EDITOR'S NOTE: Today, Press Play debuts a new genre of video essay we are calling In The Cut. These video essays will zero in on a crucial scene in a film and they will deconstruct, study and evaluate it for its technical merits and its cinematic effectiveness. Given the recent arguments emanating from this site and others about the state of action filmmaking, Press Play contributor Jim Emerson felt compelled to produce a series of three In The Cut video essays. When taken cumulatively, these commentaries explain once and for all what a successful action sequence looks like and how such a scene should influence the viewer. His forensic analysis of the truck chase from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is Part I of these essays. Part II is Phillip Noyce's Salt and Part III is Don Siegel's The Line Up. We have included the full uninterrupted sequence from The Dark Knight so the viewer can compare Jim's analysis with the finished product.
By Jim Emerson
Press Play Contributor
There are plenty of ways to make a movie. There are plenty of ways to make a mess, too. But sometimes when I and fellow critics and moviegoers complain of "incoherence" in modern "snatch-and-grab" movies (particularly action sequences), some people say they don't know what we're talking about. This is an attempt to be very, very specific about why some of us get confused. What it boils down to this: we're actually watching the movie.
When, for example, we're shown someone gazing intently offscreen and there's a cutaway to something else (that appears to be in the vicinity), we assume (having familiarized ourselves with basic cinematic grammar over the years) that we are seeing what they are looking at. But that's not always the case. Why? I don't know. I find many directorial choices in contemporary commercial movies to be sloppy, random, incomprehensible — and indefensible.
This essay takes a long, hard look at roughly the first half of the big car and truck chase sequence from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, set on the lower level streets by the Chicago River. It stops, starts, reverses, repeats, slows down… taking the sequence apart shot by shot. The idea is to look at it the way an editor would — but also as a moviegoer does. We notice lapses in visual logic whether our brains register them consciously or not. I found this sequence utterly baffling the first time I saw it, and every subsequent time. At last, I now know exactly why.
Anyone who has participated in the making of a movie, whether a D.I.Y. project or a Hollywood studio picture (I've been involved in both kinds of productions), can tell you about the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of planning, shooting and editing a movie. Surely the use of large IMAX cameras for this segment of The Dark Knight made the filming more of a challenge. Problems that could have been easily fixed on a film with such a huge budget (removing that phantom extra police car with CGI, perhaps) were also no doubt complicated by the IMAX process. And to the filmmakers' credit, they decided against using CGI for the actual stunts, using real vehicles, miniatures and explosions instead.
In the end, however, all that matters, to paraphrase Martin Scorsese, is which pieces of film wind up in the picture and which are left out (intentionally or otherwise). And then, to quote the great actor Sir Edwin (John Cleese) on all those words in Shakespeare's "Hamlet," you've got to get them in the right order.
P.S. If you want to see how this part of the chase sequence appeared in the "Dark Knight" script, click to view these .pdf pages.
In the Cut is presented by Press Play, Scanners and RogerEbert.com. Parts II and III will examine two terrific action sequences — one recent, one older.
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Jim Emerson is a Seattle-based writer, critic, editor, blogger, video essayist, gardener and pedant. He is the founding editor of RogerEbert.com, where he also maintains his blog, Scanners.
Press Play Video Blog 
This is just great. I think I see how the truck flipping around was supposed to work in a coherent 3-D model, but even then it’s still less than plausible.
It’s analyses and explanations like this that make me wish I could get a job as a real professional critic with a stipend to go back and take some film classes to understand more deeply the “language”.
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This was a really great piece and a great learning tool for people who are starting out with filmmaking and/or editing.
When is part 2 and 3 coming out?
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Also, the ‘direction of action’ described around the twelve minute mark is not ‘going forward’ – the axis of action is between the Joker in the truck and the van — that’s the essential on-screen relationship we’re negotiating, not ‘moving forward,’ whatever the fuck that means. In this regard, having reestablished his axis of action (which IS something that filmmakers can and do do), he simply cuts — it’s simple shot-reverse shot.
Stop trying to overtheorize this movie’s very real failings — it’s murkily shot and cut too fast, and because we aren’t invested in these characters (because our protagonist is not involved) we are apt to notice these things, but it really has very little to do with axis of action.
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Read Walter Murch’s book on editing and you’ll see that all this talk of three-dimensional continuity and two dimensional continuity and the 180 degree rule are kinda beside the point. They make up such a small component of what truly goes on in the editing room.
The reason why this sequence fails isn’t that we aren’t sure what side of the line we’re on — it’s because we’re totally disinvested from these characters and thus are emotionally distanced from the action. Thus we can pick apart this sort of stuff.
The failings of this movie begin with the script, not with intensified-continuity editing.
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Considering “Salt” was a doggedly boring throughout, I’m interested to see a scene from it possibly redeemed.
But perhaps it will be an exercise of something making sense in editing simply coming off as a scripted and uninteresting dance.
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Well, thanks a lot. This is really insightful. I recall some confusion when I watched this action sequence for the first time (especially being from Chicago), but I couldn’t explain why. These scenes go by way too fast to analyze them & if you stop to question it, you’ve lost a chunk of the film. However, I appreciate being given the editor’s eye and wonder if most editors see these flaws upon first viewing.
I also wonder how the film’s editor feels about being called out for these errors. Did the editor realize it and think most viewers won’t notice this; did the director push the editor to edit it a certain way–what happened?
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Peter: I honestly felt exasperated the first time I saw this sequence (though it gets better once they’re back on surface streets). It wasn’t that I had absolutely no idea of what was going on, it’s that the filmmaking wasn’t even trying to convey it. I felt like the filmmakers were saying: “Oh, it doesn’t matter what’s happening — it’s just action. People will accept it.” And lots of people did. But that didn’t change my experience of it. Your suggestion of the POV shot is an excellent solution — and there are many others that would have worked, if anybody had thought it mattered. (There are strangely few head-on or driver POV shots in this sequence, which is shot almost entirely parallel to the action in the outside or inside lanes. Shots looking forward or backward could have been used effectively to bridge those sometimes awkward changes in the direction of action.
Here’s something I posted in a comment elsewhere a few hours ago:
I was hoping to demonstrate the cumulative effect of ALL these ambiguous directorial/editorial choices. Sure, you expect to have some in any action sequence, but this one is riddled with them and it’s so unnecessary. I understand what is supposed to have happened (like when the truck gets twirled around and plunges into the water moving in the opposite direction from which it had been going at high speed). But in bridging the crash with the splash with nothing but those two insert shots — of the driver being thrown against the window, and the close view of the semi making a turn from left to right — the movie doesn’t find a way to actually show us. I would also argue that it’s not possible (momentum would still be carrying the truck ahead, unless the driver made a U-turn and hit the gas before going into the river), but that doesn’t really matter. If we’d seen it, we’d believe it.
I hope to get into this more in the next installment, focusing on a sequence in Phillip Noyce’s “Salt” (2010)
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The video above is an exemplification of what I perceive to be some of the most intelligent and yet accessible film criticism available. Compared to capsules and reviews, with, inherent to their form, a preoccupation with synopsis and evaluation, writing and video essays, like this one, are far more didactic and interactive.
Indirectly lauding Jim and this awesome generation of film criticism aside, it is such a shame that some people, some film goers, concrete in their assumptions, perceive acumen, as is obviously substantiated in the video above, to be something “superfluous” when it comes to cinema.
In my opinion, this all boils down to literacy. The illiterate or perhaps just infantile filmgoer prefers pop-up-book movies, while the literate film goer on the other hand inquisitively ascertains information from frame to frame.
Angelo:
You are quite mistaken in your feeling that Jim doesn’t know how to watch movies. I think it is fair to say that the inception of his qualms over The Dark Knight came about under the same conditions you experienced the film: at its chosen, high-speed rate. The impression of intelligibility of such a sequence is made possible, as is usually the case we’ve come to learn (hint: Matt Stork’s vid), through aural compensation. For me, even with the compensating sfx and score, and even with the rate of editing, I could tell, the first time I watched the film, that discontinuities were rife. For the critically literate film goer, the jettisoning of visual grammar is destructive to a film’s value and potential for expression.
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This is an excellent piece, Jim, and I have a question more than a criticism. I’ve seen THE DARK KNIGHT a couple times and I have had issues with Nolan’s editing in action scenes in this, BATMAN BEGINS, and especially that whole snow complex thing in INCEPTION. However, this is a sequence that I always felt I followed more or less pretty strongly. When we are able to break it down shot by shot like you are I think it’s also pretty obvious why certain edits don’t work (How simple would it have been to show a shot from the POV of the 2nd van seeing the 1st van rotate as the semi crashes into it—I feel that shot could save that issue). This scene is different from the now deemed “chaos cinema,” as you suggest, because it is trying to follow some rules of continuity—it’s not trying to simply overwhelm us, it wants us to be able to follow the action.
However, when I first saw, this, at least with this sequence in particular, I never felt I got particularly lost, and I’m curious if you felt this on a first viewing or only later when you saw it on DVD. Obviously if you took something like the final sequence in the tower it would have been like shooting fish in a barrel, but is this a case of something that if we only break it down slowly we can see the flaws? I don’t think this makes your points less valid, but I guess our goal is that we can all train our eyes to watch cinema as best as we can, and for you even to communicate the points we need to slow this down as much as possible. So I’m just more or less curious in your process in working out the issues in this sequence.
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Superb piece, Jim. I found”The Dark Knight” compelling on an elemental pulp level — the same way certain novels are compelling, if indefensible as literature — but I always respected you and the other anti-Nolanites that you cite for taking a stand. Admittedly, I do wish all of you hadn’t gone on to form a Committee-of-Admiration for a dreary snooze like “Salt,” but perhaps your next video essay will convince me otherwise.
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Jim, thank you for this enlightening moment-by-moment dissection of this sequence. The choice of the truck chase from THE DARK KNGHT is particularly laudable, for two reasons. First of all, it is not as ‘chaotically’ conceived and shot as more extreme examples of chaos cinema (comparatively long ASL, rather calculated cuts, a mixture of shot scales). You demonstrate quite convincingly that it is easy to miss the editorial inconsistencies. The sound design, specifically the gunfire and roaring engines, is instrumental in concealing the editorial flaws. And second, your analysis proves that minor editing mishaps can ruin (or salvage, depending on the perspective) the overall architecture of a sequence. Spatial integrity is not comparable to trivial continuity errors but the foundation effective action choregraphy is based upon. Great work!
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Steven: Thanks for those observations. My approach to this was to mention just about every thing that gave me pause in a sequence that confused me, as I say, from the first time I saw it shortly after the picture opened in theaters. (I agree with you that it gets better once it gets to surface streets — and I especially dig the climactic truck flip.) I certainly don’t expect every one of these choices to bother everybody, but I wanted to show how there is room for unnecessary misinterpretation — which could have been so easily alleviated with more judiciously chosen angles and cuts. (I also wonder why there are so few shots directly in front of or behind the vehicles, or from drivers’ POVs, which would have helped stitch together those shots from the sides…) In Part II I’ll look at a sequence from “Salt” that begins with something as bizarre as anything in “The Dark Knight” — but that is simply more bold and confident in the way it sells it.
Jeremy: One thing I didn’t articulate in this piece (I just couldn’t squeeze it in) is the bizarrely flat choice of angles inside the van. No, I don’t expect this to bug others as much as it bugged me, but it’s another instance of Nolan choosing a deliberately ambiguous, flat perspective rather than a more dimensional one that provides greater visual information. You’re right: you don’t want to be thinking about where the camera is placed, and you shouldn’t have to. But when it’s in a not-very-advantageous place, then it calls attention to itself. As I said, a simple two shot — just a second of film — could have alleviated all my feelings of disorientation inside the van. (And I’m by no means the only one who felt this way.) Cutting inside the van and clearly showing TWO sides — a side and the front or back, with the appropriate grating — would not only have given us a better feel that we were actually inside this metal box. There’s nothing inherently “wrong” with shooting from the back corner (though the way it’s done here convinces me that there actually is no back to the “van” and that the camera is probably really outside the “walls,” looking at a partial/flat set on a soundstage somewhere), but it seems more natural to me to shoot front to back (reverse angle) when first entering the van.
But, as I say, these things either bother you or they don’t, and I appreciate hearing from people like you guys who can articulate how they interpreted them. That’s the main purpose of this critical exercise…
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Time for the crackpot to weigh in. More later, but for now I just want to respond to Steven Santos: Amen to the assertion that an editor should go for what works dramatically over most every other consideration, in a pinch. That’s the essence of Dmytryk’s rule #6 Cut for proper values than proper matches and #7 Substance first–then form.
It’s just that the choices that Nolan makes don’t “work,” not in the sense that the great action sequences work, where your excitement flows from clear objectives, dangers, setbacks and victories. Arguments that chalk this sequence’s problems up to the complexities of modern action filmmaking just leave me scratching my head. I figure it has always been tough to wrangle stunt performers, vehicles, safety and support crew, camera cars and various technical professionals with engineering degrees… But the matter of how to cut the heavily covered footage together for suspense and dramatic impact ain’t exactly neuroscience. Or costly.
It’s clear to me that the glancing way Nolan cuts the action in TDK is part of the film’s overall design. He’s experimenting with a faster way of getting through the scenes, including the quiet, contemplative or romantic ones. I sense that he wants this thing to move with the cool, merciless glide of classic Batman graphic novels like Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns. But comic books are a static form that our mind’s eye animates and gives velocity. In a film, inelegant, abrupt cuts between two pieces of action are like speed bumps. That’s what makes TDK often feel like having a double-D tit plopped in your mouth for a hot second before your assailant slips it back in her dress, kidney punches you and goes speeding away on a motorcycle while flipping you the bird. Exciting in a certain kind of awful way.
Nolan knew what he was doing, just as the architects of the Iraq War knew what they were doing. Should we give Cheney and Rumsfeld an Oscar? Charges of incompetence or simply being harried by complex professional demands are a way of ignoring the political dimension of all this Chaos Cinema. To quote my own lost videssay on TDK, it is the film of The Shock Decade.
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Jeff: The reason it’s confusing is that it involves another change of direction/camera angle. The semi ends up going left to right with the concrete barrier on its right, which means it had to punch out the SWAT van (traveling right to left), and then swerve back around into the parallel lane it had just crossed in order to wind up going the wrong direction (against traffic) in the opposite lane(s). But the shots show it going left-to-right, reversing the axis of action yet again. It may make sense in theory, but the camera placements make it more difficult to decode than it needs to be.
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Overall, good video essay. I have to agree with Jason Bellamy, though, that the section in which the truck punches through the convoy, knocks the SWAT van into the river, and makes a right turn into the oncoming traffic lane makes sense. You can see the river in the background of the previous couple of shots, appropriately oriented, and I have no idea what the idea was about pulling back and swapping lanes or whatever.
That said, I’d say the section of the chase that follows from here is the TRULY incoherent section. There’s a series of shots of the police van, the Joker’s truck, and the Batmobile all doing various things with very poor spatial connection between them. It doesn’t make fluid, facile sense.
I also note that, rather than pick apart Jim’s piece and break up his arguments, the general refrain from the opposing camp is basically a long wail of “stopitstopitstopit”. People hate to have their pleasures trampled upon.
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Several thoughts …
* Jim on three cop cars: I guess I misunderstood. I thought in the video you were implying that the action suggests the semi hits the first cop car but that the subsequent shot suggests it was the second car. My bad. Totally agree that the third cop car disappears.
* Jim on the semi’s right turn: See, I think the convoy is moving in the same “left to right” direction of the semi, and that the semi plows through the van in the process of turning right. I agree that with all the shifts in perspective that the action on the screen isn’t always left to right, but I never get the sense the semi comes from a different direction,
* Steven on Indy IV: I completely agree that the jungle chase has at least as many problems as this one. Total mess.
* Steven on Gangs of New York: The perfect example is the initial fight sequence, as the two gangs take their places at the improvised battleground, the shots themselves and the yelling of the characters implies that each gang must be at least 50 yards apart, maybe more like 75. Then each gang takes a single step forward to being charging toward one another and Scorsese cuts to an aerial shot in which, bam, the two gangs are now about 15 yards apart. So either the gangs travel about 20 yards each in half a second, or the leaders of the gangs were yelling unncecessarily.
* Jim on the van: I wanted to close with this one because I found it intesting. You said one of the reasons the van interiors don’t work for you is “If we assume that he’s sitting there on the passenger side, the camera would have to be squeezed into the back corner on the driver’s side, and it doesn’t feel real to me.” I guess that’s as good an example as any about the different ways people watch movies, because the last thing I want to be thinking about is where the camera is. That, in my mind, is putting my attention outside the frame of the film, which isn’t where I think it should be.
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i only watched a couple minutes, but you see to assume that its a mistake if the narrative information implied in one shot is complicated or even contradicted in a subsequent shot. This is not really the case and smart directors often make use of these inconsistencies to great effect.
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From a coincidental but fortuitous 9/9/11 posting by David Bordwell on the screenwriter (and Bunuel collaborator) Jean-Claude Carriere. This, I think, adds something to our discussion:
http://j.mp/rmThXF
… He believes that there is a language of film that sets it apart from other arts. That language is grounded in the play of meaning and emotion that comes from putting one shot after another.
He explained the point through an example that seems at first to be a restatement of the classic Kuleshov effect. In Shot 1, a man in his apartment looks out the window. Shot 2: The street. A woman is walking with another man. We’ll assume that our man is seeing them. Shot 3: Our man reacts.
But contrary to Kuleshov’s dictum, his facial expression should not be neutral. In fact, his expression tells us how to understand the scene. If the man looks upset, we surmise that he’s jealous. If he’s benevolent, we assume that the woman is a friend, his daughter–or a flirt. The filmmaker needs not only techniques like framing and cutting, but also the performances of actors.
Now cut to the woman in her bedroom brushing her hair. We need to make sure the audience understands that it’s the same woman, so maybe we have to go back and add a shot to the earlier scene, a closer view of her in the street. This constant flow and readjustment of images is based on guiding the spectator discreetly but firmly through the action. The audience isn’t aware of this “secret film,” but it governs everything the viewer thinks and feels….
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It appears that some of the comments taking issue with Jim’s analysis are nothing but strawman arguments more akin to message board trolling: Emotional responses that ignore the matter at hand and take umbrage with something that’s not under discussion. What IS being discussed here is form as it relates to editing. The video clearly demonstrates the way in which Nolan and Lee violate established editing conventions that render the action nonsensical from shot to shot given the geography on hand, even though we comprehend that a chase of sorts is unfolding onscreen.
And this isn’t even delving into the narrative lapses of logic the film suffers from, which we’re supposed to take at face value. Like a Swat van that’s run off the road into a river from left to right even though the action is unfolding in the opposite direction. Some of you may not care. But it matters.
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(Part 2 of 2)
I would suggest this happens all the time, even in films that you may consider to be perfect in technique. Perhaps, because I spend so much time myself trying to figure out how one shot cuts into another, I see mistakes in pretty much every film. One of the aspects of these discussions on technique that bothers me, is that while films or filmmakers you don’t like are subjected to essays about their filmmaking abilities (Unlike others on this thread, I don’t object to the notion of you tackling this subject.), do you ever notice these problems in films you do like? I can name an obvious recent example for myself: “The Tree of Life”. A film which I thought ultimately was emotionally effective, but the more I think about it, the more I feel that film was a bit of a choppy mess in its editing that undercut how good that film could have been.
I would even acknowledge when great directors stumble during moments, as I mentioned with both Spielberg or Mann or, say, Scorsese in the opening and closing battles of “Gangs of New York” which demonstrate he is pretty incapable of staging of large-scale action sequences. Perhaps, what I’m getting at, is wondering why in the critical community filmmakers are criticized for their choices only when the film/director isn’t liked, but sometimes employ contradictory logic to justify the filmmaking of their own favored directors? Filmmaking, despite the thinking amongst auteurist-mad film bloggers (where fimmakers are either treated as deities or anti-christs) these days, is not an exact science with problems needing to be solved from conception all the way to the editing room. So through all of that entire process, why does most criticism seem to fall into the two sides: either the filmmaker is completely incompetent or every single choice they make works brilliantly? While you say that it doesn’t matter except for what’s on the screen, I wonder if it wouldn’t hurt for some to look harder and understand that the filmmaking process is messier and more complicated, which is why directors are equally capable of smart and effective choices, as well as sloppy and miscalculated ones, sometimes in the same film.
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(Part 1 of 2)
Terrific essay and this is from someone who had logical issues about your previous takes on this film, particularly the video essay where you compared scenes of characters falling from other films to the scene in “Dark Knight”. My main issues with the scene, which, oddly enough, is still the best action scene in the film (the 2nd half of it improves), have more to do with the space of the tunnels and relation of the vehicles to one another. Basically, it feels so disorienting that Nolan stages vehicles to emerge out of nowhere or land anywhere if they get hit. Nolan is not an effective director of large scale action sequences, so he tries to piece together small moments while skimming over the logistics of how these vehicles relate to one another.
Having seen “The Road Warrior” recently, the logistics of space and number of vehicles which is more complicated than this, I marvel at how much better someone like George Miller is at these kinds of scenes. Strangely enough, the same summer as “Dark Knight”, one of the best action filmmakers of all time, Steven Spielberg made a complete visual mess of the jungle chase scene in the last Indiana Jones film in ways that were similar but much worse than this: vehicles not in proper relation to each other and screen direction completely obliterated.
Now, here is what I don’t agree with. First of all, like others here, where Harvey Dent is in the back of the armored car is not really hard to follow though, as with many directors these days, I think it relies too much on close-ups for moments when you need to see their bodies being throttled in the back with every hit. You invoke the 180 degree rule, which I’m not the only one who feels this way, in that, it is nice in theory, but ultimately, it gets broken all the time and not just in Chaos Cinema. Granted, how one breaks this rule can lead to sloppiness, but I don’t think that’s the case here. One of the obvious influences on Nolan for this film is Michael Mann, who has been breaking it more and more in recent “snatch and grab style” films in ways that are shockingly sloppy. The final fight scene in the tower in “Dark Knight” is actually a better example of how obliterating the 180 degree rule leads to sloppy filmmaking.
The Joker shooting the cop doesn’t bother me at all either. If you don’t see him, then he and his truck would be yet another thing that just comes out of nowhere later. I feel it’s almost a stylistic device, a jolt cut often used by many filmmakers over the years for often similar violent moments. You may not care for it, but I don’t think it’s an illegitimate style choice.
And the final moment I disagree with you on is the shot/reverse shot of The Joker seeing the Batmobile heading towards the convoy. Yes, the shots don’t match based where his eyes are looking. But this is where I go to what you say at the end of the piece about how all the different factors of a film, something I agree with and have been saying in all comments threads since the Stork video, is how technique and content/context are not disconnected from each other and often inform the filmmaker’s choices. That ultimately, with any artistic endeavor, you try to maintain a balancing act between the two but sometimes one has to override the other for the film to be effective. In that shot, it is important to have those connection of shots between The Joker and the Batmobile because those two characters represent the main dramatic conflict of the film. Now, perhaps one can argue it can be improved in the staging, but, as an editor, given that footage, I would have cut those shots together the same way because the emotion and drama of the story ultimately trumps screen space.
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Jim,
As much as I wanted to love Nolan’s movie, I kept finding myself being distracted by lapses of narrative logic. Dissections of scenes like this reveal sequences with cinematic incoherence as well. It’s one thing to feel my attention waning; It’s another to know why my emotional investment in a movie diminishes.
Your mention of the point where the soundtrack dropped out brought something to mind. Almost every time Heath Ledger’s Joker appears onscreen the music is replaced by a mechanical sound, something akin to a circular saw being started. This grating metallic whine contributes a lot to the distress and anxiety that Ledger’s character evokes in the other characters and in the audience as well. Is this a dark Lynchian touch in the movie, or is it cheating?
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@ Mike “would love to see you make an action scene on Wacker Drive in Chicago and have the freedom to make a fully-consistent action scene.”
You know what would be *really* difficult? Filming a “fully consistent” chase scene on those crazy curvy streets of San Francisco. Wait a minute, they did a hell of a one in “Bullitt”. Okay, but how about a chase scene along/and under/and around an L-train in Chicago (where I hear it’s hard, on a multi-million dollar budget, to film chase scenes). Wait a minute; gadzooks! That happened–and with mustard–in “The French Connection”.
Ug, I’ve never understood this impulse just to be content to consume things, to “tune out.” Great, you “like” something. And *you* are? …How about using a higher brain function once in awhile to analyze and understand why you “like” the things you “like.” The disdain for a healthy critical faculty is the locust in the wheat field of the world. I mean, without a critical faculty, you’re about as passive as a baby in a high-chair, a chimp in a cage–eating, slobbering, sh*tting, repeating.
I also don’t get the LEAVE IT ALONE ALREADY, IT’S BEEN THREE YEARS people. Is this a good movie or isn’t it? If it is (“the BEST,” you say; “a MASTERPIECE,” you declare”), why *shouldn’t* we still be talking about it? God knows we’re still talking about “The Searchers”. How about taking some responsibility for the things you “like”. How about reaching a little. Look. Really look. That’s all Jim’s doing here. He’s looking. He’s asking questions. Christ, if the world was full of Jim’s we’d have Xanadu.
As for the “get a life, it’s just a movie” people. Those people are hopeless. Those people are flatliners.
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Jesus, give it a rest already. I guarantee that if Nolan had done the scene exactly as you described, you’d complain that it was being too literal and spelling things out for you too much. And that the scene needed a shot of the Joker to establish he was there.
You rail against Nolan for spelling things out too much in the rest of the movie and then you want him to do that exact thing here.
You have a bad habit of harping on things that just don’t matter.
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I’m sorry: that previous comment is addressed to Mike, not Matt!
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Matt: You’ve given your answer to the question I ask in the video: Do these directorial choices make the movie more exciting or just more confusing? For you, the answer is “more exciting.” Fine. And I explain why I find it confusing. But as I say both at the beginning and the ending of the essay, all that really matters is what’s in the movie — and what’s left out. Whether the filmmakers could get the proper permits to shoot on Wacker may provide an excuse, or even an explanation, for why the movie turned out the way it did (and I mention the use of IMAX, too) — but that’s of no concern to the movie’s audience any more than the $180 million budget should be. The filmmakers either got the shots they needed and put them together well… or they didn’t. A few adjustments in cuts and camera placements and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
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Jesse,
You question why reevaluating The Dark Knight’s editing is worthwhile, three years later (which is confusing in and of itself, is there a statute of limitations on film criticism? is three years too late or too soon?). I can think of two reasons:
1. “Is is one of the better movies of recent years and entertaining. Yeah! It’s one of the best superhero movies ever and beyond that genre it’s just a good, fun movie.” – You
This is a common claim. I would argue that superhero movies, being heavily reliant on action, are by necessity heavily reliant on editing. If the editing is lackluster, then perhaps the claim that it is “one of the best superhero movies ever” (I’d even say this is the consensus) deserves questioning, as it has real ramifications for a growing genre.
2. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing.
Eh, that’s pretty self-explanatory.
Hope that makes sense.
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Would love to see you make an action scene on Wacker Drive in Chicago and have the freedom to make a fully-consistent action scene. The scene is perfectly coherent for anybody not wasting their time breaking down every moment like that. I’ve never had an issue and neither has anybody I’ve spoken to. For a scene that takes place in a real environment, Nolan’s execution is nearly flawless. If his focus was on spacial integrity and not the action itself, we would not only have a much more boring film, but he would have shot it on a stage.
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I enjoyed watching this video, but I also kept hearing Kevin Costner saying over and over again, “Back…. and to the left. Back…. and to the left. Back….. and to the left.”
🙂
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P.S. to Jason re: three cop cars. When the cars are entering the lower lanes, we see all three. Cut to the driver of one of them. The garbage truck takes out the one in the foreground, but when we cut back again the garbage truck now has one cop car ahead of it and one behind it. Then it takes out the first cop car, and sometime during the chase the final cop car just goes away.
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Jason: Maybe it’s just my feeling for space, but when you see somebody get into the back of a van, sitting right next to the back door, I would expect to see that back door in the next shot of him inside the van. If we assume that he’s sitting there on the passenger side, the camera would have to be squeezed into the back corner on the driver’s side, and it doesn’t feel real to me. It feels like somebody’s showing me a cheap, flat set representing the inside of a van rather than putting me inside a van. (Which, I believe, is exactly what we’re looking at — in IMAX!) And, again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but a simple two-shot could have cleared it all up in a second.
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Oh, one more: When the semi takes out the Quickly Introduced and Destroyed cop, I indeed read that as the FIRST cop car being taken out and then, while we were watching that cop car shoot into the next lane, the forward momentum of the other cars carried forward (outside the frame) so that the previously second car was now first. That’s the way it looks to me. Again, not clean, but that’s how it plays for me.
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This is very good.
I do like the sequence, but I think it works largely due to the sound and, eventually, the score. Still, it’s a good analysis and indicative of the larger problems in Nolan’s directing. These little problems can add up to a lot, especially in a sequence like the Snow Fortress in Inception, which is distractingly terrible.
What struck me when I first saw The Dark Knight were shots like the Joker with the shotgun. That quick cutting should be about SHOCK and IMPACT but it feels like frames were removed to keep the rating down to a PG-13, which I guess was never the problem initially. Perhaps it’s because the non-action scenes of the film tend to move in a slower, more considered fashion, that the quickness of these inserts is more jarring. It feels like you’re watching an edited-for-content TV cut of the movie, and it’s something I remember cropping up a number of times in the theatre.
I wonder if American audiences are now trained to accept that kind of cutting as normal because so many people grew up watching edited TV cuts. I lived in the UK for a number of years, where the films are never really edited for TV (after 9pm you can show anything, so if a film is objectionable for content it is generally only aired after that watershed). Returning to the US, I find it incredibly difficult to watch films on FX or AMC or TNT because of these edits just feel that much more jarring, even with the increasingly lax attitude towards violent content on cable. I have no basis for that, I’m just throwing that out there.
Can I just say to the negative commenters: The small critical contingent that has talked badly about The Dark Knight and Nolan in general get a lot of stick because people don’t really understand what they’re talking about. Jim’s just gone through a sequence shot-for-shot to explain his side, and you still call him an idiot? The sequence can work for you or not, and that’s not really the point, but there is a cumulative effect on the subconscious from this stuff.
I think this was really interesting, especially in light of the Chaos Cinema debates that have gone on since Matthias Stork’s series.
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Jim: Indeed, you prove what you intend to prove: that it’s accurate to suggest that some of the scenes in The Dark Knight are confusing or incoherent, or whatever word one wants to use, and that Nolan defenders can’t wish away such criticisms or (in all cases) suggest that Nolan is simply going for disorientation as emotional/visceral effect (that latter defense works in terms of the frequent flipping of the axis, but it doesn’t work in shots like the one where the police van that the Batmobile is protecting entirely disappears from the frontal shot).
That said, watching this essay I’m confused as to why you come to some of the conclusions that you do. Most significantly, you show us where Harvey is sitting in the back of the police van and then suggest you think he moved. Why? Your reasoning seems to be based on the shot that precedes it, of the masked cop, but I fail to see enough evidence in that shot that would suggest we should assume we know where the masked cop is. Thus, we’d be uncertain about his location until we see Harvey again, and then the two shots make sense. Later, when the van gets rammed from behind, Harvey indeed first looks to his left, toward where he was hit, and then looks to his right, as if looking up the road to see if there is room to escape. This all makes perfect sense to me: Nolan puts Harvey in the back right of the van and uses him as our axis point, if you will, around which the camera will pivot in the various angles later on. Neat and tidy? Well, no. But I don’t have any trouble following it. Similarly, later on, I watch the semi blast through the van, past the convoy, and into the next lane, where it ends up from there. Is it unrealistic that the entire semi cleared in front of the rest of the convoy? Yes. But I couldn’t follow your argument suggesting that the van ended up in the same lane and then jumped lanes and then turned right, and then whipped back and to the left, or whatever. Lost me there. So far as I can tell, my eyes show the semi blast through the van, across the convoy lane and, with a right turn, into the lane to the left of the convoy.
All that said, indeed, the van spinning into the water has no justification whatsoever, without taking extreme liberties as to what COULD have happened, and even then it’s thoroughly confusing in every way. And I agree with you on the shot in which the van is suddenly between the semi and the oncoming Batmobile, and the scene in which the Batmobile leapfrogs over the car and the van next to it disappears. And any one of those is enough to support your hypothesis.
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Angelo and Jesse Pinkman (Jesse: Are you going to kill Gus?): As I say repeatedly in the video, if the things I show you (appearing and disappearing cars, vehicles abruptly reversing directions, ambiguous camera placements, etc.) don’t bother you, then they don’t bother you. They’ve always bothered me, and this clearly shows why. It would have been easy to orient the viewer (with regard to the van interiors, for example), but somebody didn’t think it was important to do so. As a commenter at Scanners wrote (about “Inception”): “I do ‘have a sense of what happened’, but it’s not what I want: I want to see what’s happening, I want to know, I dont want to doubt, I dont want to open an epistemological quest every time I see an action scene…” The point being: When an action sequence is sloppy and ambiguous for no good reason, it’s not engaging the audience’s full attention. That may be fine for most viewers (Nolan’s movies, for example, are quite popular). But as you can see from the reviews I quoted in this piece, not everybody admires their “incomprehensible” approach to action. I admit, my reservations about this sequence began with the cutaway to the “Shotgun SWAT” getting into the cab of the van — when we hadn’t seen the truck yet. Again, a minor thing, but it makes the scene feel flat and choppy. How much more “dimensional” it would have been if we saw the truck during the tracking shot following Harvey and Rachel. All it would have taken was a slight shift in angle to show the spacial relationships. Just a little extra thought and effort could have made the whole sequence more cohesive. But choppiness is trendy now.
As for why I stopped where I did: Hell, the thing was already 19 minutes long, and I think I’d made my points by then!
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I thought it was a brilliant video essay. There was always something that bothered me about that sequence, and I’m glad someone broke it down piece by piece.
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Jim,
Angelo said it a lot nicer than I’m gonna say it.
You’re too dumb to function.
It amazes me that after 3 years you still have such a hard on for ragging on The Dark Knight. It came out in 2008 and you’re still talking about it. I don’t think that you’ve written nearly as many articles about any other film from 2008 including the best pic winner Slumdog. That tells me that TDK is either better than you say it is or you have a vendetta for it.
Is TDK a perfect movie? Certainly not. Is is one of the better movies of recent years and entertaining. Yeah! It’s one of the best superhero movies ever and beyond that genre it’s just a good, fun movie.
Jim, you seem to be the only one that is confused by this movie as well as this action sequence. That should tell you something right there.
You seem to work awful hard at looking foolish.
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Jim, you seem very confused, very easily. I watched your break down of the chase scene and saw no reason to make any of the assumptions you made, and the chase was perfectly clear to me. I mean, you start off not even thinking that the truck where we first see two drivers is close to Harvey, but it should be obvious since they cut directly to them from a shot of Harvey walking out of the jail with Rachel. The fact that the shots are right after one another shows that they’re linked together.
Your lack of awareness when the movie first shows the convoy in motion and cuts to the guard, which you bafflingly assume is where Harvey should be sitting, isn’t confusing at all. It keeps everything on the same axis as what we were just watching. The front and the back were always clear to me.
Heh. “Why would you cut away from the convoy just when it’s getting going?”
Yeah, Jim. Why cut away from something in a movie when something else is happening? That’s what I’d like to know. Unheard of in a movie! And the Joker’s appearance is so brief it’s not very effective (when he shotguns a cop from the trailer truck)? That’s a non-criticism. An absolute non-sequitur of a statement. It suggests more than it shows-that the Joker is inserting himself into this situation and we can’t control it. He’s taking over the story, just like how his theme plays, and not Batman’s theme, through the beginning of the convoy.
Why stop there? Why not go for broke and demand that the Joker just stop to give a monologue about why it feels good to be bad? That would be every bit as sensible as demanding he be on screen longer.
My goodness, Martin Scorsese uses lots of quick shots like that to suggest violence, and you quote him. I admire your articles, but I get the feeling that you don’t know how to watch movies from this.
Again, why stop where you did? You could have gone so much further in confusing yourself if you really wanted. You could have asked why the movie didn’t display a HUD style map in the corner of the screen with GPS coordinates. Every bit as superfluous and sensible as your criticisms.
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