Forgot to say, I saw the movie in IMAX a few nights back, and it was pretty impressive even when I had to sit in the first row off to the side (you can definitely get motion sickness watching IMAX films) as far as I'm concerned if you're going to be talking about a film you best see it twice.
So, second time around, the things I liked I liked more, but the little nagging things never went away, and I noticed more of them this time. Dark Knight remains the movie with the most plot seams / gaps / holes I've ever noticed. For instance, if this universe has any rules at all, Mr. Reese has to make an appearance in the third movie, as he apparently had legitimate enough claims to knowing who Batman is to get on television, and we can certainly assume that the third movie will contain a plot about people trying to figure out the identity of the Batman. But the universe really doesn't have any rules beyond what makes a thriller, and Reese won't make an appearance because that would be far too easy. If the Joker can manage to rig an entire hospital with cheap explosives unnoticed (and the cops wouldn't use the fucking explosive detectors they used on the bridges to find the explosives in the hospital) and crash a high-society fundraiser high on a skyscraper without getting even threatened by the cops, or blow up a firetruck on a street cleared by the cops without anybody noticing (and why the fuck couldn't they go around a different way that was clearly shown instead of falling into the obvious trap?), then characters can mysteriously disappear, whatever. I don't know why it irks me so much in this particular case. Probably because Nolan set the movies up as not particularly fantastical and thus the relatively common leaps of logic that come with movies like this stand out more than they usually would. Were it not for the uniformly fantastic performances I wouldn't really like the Dark Knight.
And man, Nolan needs to get a second unit guy to handle his hand-to-hand scenes or something. Just awfully shot.
Also, if Bruce Wayne got a really bad sore throat, would people suddenly realize he was Batman?