I managed to get a pair of tickets to The Dark Knight premiere screening through a friend who has hookups with a local movie theater. The show was at 12:00 AM Friday morning, and there were quite a lot of people who were crazy like me to go see the Batman Begins sequel. I have been waiting for this movie to come out all summer when I first saw the preview. I’m sure it was announced well before the summer started, but I live under a rock so I’m good like that.

To get a good understanding of the continuation of the film, I watched Batman Begins with a few friends to simply refresh my memory on what had happened. Basically, Batman stopped the League of Shadows, managed to get rid of some dirty cops (although a lot still remain), made friends with the Lieutenant of the police force (then the chief of police) and succeeded in starting to turn Gotham city around for the better. As Bruce Wayne, he returned after a 7 year disappearance (his death warrant had been executed) and managed to regain control of his company, Wayne Enterprises. Finally, his mansion burned down (because of Ra’s al Ghul’s revenge on Bruce) damaging the Batcave as well (the south-east foundations). The movie ends with a new villain, calling himself the Joker, leaves a calling card for theatrical reasons. Batman promises the Lieutenant to look into it and this is where the sequel, The Dark Knight, resumes.

This movie was a lot darker than I had expected, and that’s a good thing. I always saw the Batman movies as dark, gritty films; it really adds a certain atmosphere to the entire series. Gotham City looks darker than ever in The Dark Knight. Throughout the movie, I was amazed as how they managed to pull it all off… I could even go as far as to say the movie was disturbing through certain parts. It was that evil.

Christian Bale yet again returns to give a stellar performance of him as Batman. Fact is, Bale never disappoints, as I’m a huge fan of his films (I love American Psycho; Equilibrium was superb). The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger, is a phenomenal character. Wow is all I can say. It is up to par with Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the Joker in Batman (1989 film by Tim Burton) if not better. Quite a shame we will never see the continuation of Ledger’s performance. A new face in the series, Harvey Dent (played by Aaron Eckhart from Thank You For Smoking fame) was also an amazing character to watch.

The movie definitely lived up to its hype my expections. Actually, it exceeded them. I’m going to watch The Dark Knight again sometime next week.