I've always thought that The Killing Joke is actually not long enough and not quite suitable enough for big screen. This just proves it.
There's a lot of padding to extend the run time. First 20-ish minutes are brand new stuff, not from the comic book. It deals with Barbara and her relationship with Batman. Also, they have sex. Yeah, so, moving on.
I guess that new stuff had purpose to extend the run time and maybe add some more character to Barbara, to make the later stuff more impactful. But somehow it (new stuff) becomes totally disconnected from the rest. Again, the comic didn't have that much material to put into an hour plus long movie. So while it does fill the time, it doesn't add much or subtracts from the whole picture. Although, that sex scene was a bit unnecessary.
There are few more fillers along the way and they are also in that "nor adding, nor subtracting anything from the whole" formula.
Ending was a bit weird too. While it will be an eternal debate about "did Batman strangled Joker or not?", in the comic, that last page ended perfectly, they both laugh, then they both stop, and you can only "hear" incoming cop sirens. Here, similar, only we hear Batman weird laugh extending into fade to end credits. While a small thing, it kinda annoyed me. Also, there's a mid credits stinger, which was also out of place and felt a bit unnecessary.
Now, it's nothing new that Alan Moore doesn't want to have anything with transferring his stories to big screen, here they skipped him completely and credited Brian Azzarello for story. I guess he did the best he could to expand the story to fit into an hour and 15 minutes animated feature. Only those fillers were kind of whatever.
Voice acting and all that, Mark Hamill, Kevin Conroy, Tara Strong, Nolan North.. all the good stuff about that. Music, also fine. What I want to write a bit more about is animation. Now I'm aware how painful process of animating can be but here we got DC average animation to DVD/BR home feature - bit stiff, not much texture to the world and characters but passable. It could (should) be way better though.
Directing was OK but I can't shake the feeling that a bit of quality directing and editing would make this thing a whole lot better. But it's OK.
And that's the running theme here - OK. Good but not great. In the end it was just another DC animated straight to DVD/BR feature and not exactly suited for the big screen. I would be OK if they never made this, but I'm OK with this as well but it could be better, as I already said. I expected more, was fine with what I got... but... I expected more dammit.
There's a lot of padding to extend the run time. First 20-ish minutes are brand new stuff, not from the comic book. It deals with Barbara and her relationship with Batman. Also, they have sex. Yeah, so, moving on.
I guess that new stuff had purpose to extend the run time and maybe add some more character to Barbara, to make the later stuff more impactful. But somehow it (new stuff) becomes totally disconnected from the rest. Again, the comic didn't have that much material to put into an hour plus long movie. So while it does fill the time, it doesn't add much or subtracts from the whole picture. Although, that sex scene was a bit unnecessary.
There are few more fillers along the way and they are also in that "nor adding, nor subtracting anything from the whole" formula.
Ending was a bit weird too. While it will be an eternal debate about "did Batman strangled Joker or not?", in the comic, that last page ended perfectly, they both laugh, then they both stop, and you can only "hear" incoming cop sirens. Here, similar, only we hear Batman weird laugh extending into fade to end credits. While a small thing, it kinda annoyed me. Also, there's a mid credits stinger, which was also out of place and felt a bit unnecessary.
Now, it's nothing new that Alan Moore doesn't want to have anything with transferring his stories to big screen, here they skipped him completely and credited Brian Azzarello for story. I guess he did the best he could to expand the story to fit into an hour and 15 minutes animated feature. Only those fillers were kind of whatever.
Voice acting and all that, Mark Hamill, Kevin Conroy, Tara Strong, Nolan North.. all the good stuff about that. Music, also fine. What I want to write a bit more about is animation. Now I'm aware how painful process of animating can be but here we got DC average animation to DVD/BR home feature - bit stiff, not much texture to the world and characters but passable. It could (should) be way better though.
Directing was OK but I can't shake the feeling that a bit of quality directing and editing would make this thing a whole lot better. But it's OK.
And that's the running theme here - OK. Good but not great. In the end it was just another DC animated straight to DVD/BR feature and not exactly suited for the big screen. I would be OK if they never made this, but I'm OK with this as well but it could be better, as I already said. I expected more, was fine with what I got... but... I expected more dammit.