, for several years. It was like Nolan fanboys blitzed the board on purpose, to make open discussion impossible, and thus to eliminate criticism -- an aggressive form of censorship.
IMDb even posted a warning at the top of the page, but it was totally ineffectual. The wiki "Troll Wars" link is also inaccurate. The TDK board was not just mired in trolling around 2008, the year of the film's release. It carried on well into 2011. My archive copies show this to be the case. Luckily, there are also some online archives.
Here's how the TDK board looked in August 2010 -- one or two topics appear to mildly pertain to the film, but they are outnumbered by completely tangential ones:
web.archive.org/web/20100804223854/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/board/Here it is again in November 2010 -- not a single topic in the list appears to have anything to do with Christopher Nolan, the character of Batman, or the film:
web.archive.org/web/20101104072757/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/board/On into June 2011 -- some topics are back to discussing the film, or addressing TDK fans, but most are still entirely off-topic:
web.archive.org/web/20110626002055/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/board/(Unfortunately, that is the only snapshot the Wayback Machine has for the entire year).
In my own snapshots from this period, I have a bigger list of topics in the index (because I had an account on IMDb and you could increase the number of topics displayed per page) -- and almost none of them connects to the film itself. Here's the list from a personal snapshot dated May 7th 2011 at 11:42:54 BST:
Although IMDB earned a reputation for being overrun with trolling, most threads on most boards were usually on-topic. Why the TDK board was struck down in this way, and for such an extended period of time, remains a mystery. But it sadly fits with the spectre of seediness surrounding the film and much of the online discourse around it back then. After all, what is more effective than calling people jerks or threatening to kill them for a negative opinion? It might just be using tactics that make
any kind of discussion impossible, erasing the worry of difficult or dissenting commentary and the prospect of facing a weakened consensus altogether. It's quite the microcosm, actually, for how our societies function (or, as it were, dysfunction), especially where the media is concerned.
In that way, Nolan's "Dark Knight Trilogy" is more the inverse image of the Prequel Trilogy. One showered with praise and all critics swiftly denounced, and almost all negative commentary erased through blunt-force trolling methods; the other, the focus of a non-stop hate campaign, so vicious and sustained that at least one prequel actor (Ahmed Best) later admits to almost taking his own life; while George Lucas sells Star Wars to Disney and then Disney pussyfoot around the haters, blatantly pandering to the rabid hordes, barely even able to say a word in the prequels' defence; and in Lucas' own words, not particularly keen on having even the series creator around. We definitely live in a surreal universe.
Try reviewing some gay porn, I'm sure you'll give it 5 stars!
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I knew Ingram's brain would explode 
