Your phrasing of the question is too charitable to the "new" fight editing style, epitomized by Nolan's Batman Begins. (I completely expect Dark Knight to follow suit, although I have not yet seen it.)

Not only is it not better than most "classic" fight scenes, it is far, far inferior. You give Begins a pass, noting its ninja themes; but I left that movie able to believe only that Nolan was either A) too lazy to choreograph an actual fight scene or B) technically incapable of it.

As a big fan of Momento and, to a lesser extent, Insomnia, I don't want to hold such perjorative thoughts of Nolan. But that indecipherable fight editing left me no other option.

“We look forward to seeing your new film. When do you start production?”

Hm, yes, well put. Meanwhile, all you folks who've never run a country, sit the hell down and leave poor George Bush alone! Talk to us when your name begins with "Premier."

I will reiterate that I love a lot of Chris Nolan's other stuff. But I wish he'd arranged some sort of tag team with another director who cares to string together a coherent fight scene, for those parts of the Batman films. Something like the successful Rodriguez/Tarantino/Miller collab on Sin City might've been nice.

Cheers!

Here here.

I read a revies that Bale's martial arts' were a low-tech pleasure to behold, but damn if I could see any quality thanks to Nolan's (lack of) choreography.

Look, sometimes I think the choppiness works, especially for brawl type fights, but when our hero is using the martial arts- jujitsu, karate, kung-fu, or even Jackie Chan's Chinese Opera inspired stuff- I want to SEE it. The martial arts are just that- art forms. I would like to be able to appreciate them. They're beautiful and exciting and deserve to be displayed. Also, the visceral street-fight or bar-room brawl are great when they're choppy and fast and disorienting, but the mixture of the brawl type camera work with martial-arts fighting style in a word, sucks. I find myself continually disappointed that I can't see my hero dispatch the villain because since I can't figure out what the hell he did, I don't believe that he did it. It's unsatisfying and lame. I would love for Nolan to pull back the camera during a fight scene just once and let us see what is going on. I always think of Jet Li's scenes in Lethal Weapon 4- his simple Tai-Chi flavoured style was goregeous in it's simplicity and lethal efficiency.