Everyone Was Kung Foo Fightin
Just about all the fight scenes with Batman in them were too confusing, dark, and too closely shot. This was one of the only drawbacks of the first film, but seemed to get significantly worse in TDK. Stuff like this works in horror or suspense files like Alien, but for action movies they are crap. It’s not like we don’t know what Batman looks like. We want to see the fighting. We want to get a sense of where things are happening. We want to have a 3D sense of a scene. We don’t want to see close-ups of arms flailing and occasionally blocking punches or bodies tumbling around with lots of hitting sounds. And dark, oh so dark… Yeah, we get it, it’s NIGHT, it’s DARK, and it’s the DARK KNIGHT, but we don’t need to have some of the most enticing visual parts of the movie so obscured that all we can muster is “I’m pretty sure Batman is kicking some ass because, well, I can hear things being smacked around, there’s his blurry head and bat ears and, oh wait, I think I just saw a flash of his bat ninja thingies fly by…”
Filed under: Writing/Direction Tags: fight scenes
Agreed. And we didn’t get a taste of the might of the bad guys? Were they any real bad guys/fighters in the film besides the joker? Batman fought a bunch of card board bad characters without any real opposition. He kicked and bunched, shot a grappling hook into the air and the fight scene was over. Repeat for the next sequence.
Actually, I found the fight scenes in this one to be far more clear and discernible than Batman Begins. They still had the curse of the shakey-cam and quick-cut, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the first one.
But we’ll never get clear Batman fight scenes as long as they’re duding up the actors in heavy rubber bodysuits. At least not clear Batman fight scenes that are particularly interesting to watch.
I watched it last night in IMAX and found that the fight scenes (although dark) could be easily viewed. Maybe your theatre just has poor projection lighting.
Yeah, big improvement from Begins, but the tdk fight scenes aren’t exactly choreographed by Woo Ping. I don’t think directing fight sequences isn’t exactly one of Nolan’s strong points. I think he was more interested in presenting a mood for a fight rather than showcasing the skills or moves. In that sense it works, but I would have liked to see a bit more.
Had the same issue with Bourne Supremacy and a whole bunch of other movies. Shaky cam is the clearly the cool thing to do in hollywood action films recently.
Honestly speaking, I thought they were decent, but Batman did appear slow at times, I remember towards the end he holds this doctors head down for a good 1 and a half seconds before slamming his fist down on it, might not seem like that long, but i’ve always imagined batman to be extremely fast, but I still did like them overall. I thought the best fight scene was the one right before rachel gets thrown out the window, especially when batman slams that guys face into the back of that other guys gun and sets it off(in case your about to bash that for being unrealistic, that happens in real life all the time, the firing pin gets momentum from the impact and slides forward, hitting the primer.)
It was an insult to previous batman films. I prefer the POW and BOOM bubbles to this shit