Same here. Much rather the feeling of it than someone explaining it verbally in detail.
This thread and the quoted post raise a good point, actually, which may be too in-depth for this board, but here it is anyway for those who care:
Cinematically,
The Dark Knight is actually quite horrendous. Rather than using visual storytelling--the essence of cinema--everything in the film is established and explained through dialogue. It's like a stage play, not a movie, which is one-dimensional, lazy filmmaking. But! when viewed from that perspective, I actually think
The Dark Knight is brilliant, honestly. I enjoyed the movie, it's a great story, gloriously crafted, phenomenally written, but it's a terrible piece of
cinema (in fact, the most "cinematic" thing about the movie is Heath Ledger's performance).
The best movies work visually, creating atmosphere and emotion without speaking a word. That's why movies like
E.T.,
Star Wars, and
The Wizard Of Oz have lasted as long as they have and why each new generation, despite their ever-increasing "old movie" biases and ever-decreasing attention spans, falls in love with those movies, because they work on a fundamental level of visual storytelling. And I'm not talking about action sequences, I'm talking about executing any type of scene effectively harnessing the universal visual language of movies. It's easy and boring to just
say something in a movie through dialogue, but if the filmmaker
shows it to the audience, makes them
feel it, that's when the experience of a movie becomes more than a passive experience, more than just a flat screen in front of you--it becomes an
interactive experience where you're engulfed into the world of the movie. Only visual storytelling can create such an experience. A more recent example is
The Sixth Sense. Why did audiences go crazy for that movie? The story is actually quite plain and sluggish, not the makings of a $600 million blockbuster. It's because M. Night Shyamalan, in the Spielbergian tradition, utilized the visual storytelling language to a hypnotically potent effect and audiences responded to that language whether they knew it or not.
A Superman movie can, without a doubt, contain such emotional visual storytelling because we know that the material provides glorious opportunities--any movie does, but especially a colorful morality myth like Superman--it just comes down to whether the director knows how to take advantage of such opportunities. So in this thread, when we're talking about "emotion," we're not talking about dialogue. We're talking about character, atmosphere, and the talent of the director.
Again, I point to
Superman For All Seasons as a great jumping off point. Anyone who hasn't read that comic needs to go out right now and buy it. You'll thank me later.
