5 Reasons The Dark Knight Is Better Than Batman Begins

Batman Begins is good, but The Dark Knight is epic perfection. Now that you’ve read my review, I thought I’d simplify things and break down just exactly what it is that makes The Dark Knight so much better than Christopher Nolan’s first caped crusader effort. 5, spoiler-free reasons:

5. More James Gordon
Commissioner Gordon has always gotten the short end of the stick in every Batman movie. In Batman Begins, Nolan attempted to give him a personality and actually went through the trouble to cast Gary Oldman to play him. But Gordon never really felt as fully formed as he does in The Dark Knight, where he not only gets more screentime, but gets a more complex plotline. It’s great to have more Gordon, especially when he’s played by Gary Oldman.

4. Origin Story Free
Let’s face it, as good as Batman Begins was, the origin story has been done to death. The real fun of Batman isn’t in finding out where he came from but watching him stalking through Gotham City fully formed, going toe to toe with the most psychotic superhero rogues gallery ever assembled. With all the training montages out of the way, The Dark Knight is able to get down to the business of delivering the real Bat.

3. Better Action
Chris Nolan tried, but there’s no getting around some of the uneven action sequences in Batman Begins. The final battle between Christian Bale and Liam Neeson in particular suffers from extreme-shaky cam syndrome. Most of the time, we had no idea what was going on, or even who was winning. The Dark Knight solves all of that by delivering simpler, quicker, more brutal fight sequences. Maybe Nolan still has no business directing the Jet Li film, but who wants him to? He’s rounded out the awkward corners of Batman Begins’ fight scenes and delivered hard hits which are only made even harder by the philosophical underpinnings of his film. Watching Batman stalk through the darkness taking out two-bit thugs with vicious roundhouse punches is now a thing of beauty.

2. Less Bruce Wayne, More Batman
It’s Batman that’s the real person, and Bruce Wayne is the alter-ego. Yet in Batman Begins we spent a lot of time with Batman out of his costume and playing the playboy bit. The Dark Knight gets over that, and focuses more than ever on keeping Bale inside his costume, and growling his way through Gotham’s underworld. Sure we still get plenty of Bruce Wayne, but with his crime-fighting skills now fully formed, it’s Batman, not the playboy son of a billionaire who is the real focus of Nolan’s second film. Hell yeah. Keep him in the cape and I’m a happy man.

1. Better Villains
Batman has always had the best rogues gallery of any superhero character, and The Dark Knight delivers not only his best arch enemy in The Joker, but another of his most interesting baddies. No, I’m not spoiling that for you here. Much as I love Liam Neeson, he just can’t compare to Heath Ledger’s iconic, amazing, mind-bending performance as The Joker. Batman Begins was, as the title suggests, primarily about Batman and his beginnings. Most of the film is spent with Bats stalking boring gangsters and figuring out how to jump from roof to roof. This time, the villains are unleashed, and the coolest bad guys in the comics universe are better than they’ve ever been in any other incarnation. The greatness of Batman has always been tied into his villains are held up as a mirror reflection of who and what he is. The Dark Knight does that in a way Batman Begins simply couldn’t, and that alone makes this a much better film than Batman Begins could ever have hoped to have been.

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Batman 3: Catwoman & The Penguin To Remain Unemployed

The Dark Knight has whipped up such a hype frenzy that we wouldn’t be surprised if it cured the blind and healed the terminally ill.

In fact, people are going so potty over The Dark Knight that they’ve started to pretend that they’ve already seen it just so they can move onto speculation over Batman 3. So we may as well do the same. It’s not like we’ve got anything better to do.

Batman screenwriters David Goyer and Jonah Nolan have responded to claims that the baddies in Batman 3 will be Catwoman and The Penguin by saying that the baddies in Batman 3 definitely won’t be Catwoman and The Penguin. They’ve got a whole raft of other villains to chose from, so why pick the two most obvious? Especially when nobody’s put Lola Lasagne in a Batman movie yet.

Believe what you read and you’ll hear that The Dark Knight is as good as The Godfather II, that The Dark Knight is so profound that your life will be changed forever by two and a half hours of watching a man in a silly rubber costume riding a bike, and that Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker is so perfect that all Oscars past present and future should be posthumously given to Heath, melted down and made into a single giant Oscar that does the dance from 10 Things I Hate About You every hour on the hour.

Is The Dark Knight that good? Buggered if we know, but we’ve been suckered in by the hype as much as anyone else. So, to try and combat our feelings of market-manipulated vulnerability, let’s try and take control by starting up a bunch of hype about Batman 3.

Christian Bale is already keen to make another Batman movie and, so long as Christopher Nolan decides that he wants to, it’s pretty much a done deal already. Which begs the question - which of Batman’s villains will feature in Batman 3?

Obviously the two main choices are The Penguin and Catwoman. They’re just as iconic as The Joker and they’ve as yet been ignored by the Nolan Batman series. However, we have our reservations.

For example, The Penguin is usually seen as a comedy character, and Christopher Nolan would rather cut his balls off than have a moment of light relief in one of his Batman films. And as for Catwoman… given what Nolan has done to The Joker, we’re not sure that we’re ready to have our life-long Catwoman fetish ruined by a scar-covered mess with matted hair and a freaky make-up job.

Luckily, Batman writers David Goyer and Jonah Nolan agree with us, although their reasoning has slightly less to do with the preservation of a slightly unnatural sexual fantasy than ours. Totalfilm reports:

“In the first movie we use Ra’s Al Ghul and The Scarecrow, who had not been in the movies before, and had not been in the sixties TV show before. And there are dozens if not hundreds of other characters that fit that bill. Everyone says its gotta be The Penguin or Catwoman… well I completely disagree.”

Of course, there are hundreds of various Batman villains that could be used in Batman 3, so we’ll just have to sit and wait to see which ones get used.

Needless to say, we’ll never be happy until Schwarzenegger reprises his role as Mr Freeze, because if there’s one thing that Christopher Nolan is shit at, it’s the ice-based pun.

What would you rather have - a critically-acclaimed immersive crime drama or a great big European guy painted blue shouting things like “You’re not sending me to the cooler!”? Mr Freeze wins every time. It’s not even a contest.

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Bonjour! Jolie-Pitt Twins Are the Talk of Nice

Just hours after he cut the umbilical cords of his newborn twins, Brad Pitt welcomed the mayor of Nice and told him, "I'm the happiest father ever."

In fact, the proud papa kept repeating the phrase over and over again, Mayor Christian Estrosi – who visited Pitt and Angelina Jolie in their hospital room – told the local newspaper Nice-Matin.

The twins, Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, were born Saturday and the mayor came by the next day to sign their birth certificates.

According to the paper, the babies spent Saturday night in Jolie's room and she took care of them by herself.

The actress's obstetrician, Dr. Michel Sussmann, also said that Knox and Vivienne – who weighed in at 5.03 and 5 lbs., respectively – are in excellent health, but they do need to gain some weight. He told Nice-Matin that Jolie may remain at the hospital another six or seven days while the newborns grow.

While the duration of Jolie's hospital stay remains to be seen, Mayor Estrosi added that Pitt and Jolie have great affection for Nice and the Fondation Lenval hospital, which overlooks the Mediterranean.

"[Brad] told me we chose one of the best hospitals in the world, one of the best doctors, one of the best medical teams," he told the paper. "And also the most beautiful bay in the world."

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