I know I'm in the minority, but much like the child in The Emperor's New Clothes, I'm willing to speak my mind about what I've seen in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.

Unlike in that story, though, no one else seems to be aware that the Emperor is naked.

I've finally realized that I simply don't connect with Nolan's movies. This isn't a big deal, as I don't connect with Oliver Stone or Robert Zemeckis, either. All three of these men are technically proficient and the craftsmanship of their films is beyond reproach, but not every director makes movies for everyone, and so far, Nolan hasn't been making movies for me.

Again, it's not a big deal. His movies just seem dry and clinical to me, and I never get caught up in the emotion the way he wants his audience to. The characters appear to be created to serve the devices of the plot, rather than the plot growing out of the genuine actions of the characters. As a result, his films become predictable despite a pretense of being surprising and filled with twists: you simply have to find a piece of unmotivated behavior and follow it to its conclusion in order to figure out where the story will lead.

Since I don't get caught up in Nolan's devices or in the emotions he's trying to wrest out of me, it allows me to watch the movie with a more objective eye than I would with other directors, such as Spielberg, Scorcese and Fincher.

My fundamental problem here I that I couldn't find any level on which this film worked for me. It didn't work as a Batman movie, and it really didn't work as a movie in general.

Why it didn't work as a Batman movie

For more than three years now, I've been fighting an uphill battle about whether Nolan's depiction of Batman is true to the comics as so many people think.

I've spent about 25 years of my life as an avid comic reader, and though I haven't been reading them much in recent years, I do have a feel for certain characters. Overall, I'm more a Marvel than a DC guy, but DC has released several seminal stories for their key characters over the years that capture the essence of what those characters are. For me, the best of the Batman stories have been The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, The Long Halloween, and—to a lesser degree—Dark Victory. In the older tales, the run that Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers had in the 70s did a great job of defining the character at that time. I didn't care for The Killing Joke, though it had moments that were of interest to me and which obviously influenced this film.

I won't go into detail about the basic problem I have with Batman-as-armored-shock-trooper instead of the more ninja-like portrayal that the best of the comics depict. Suffice it to say that that, combined with carrying dozens of gadgets created by someone else (remember, Batman is supposed to be a detective/scientist), are enough to make this character not Batman. But it goes beyond that.

In the first film, I had more of a problem with the chicken-shit nature of Wayne and Batman than anything else: he felt like a rich guy who equipped his way into thinking he was prepared to do something he couldn't emotionally handle. Contrast this to Year One, in which Wayne doesn't even dress as Batman until he knows he's got the chops to carry it off. The Dark Knight has matured him a little, so the only things really wrong with the character now have to do with the armor and toys.

I have a couple of problems with the two key support relationships in the films, as well.

While Alfred is properly depicted as having a disdainful attitude toward Bruce's approach to handling the problems of Gotham—which, frankly, he could and should have much more impact on as a captain of industry than he ever could as Batman—the idea that Alfred is answering questions for Bruce and explaining the nature of the Joker to him works against what that relationship is supposed to be in my mind. Alfred is not an enabler: he's supposed to be the guy who keeps Bruce grounded, even if he has to be snarky to do it.

Lucius Fox I've had a problem with from the beginning, and that problem comes to fruition in this film: the Batman is supposed to be a secret. This movie series gives us three people who know the secret, one of whom apparently keeps files directly pertaining to that secret available for a lawyer to stumble across.

Are Lucius and Bruce really that stupid and clumsy?

This leads me to...

Why it didn't work as a movie, period.

One of my problems with Nolan is that the behaviors of his characters always seem to conveniently fit what he wants them to do to make the plot move forward. There's never a sense for me that the story I'm watching is playing out the way it is because the characters are the way they are. Instead, the characters feel like their roles in the way things play out are conceived as an afterthought to how Nolan has decided they will play out.

For example, the lawyer mentioned above.

It was as though Nolan had decided that he needed a threat for the Joker to unleash on Gotham City, and worked his way backwards from there.

The Joker's plan is to get a normal citizen to become homicidal and kill someone innocent in order to save potentially thousands. The Joker needs someone for them to kill. The Joker is also trying to either kill Batman or get him to quit. How about a guy who is about to reveal Batman's secret, spoiling the Joker's fun? Well, to reveal the secret, he has to know the secret. Who could know the secret? A guy that works for Wayne as a lawyer who somehow comes across the plans for the Tumbler among other things.

But this depends on Wayne and Fox being idiots and leaving that stuff in the system where someone can find it.

Contrast this with Wayne figuring out a way to completely hide the Sonar R&D project from Fox: getting something hidden so deep that even Lucius couldn't ferret it out.

Inconsistent character portrayal based on what the movie needs them to do rather than who they are.

Similarly, the entire business with the ferries full of passengers rings false to me: the Joker comes over the PA system and announces to each boat—filled with 500 or more people—that they have the key to destroying the other boat in their hands. All they have to do is use it and they will be safe from having the other boat use it against them.

Now, maybe I'm crazy, but isn't Joker the bad guy, here? Didn't he lie to Batman about where Rachel was so that Batman would try to save Harvey, instead? Hasn't he been playing tricks on Gotham City for the past few weeks?

Why does no one—of the thousand people on either boat—even bring up the question that he might be lying to them about the detonator? That the real trick here might be that the detonator they're carrying is for their OWN boat, not the other one? Doesn't that seem like a typically Joker thing to do? You turn the key, thinking you're blowing up the other boat and your whole boat goes up in flames?

It's particularly clumsy because it would be an easy thing to get around: simply rig up something between the two boats that allows people to see that the detonator they're holding WILL affect the other boat—a system of cameras and a light that flashes if you turn the key away from the detonation position instead of toward it.

But, well, when the Joker suggests they turn the key, again, he could be lying.

This is how you make things "deep" or "complex:" by exploring the questions your plot brings up rather than ignoring them in favor of moving the story forward, however clumsily.

In the same scenario, we also see some of Nolan's blatant manipulation at work: the convict who demands that the Captain of his ferry give him the detonator. He makes it sound like it's his intent to trigger the detonator and blow the other ship up. You could argue that he does that because if he even hints at what his true intention is, someone's going to try to stop him. But that doesn't work because he's already the biggest guy on the boat and nobody's trying to stop him when he's talking about killing 500 people on the other ferry.

These are not hard problems to find: all you have to do is look past Nolan's slick, manipulative filmmaking and you can see the gaping holes in the foundation of his story. Once I don't buy that people wouldn't question what the Joker is telling them, nothing else that Nolan does with that scene is going to work for me.

I alluded earlier to the chase that Batman makes after what he thinks is Rachel. This, to me, is one of the messiest parts of the story: the Joker tells Batman where Rachel and Harvey are and Batman doesn't even give a hint of questioning whether he's lying. All it would have taken is one line as Batman takes off: after he tells Gordon where to find Harvey, he could simply say, "he might be lying, but we don't have time to second-guess him."

When the police are escorting Harvey across town, the Joker blocks their way with a burning fire engine. The cops elect to go down to "lower fifth," where they lose their air support. They do this despite the lane in the other direction on the upper level being completely clear. As a result, a huge amount of violent destruction ensues, with multiple cops getting killed. If you ask me, what you do in that situation is not follow what the Joker wants. You mess his plan up and see if your own approach to chaos can put him on the defensive.

And that's a fundamental problem with the whole depiction of the Joker: accepting that somehow Batman and Gordon have figured out "the Joker's style" after only two criminal acts, they simply let him manipulate them the whole rest of the way. If they think he's trying to lead them a certain way, they go along with it, and if they don't figure out how he's trying to lead them, they fall into the trap (like the cop who was guarding him).

It's no wonder the Joker was able to outsmart most everyone in Gotham City: the place appears to be fully populated with morons.

This section is for those who call Nolan's version of Batman "realistic."

I don't specifically have a problem with the stuff in this section. It's just that I've seen a lot of people call Nolan's Batman films "realistic," when they are, in fact, just gritty superhero films.

Batman, who's supposed to be a regular guy in an armored costume, reaches out and bends the barrel of a gun with his hand. He also catches the Joker while the Joker is falling off a building, using a cable gun that he holds one-handed to snare and support him.

An 18-wheeler flips end over end because of an elaborate trip-wire.

The destroyed portion of Harvey Dent's face still functioning normally or something close to it.

The magical sonar array that somehow uses phones that aren't even active to create a detailed visual image...even in an building that has only a couple dozen people in it.

Somehow managing to get a fingerprint off a shattered bullet...though there was a certain stupidity in presuming there would be a readable print on a bullet in the first place, especially since half of the bullet is inside the shell-casing when it's being pressed into the magazine. So when Batman finally DOES do some detective work, it's based on a fundamentally wrong assumption about what he could possibly find. More amusingly, the Joker actually uses the found fingerprint as a way to lead Batman into a trap.

A couple of nitpicks

Why would Batman use his Batman voice when speaking to Lucius, given that Lucius knows that he's Bruce? Why not just use the Bruce voice? Surely no one's listening in...

Eric Roberts' character Sal gets dropped off a building by Batman. We hear his ankles break. The next time we see him, he's just kind of hanging around the hospital hallways...on his feet, with no apparent means to support himself from having to stand on those ankles.

Performances.

There were some wonderful performances in the film. Heath Ledger, of course, was wonderfully cracked as the Joker. I was a bit disappointed that he was in the film so little considering the hype I had heard about him. Gary Oldman was his usual fine self in a very understated performance as Gordon. Again, not in the film enough.

Along the way, there were some average performances, as well. Aaron Eckhart—whom I generally love in everything—was very ordinary until he became Two-Face, at which point he really popped as an actor. Maggie Gyllenhall was ok as Rachel, but they really didn't give her much to do. Michael Caine felt to me like he was phoning it in, but Caine phoning it in is still better than most actors busting their asses. Same with Morgan Freeman.

But, frankly, I don't like Christian Bale. I've seen more than half a dozen films with him, and I just don't like his acting choices. For me, he never seems to escape being Christian Bale, no matter how hard he tries: there's this central, brooding core that seems to whine "take me seriously!" and it seems to be lurking in every one of his performances.

How deep does it go?

I suppose if you're going to think of this as a superhero or comic book film, there are things about it that are deeper than other superhero or comic book films. But critics are talking about this like it's a major crime thriller in superhero disguise. Setting aside that the characters are too stone stupid to solve a crime (they let a guy smuggle a carbon fiber gun into a courtroom and somehow don't get all of the Joker's knives away from him when they take him into custody), the depth in this story has to do largely with the Joker trying to get good people to do bad things. He takes an approach similar to what we see in The Killing Joke, telling people, in effect, that they're already so close to evil themselves that it takes only the right situation to push them over the line.

Never mind the fact that the choices he sets up are more about making difficult decisions—killing one to save many—rather than about how close we are to evil. The approach he takes is handled much better in David Fincher's brilliant Se7en, which gives us Kevin Spacey's John Doe character manipulating his foes perfectly: there isn't a single action they take that he hasn't anticipated, and in the end, they're playing completely into his hands. The Joker claims to be a force of chaos who is using the ways of the "planners" against them, yet his own plans require a flawlessness in design that seems to be too dense for our too-dense heroes to penetrate. The only reason he has the upper hand is because these professionals of law enforcement and a superhero who is supposed to be the foremost detective in the world can't seem to figure out what he's likely to do next.

It's Nolan's clumsy manipulation all over again: he wants the Joker to be chaotic and unpredictable, so he makes the characters take stupid guesses, explore blind alleys without thinking, ultimately leading them away from figuring out the twists that were obvious to me as an audience member.