we are just days away from the release of the dark knight, the second installment in director chris nolan's batman franchise. there have been very few times where i've been this excited for some new kind of media coming out in the last few years: seeing the extended edition of return of the king for the first time and reading the last harry potter book are the two i remember right off the top of my head. seeing this movie is more than just being excited to see a cool new film coming out, like i'm excited to see prince caspian or iron man when i get to it.
the dark knight is different because it has a special element that is so rare to find nowadays. it tells an incredible story. stories run our lives; underneath everything important, everything that matters in life, there's some kind of story. stories take us somewhere else, somewhere different and new. a good story has the ability to transport me to a completely different mindset, it can take me out of myself completely and make me feel the most foreign things. i'm not a huge fan of knights, wizards, magic, that whole fantasy genre, but when i first read the lord of the rings when i was younger, it spoke to me on a completely different level than any book i'd ever read before. it sucked me into this universe and told me an incredibly dense and vivid story that swept me up.
the best stories sweep you up. even now, reading lord of the rings wraps me into the story so much that i forget that i'm reading a fantasy story. i thinkvreal stories, stories that ring true even if they're fiction, do so because they present us with ideas and concepts that are so foreign to us in our culture. i feel like bravery is hard to find nowadays. not just hard to find in our culture but hard to find in myself. reading good stories makes me believe in those things like bravery. like courage and love and hope and redemption.
other than the fact that i know the dark knight is going to be an all around great movie, another reason i'm so excited about it is that there have been two instances i can think of where i've been conscious that i was about to take part in an incredible story experience. i wasn't aware of what i was reading when i started lord of the rings, and only after having reread it bunches of times have i realized how wonderful those books are and what a great story the whole thing is. going into it i didn't know though. the last harry potter was the first time when i really realized that it was such an incredible story and i was about to immerse myself in the final chapter of the whole tale. that i was about to read the conclusion to one of the best epic stories i'd ever read for the very first time. it's like there have really only been like less than ten albums where i knew going into it that it was potentially life changing music that i was about to listen to for the first time. it's an exciting thing for me to realize what i'm going into, how important what i'm going into really is to me, and to go into it and just experience it and enjoy it. the dark knight is really the second time that's ever happened in my life.
and it's about a superhero. childish but heroes are so important today. there is so much more i want to write about this movie but for now this is it. it's already in my Top 5 Movies list and i've only yet seen the trailer.
-jon
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