Movies | Data Science
Movie Review with Data Analysis: The Dark Knight
Commentary on One of the Greatest Flims Ever Made with Data Analytics
The second entry to the highly acclaimed The Dark Knight Trilogy is one of the best works of Director Christopher Nolan. This film was released in 2008 as part of Nolan's Batman trilogy, and it has become a landmark in the world of cinema, setting a higher standard for superhero storytelling.
Today, we will provide a literal movie commentary and collect and analyze data.
Movie Review
One of the striking features of the film that leaves a mark is the conflict between Batman and Joker, which continues to evolve and metaphorically explores the thin line between order and anarchy. Health Ledger’ Joker is more than just a psychopathic criminal mastermind. He is an agent of chaos who wants to “watch the world burn.”
Christian Bale returns as Bruce Wayne/Batman, and his performance is as compelling as ever. The character's internal struggle is palpable as he grapples with the moral dilemmas of being a symbol of justice in a city plagued by corruption. The film also introduces Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent, the district attorney who undergoes a tragic transformation into Two-Face. Eckhart's portrayal is equally riveting, adding another layer of depth to the narrative.
Nolan's direction is masterful, and the film's technical aspects are top-notch. Wally Pfister's cinematography captures the gritty realism of Gotham City, while Hans Zimmer's score, with its haunting notes and relentless beats, intensifies the suspense and drama. The action sequences are expertly choreographed, showcasing Batman's prowess without relying on flashy CGI.
Data Analytics
Numerous professional critics have written their reviews of The Dark Knight. In addition to that, over two million IMDb users have rated the movie on the platform, making it the second most-voted movie after The Shawshank Redemption. It is now time to apply data science techniques to understand the insights from these critics and IMDb users.
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a popular review-aggregation website for movies and television. It provides an average score of critics' opinions, known as the Tomatometer, and an Audience score for each movie. Additionally, the website features headline reviews from critics, which are easily accessible through external links leading to the full review. These reviews contain a brief paragraph with the critic's overall thoughts about the movie.
The Dark Knight movie received 338 reviews from critics, including reviews from the top 63 highly respected critics. Their words are valued by readers and media alike. For this project, we retrieved, cleaned, and analyzed the headline reviews from these top 63 critics. The word cloud of these headline reviews is presented in the figure below.
We can see positive words like "entertain", "best", and "like", as well as mentions of Heath Ledger and Christopher Nolan.
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that gathers reviews of various forms of media, such as films, TV shows, music albums, video games, and books. The website calculates the average score from all the reviews it collects for each product and features headline reviews from renowned critics. Metacritic is popularly known for being more critical in its review scores than Rotten Tomatoes.
The figure below shows the word cloud of the headline reviews.
We can also observe critics mostly discussing Heath Ledger's Joker, Christopher Nolan's work, and Christian Bale's Batman.
Critics praise the movie, especially Nolan's direction, Ledger's performance, and the action sequences.
IMBd
IMDb is an online database containing information on movies, TV series, home videos, video games, and streaming content. It includes cast, crew, biographies, plot summaries, trivia, ratings, and reviews.
The demographic (age group & sex) of voters in IMDb for a specific show or movie is always public.
Twitter is a widely used social media platform where people share their thoughts and opinions on various topics. It is possible to extract public data from Twitter, clean it up, store it in a data frame, and visualize it. This can provide valuable insights into the trends and discussions happening on the platform.
This study analyzed 20,000 public tweets written in English with #theDarkKnight.
Character Network Analysis
We can visualize the relationships between the movie's main characters, taking our approach further. Network Analysis is a set of methods used to visualize networks and describe specific characteristics of overall network structure. Here, we will analyze the network of characters in The Dark Knight. Rather than just showing one simple random network, we can experiment with different kinds of layouts without a network.
We can specify the layout for the plot. That is the (x,y) coordinates where each node will be placed. R package igraph has a few different layouts built-in that will use different algorithms to find an optimal distribution of nodes.
The most popular layouts are force-directed. These algorithms, such as Fruchterman-Reingold, try to position the nodes so that the edges have a similar length and there are as few crossing edges as possible. We aim to generate layouts where nodes closer to each other share more common connections than those farther apart.
Notes: Choosing a different seed will generate different layouts.
The Dark Knight is one of the greatest movies ever made because of the outstanding achievements of the whole cast and crew. It will continue to be experienced, discussed, analyzed, and celebrated for its influence on world cinema.
