I'm hard on movies. I love them or hate them usually and I'm known for being one of the most critical of them in my small circles.

It lived up to all my expectations. 8.9/10

I wasn't blown away, but then again I went into it with very extremely high expectations. The movie is awesome and will blow you away if you're not anticipating it, don't get me wrong. I was not let down.

Solid performances from all the actors, fast-paced action, decent plot, no stupid old-school happy Comics Code Authority-ridden-ness, very cool action sequences. The writing for this movie is actually rather incredible, especially for an action movie. There is a significant amount of dialogue and everyone pulls it off rather well.

I got to see it in an IMAX theater. I haven't been to one in a really long time. I thought the experience would be more wrap-around horizontally, but it's actually more vertical. There are some really awesome shots the whole way through that use this format to its fullest, but like Chris Nolan I wish the entire film could've been done in this format.

I waited for three hours in line with Lauren (about 60th in line) to get in with all the other fans who were all about our age. It was fun. The IMAX here in Austin is in a really nice museum and the whole experience was extremely pleasant. I don't recall anyone even getting up to leave the theater once the movie started. Everyone was outrageously quiet the whole way through to the point that I felt like I couldn't move without disturbing the entire theater. Tickets were more significantly more expensive than the regular theaters, but just for the atmosphere and people it might've been worth it.

This part may contain significant spoilers. If you haven't seen the movie don't read these.

Issues:

• Change in the voice inflections/line delivery from the trailers - It doesn't take much effort if you've watched the trailers for this movie about a hundred times. You can easily notice that they've very much altered the way certain lines are delivered. The trailers were extremely well-crafted and I think in 100% of the changes that they used in them they should've followed up with changing them in the movie. I was pretty disappointed hearing the same lines delivered with significantly less intensity to them.
• Too many close-up action shots - this is characteristically 1995-20xx action movies, with some directors in particular being guilty, but it needs to stop. I want to see the action, not a blur! Either fill in the action sequences with a double who can do cool things or just get your actors to do different stuff.
• Two-Face somewhat disappointing - Harvey is ok. Not terrible really. Character development could've gone further. Makeup/CG on Two-Face was a little disappointing.. better than the old Tommy Lee Jones version certainly.
• "Dark" Knight explanation sort of weak - Batman becomes hated and somehow everyone magically believes he did some bad things he never would. Meh. Kind of an afterthought at the end of the movie.
• PG-13 and lack of darkness - This movie was dark and the Joker was scary. I think there are a lot of things that could've been done to make him much more horrifying though.
  The PG-13 rating I understand for marketing and getting the kids to see Batman and all, but really I'd like to see what they would've done with the violence more fully depicted. Joker talks about how evil he is and everyone else does too, but we never really see it in action. Even one cold-hearted, blood-ridden scene would've helped.
• Rather predictable - I'm usually the one, when watching a movie, to think at the end "Wow I didn't see that coming". Not so in this movie. I knew everything that was going to happen the whole way through I think. I know it's based around comics (which all sort of do the same thing and can be rather predictable), but with the amount of artistic differentiation Chris Nolan has pulled one might think it would extend into this realm as well.