Batman : The Dark Knight Blog

Batman (originally referred to as the Bat-Man and still referred to at times as the Batman) is a fictional comic book superhero co-created by artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger (although only Kane receives official credit)[1] and published by DC Comics. The character made his first appearance in Detective Comics #27 (May 1939). Batman’s secret identity is Bruce Wayne, a wealthy industrialist, playboy, and philanthropist. Witnessing the murder of his parents as a child leads him to train himself to physical and intellectual perfection and don a bat-themed costume in order to fight crime. Batman operates in Gotham City, assisted by various supporting characters including his sidekick Robin and his butler Alfred Pennyworth, and fights an assortment of villains influenced by the characters’ roots in film and pulp magazines. Unlike most superheroes, he does not possess any superpowers; he makes use of intellect, detective skills, science and technology, wealth, physical prowess, and intimidation in his war on crime.

Batman became a popular character soon after his introduction, and eventually gained his own title, Batman. As the decades wore on, differing takes on the character emerged. The late 1960s Batman television series utilized a camp aesthetic associated with the character for years after the show ended. Various creators worked to return the character to his dark roots, culminating in the 1986 miniseries Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, by writer-artist Frank Miller. That and the success of director Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman motion picture helped reignite popular interest in the character. A cultural icon, Batman has been licensed and adapted into a variety of media, from radio to television and film, and appears on a variety of merchandise sold all over the world.

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By Fraidy Reiss • STAFF WRITER • December 27, 2007
JACKSON — Visitors to Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson next year will get to experience the terror of being victimized by the Joker while waiting to be rescued by Batman.

The theme park plans to introduce a new attraction in April: The Dark Knight Coaster, an indoor ride based on Warner Bros. Pictures’ upcoming movie “The Dark Knight,” which features the DC Comics characters Batman and the Joker.

On the coaster, riders will be transformed into citizens of Gotham City, a municipality being tormented by the Joker, according to a news release issued by the park. Riders will speed through six 180-degree turns, climb unseen hills and plunge into pitch darkness as they try to escape danger.

Their only hope of rescue is that Batman will arrive in time to save them.

The coaster will use storytelling, physical movements, video, sound and special effects to help riders experience the danger of Gotham City, according to the release. It will be located in the Movietown section of Six Flags.

The movie “The Dark Knight” is scheduled to open in theaters July 18. In the movie, Batman (Christian Bale) sets out to dismantle the criminal organizations that continue to plague the streets of Gotham City. He, along with Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) must take on a criminal mastermind known as the Joker (Heath Ledger).

Six Flags is on Route 537 in Jackson. It features the 465-foot-high Kingda Ka, which park officials say is the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world; and El Toro, whose 76-degree drop is the steepest of any wooden roller coaster in the world, according to park officials.

More than 1,200 animals live at the park all year round, with most on display to visitors who drive the 4 1/2-mile auto trail through the park’s Wild Safari, officials say.

Next door to Six Flags Great Adventure is Six Flags Hurricane Harbor.

The 45-acre, tropical-theme water park includes a million-gallon wave pool with ocean-size waves, one of the world’s largest adventure rivers and almost 20 speed slides, according to the park’s Web site.

This section shows information about the actual coaster.
Name: Batman The Dark Knight
Company: Bolliger & Mabillard
Type: Floorless Coaster
Location: Six Flags New England, Agawam, MA, USA
Opened: 2002
Max. Height: 118 ft.
Max. Drop: 118 ft.
Max. Speed: 55 mph
Track Length: 2,600 ft.
Inversions: 5
Special Features: Compact Layout Steep lift hillFor more information, call Six Flags Great Adventure at (732) 928-1821.

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Phelim O’Neill
Friday December 21, 2007
The Guardian
If you go to see Will Smith starring in the big-budget adaptation of Richard Matheson’s influential apocalyptic vampire novel, I Am Legend, at an Imax cinema, you’ll see some spectacular scenes - but perhaps not the ones you were expecting. You’ll see an armed robber tear off his mask to reveal an even scarier visage: his whitened cheeks bearing scars cut from the corners of his mouth, with a crude, red smear of lipstick. This terrifying apparition, taking up all of the colossal Imax screen, marks moviegoers’ introduction to the Joker, as played by Heath Ledger.

If you’ve read I Am Legend or seen the previous movie adaptations (The Last Man On Earth and The Omega Man), then you’ll recall that Batman’s nemesis has thus far been conspicuous by his absence. That’s still the case, sadly, but Warners has tagged on to the programme seven minutes of its new Batman movie, The Dark Knight (six minutes being the introduction to the Joker, with the rest made up from snippets of key sequences), way ahead of the movie’s July 2008 opening date.

This experiment marks the convergence of two trends in film marketing. Firstly, the practice of delivering exclusive footage with another film. You may recall the fuss when George Lucas’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace trailer hit cinemas. In the US, for many weeks, you could only view it in theatres playing the Denzel Washington thriller, The Siege. Washington’s pre-9/11 piece of scaremongering had nothing in common with Lucas’s space opera - yet screenings were packed with Star Wars fans who had paid admission simply to catch the two-minute trailer before leaving en masse as the main feature unreeled.

The Phantom Menace trailer leads us to the second of the new marketing schemes. Trailers are traditionally, by and large, as misleading and dishonest as they can legally be: they cut together the best shots of a film without giving anything close to a true representation of what it is about. So now, usually on the internet, it’s becoming common to release a few minutes, often from the movie’s opening, to give the audience a proper taste of what to expect. This has worked exceedingly well for films with impressive opening sequences that seemed almost tailor-made to stand alone and leave viewers wanting more, such as the remake of Dawn of the Dead or Joss Whedon’s feature version of his cancelled TV show Firefly, Serenity. Perhaps that was always the intent.

It was definitely the intent this time: director Christopher Nolan was clearly looking for the big bang of the Imax trailer effect when he made The Dark Knight. Four of the film’s big action scenes were filmed in the format, a first for a blockbuster. The air was sucked out of the room by a collective gasp from those attending the preview in London recently as Gotham city appeared in razor sharp detail on a 20-metre screen.

So what has the Dark Knight footage done for the buzz about its parent film? Apart from anything else, it has silenced any doubts viewers might have had about the controversial casting of Ledger as the Joker. It may not sound particularly vital, but the core fan groups of genre - and particularly comic book-adapted movies - are incredibly vocal on the internet and can be merciless on a perceived casting mistake or thematic alteration from source material long before cameras have even stopped rolling. The effect such criticism has is palpable: the studios have run scared since the demolition job aintitcool.com did on Batman & Robin in 1997. And one happy side effect for Will Smith? It may just give I Am Legend the extra push he needs to survive a box office apocalypse

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By Shawn Adler, with additional reporting by Brian Jacks and Josh Horowitz
‘I thought the Joker was still serving hard time,’ Adam West says playfully of character now being played by Heath Ledger.

The makeup. The walk. The cockeyed posture and bubbling psychosis: For legions of Batman fans across the globe, Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in “The Dark Knight” is no laughing matter. So why are so many people smiling?

“I love it,” “Hellboy” director Guillermo del Toro gushed to MTV News. “Every time I see more of Heath Ledger’s Joker, I like it more. That’s a good sign because if something is going the wrong way, the more you see about it, the less you ingratiate yourself with it.”

Del Toro isn’t alone. Just days after the first extended “Dark Knight” trailer leaked online, fans and critics alike are singing the praises of Ledger’s portrayal, which many are already calling a pitch-perfect dramatization of Batman’s greatest nemesis, the Clown Prince of Crime.

It’s a difficult role for any actor to pull off, say fans, a delicate balancing act that straddles the line between crazy and crazy-scary. That Ledger appears to pull it off so effortlessly is nothing less than a testament to director Chris Nolan’s vision, “Batman: The Animated Series” producer and writer Paul Dini insisted.

“Heath Ledger’s Joker seems perfectly suited to the dark Gotham City created by Christopher Nolan,” Dini asserted. “He seems more street than any other version of the Joker, with his clownish visage recalling hastily applied graffiti paint rather than chemically dyed skin.”

Dini is legendary among Batman aficionados for his work on the Emmy Award-winning “Batman: The Animated Series.” The show’s more famous canonical influences include an adopted redesign of Mr. Freeze (as well as a new back story for the super-villain) and the introduction of the Joker’s demented sidekick, Harley Quinn — but it was his work with the Joker himself that often earned Dini the loudest praise. His version of the character (voiced by Mark Hamill) could turn on a dime, from twisted psychopath to demented prankster — always ready with a laugh or a gag for his enemies.

Dini sees very little of that schizophrenia in Ledger’s performance, a quality that he believes makes the character that much more terrifying.

“His attitude is mordant and sardonic as opposed to manic,” Dini reflected. “No goofy gags or puns for him. This Joker doesn’t split sides … he splits skulls.”

As much of an influence Dini’s noirish vision may have had on the darker themes of Nolan’s Batman universe, no artist, perhaps, has made as big an impact on “Begins” and “Dark Knight” as Jeph Loeb, the legendary comics author of “Batman: The Long Halloween,” a 13-issue limited series that examined the origins of Harvey “Two-Face” Dent and the rise of Batman’s familiar rogues gallery after the fall of crime boss Carmine Falcone. By his own admission, Nolan credited the series as a powerful inspiration for his take on Batman.

The respect and admiration is mutual, Loeb said.

“I saw the trailer and loved it,” he enthused. “I’m as big a fan of Nolan’s and [writer David] Goyer as they are of me! They talked extensively about the influence of my work on both films — so what’s there not to like?!”

In particular, Loeb singled out Ledger’s Joker as particularly terrifying, contrasting it with previous incarnations of the character that might have been too “clowny.”

“I was never a big Nicholson fan,” Loeb said of Jack’s work as the Joker in Tim Burton’s “Batman.” “[Ledger] however feels just about right. I eagerly anticipate more!”

“If any franchise can benefit from being grittier and darker, it’s Batman,” Del Toro added. “With this I find him really scary. I find him really, really edgy and scary.”

With a scarier, grittier Joker on the loose in Gotham, what exactly is a crime-fighter to do?

Find out how the heck he got out in the first place, joked Adam West, best known to a whole generation of fans as TV’s Batman.

“The Joker? Heath Ledger?” the icon playfully questioned. “I thought the Joker was still serving hard time in Gotham State Prison.”

POW! BAM! Ledger’s Joker arrives in all his glory July 18.

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Well here is another 6 minutes The dark knight prologue i’ve find on youtube.
this trilaer is played right before will Smith new movie I Am Legend

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Published by Shawn Adler on Monday, December 17, 2007 at 6:15 pm.
Ever since the first trailer for “The Dark Knight” premiered online late Thursday night, we’ve been pouring over the footage like it was the Zapruder film. And we mean that literally — frame by exhausting, exhilarating, frame (”Back and to the left. Back … and to the left.”)

But whereas that film could only offer hypothetical proof of a (possible) second gunman, “The Dark Knight” trailer offers so much more — concrete evidence that the team behind the greatest comic book movie ever made have topped themselves in realizing its sequel. Front and foremost in their vision (and consequently, in the trailer as well) is Heath Ledger’s Joker. Below, we lifted an image from the trailer of Ledger’s Clown Prince to find out what it tells us about his characterization. After we’re done, remember to head over to our exhaustive analysis of the whole trailer to find out about the rest of the footage.

Check out more analysis and a slew of new pictures here!

For starters, notice how awkwardly the Joker holds the bazooka in the above image, the way his grimace belies the fact that he’s not totally comfortable with a rocket launcher on his shoulders. A small moment, perhaps, but one entirely befitting the iconic joker of Batman canon — whose preferred weapon is a knife (a more gentlemanly tool). He’s out for mayhem and bloodshed, sure, but only as a means to an end of total anarchy — which is why he’ll use any means of destruction available to him. So, OF COURSE, he would be uncomfortable holding a bazooka. Chances are he’s never held one before. But give him the opportunity and, well, the joke’s on you.

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High Resolution Screenshots from The Dark Knight Trailer

Just for you (especially those that can’t play HD video on their machines) we have some wonderful high resolution screenshots from the trailer that was officially released yesterday. I highly recommend looking at the Joker images, they are quite fantastic.

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The Warner Brothers website, thedarkknight.warnerbros.com, has now updated - clicking the large blue logo takes you to a page with download links for high definition formats of the official trailer. They have also kindly provided us with a nice high resolution, official copy of the third teaser poster that we have seen only through blurry camera shots of so far.

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A Taste for the Theatrical, a clue that was revealed via the latest Joker teaser posters, as seen around cinemas, has unveiled what we have all been waiting for. Some of you may have seen this on a cinema screen - big, bold and brilliant, or on a YouTube bootlegged cam shot - small, grainy and mysterious. Today we can all download for ourselves a high resolution trailer of The Dark Knight.

Download The Trailer:

A taste for the theatrical…

Best quality (98.2mb)
High quality (78.1mb)
Med quality (24.6mb)

Watch it on YouTube:

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By Rafe Telsch: 2007-12-16 21:23:11