So I went and saw The Dark Knight last Thursday. I had received a series of horrifying phone calls, and was forced to see the film under threat of catapult. This damned movie has become a phenomenon. Even if you don’t care about it, you are obligated to see this thing. It appears to be a perfect storm of marketing, casting, tragedy and timing. Everything just seemed to line up for this picture.
I mean, you have the “tragic” death of the young celebrity. You have two former teen heartthrobs playing your two leads. You have geek dream girl Maggie Gyllenhaal as the female lead. You‘ve got the old respectable white actor in Michael Caine. You got the old respectable black actor in Morgan Freeman. You’ve got the somewhat less old, respectable actor of Gary Oldman; though his respectability is due in part to being confused with Daniel Day-Lewis. You’ve got one of the 10 most recognizable characters to come out of the 20th century battling his most popular villain. You’ve also got that character’s second most important villain. You’ve got Eric Roberts, star of DOA: Dead or Alive and Less Than Perfect. . .
Okay, so Eric Roberts probably didn’t draw much. . .
But Julia Roberts’s brother notwithstanding, we are still looking at a movie that brings in more money on a weekday two weeks after opening than most movies do on opening weekend.
It is an enjoyable enough flick, although a bit numbing. I only had problems with the characters, dialogue, plot, action sequences and themes. (I had no problem with the setting. Wooo! Go Chicago! Batman rode his fancy Batpod through the Metra Station by Millennium Park! Woo!)
Here are some Dark Knight Discussion topics!
1. How does the Joker scout his criminal henchmen so well? They have to be smart enough to remember directions, amoral enough to shoot their partners in the back, and dumb enough to think that the same thing won’t happen to them.
2. Does it really matter that Heath Ledger is playing the Joker? The character doesn’t have many of the Joker’s traits. He doesn’t have the bleached skin. He doesn’t have squirting flowers or joy buzzers. His victims don’t start laughing hysterically, and they don’t die with twisted grins. With the way that the film’s villain leaves esoteric clues for the Batman to find, he resembles the Riddler as much as the Joker. Seriously, why would the Joker leave DNA samples on a playing card in order to show who his next batch of victims are going to be?
3. And those folks that tested this playing card clue, did they just start matching this discovered DNA against everybody in Gotham?
4. And another thing about the Joker, do you think that the Nolans were reading a lot of Kohlberg moral dilemmas while they were creating this incarnation of the character? “I know, we’ll make him an immoral sociologist!” Seriously, I was waiting for the Joker to ask whether or not it is morally acceptable to steal medicine for a dying spouse.
5. So replacing Katie Holmes with Maggie Gyllenhaal is like replacing Meg Ryan with Cate Blanchett. It’s like replacing a Big Mac with Kobe beef. Maggie Gyllenhaal is so much better for this part. She seems smarter, stronger and more capable than Tom Cruise’s child-bride could ever hope to be. Plus, she appears damaged enough to be a proper Batman love interest.
6. It’s nice to have a Batman love interest that seems strong, capable and morally upright. Unfortunately Rachel Dawes was killed off in order to jump start the third act. Such is life. Here is the thing, though: wouldn’t it have been cool if Dawes had become Two-Face? What makes Two-Face compelling as a Batman villain is the backstory. Harvey Dent was a good friend of Bruce Wayne, and one the earliest allies of the Batman. When he turns into Two-Face, the loss is two-fold. Now, in the film Dent has to be introduced to Wayne. Batman and Dent start to form a minor alliance. Movie Dent becoming Two-Face isn’t a loss to Batman/Wayne, it is a loss to Gotham city. Rachel Dawes becoming Two-Face would’ve been emotionally crippling. Comic nerds would’ve been upset, but hell, Marvel has been feminizing all their villains lately. Just ask that “I’m Just Saying” guy over at the nexus.
7. Is that Limey cocksucker Nolan making fun of America while laughing all the way to the bank? (I’ve seen somebody laugh 2/3 of the way to the bank once or twice. ) It certainly seems to be the theme of the Dark Knight that democracy, truth, freedom and civil rights are good ideas, but only when nothing is at stake. Let’s take a look:
A. Batman violates the sovereignty of a foreign nation, and kidnaps a Chinese national. A little more detective work of the Batman’s behalf might’ve avoided this potentially deadly international incident.
B. Batman violates the privacy of every Gotham Citizen with a cellphone with his improbable wiretapping/ sonar device. Batman needs to listen to Sherriff Andy Taylor about such things. (Okay so the video clip is missing now, but trust me, it was good!)
C. Harvey Dent, Gotham’s great white hope, fully supports the Roman notion of suspending democracy and appointing a dictator in times of peril.
D. The votes of the majority of people on both boats (each to blow up the other) go ignored like so many hanging Chads in Florida.
E. The symbolic reputation of a murderer (I.e. Dent) is deemed more important than the truth of the situation and reality at large. The movie says that people will be better off believing a big lie, or was that the big lie? All I know is that real Chicagoans in real Chicago come perfectly equipped to handle our politicians’ feet of clay.
F. Batman risks the health and safety of innocent Gothamites by making Mob money radioactive. (How did he do that again?) Doesn’t the Batman care about the McDonald’s worker who sells Fat Tony his daily McGriddle? Does Batman want that kid to die of cancer? What about the in-the-dark bank teller who has to count all this money and dies of radiation poisoning? Or what about the poor waiter at the Italian restaurant who stores his cash in his apron? He’s sterile now. Thanks a lot Batman!
8. What about that cell phone nonsense, anyway? Am I supposed to believe that 1 guy covering 10 million phones is going to be able to tell Batman anything useful? It’d be false positive city, population: Fox. Am I really supposed to believe that Batman can hack into all the cellphones in Gotham, even the ones with out of state area codes, and install sonar? First off, he’s killing the battery life of those phones, and probably using up all those people’s minutes. And how does this create a realtime 3d picture of all of Gotham again? (This is almost as bad as Daredevil’s radar sense picking up the cones and rods of Elektra’s eyes in that piece of crap.) And I know that there are a lot of cellphones in the world, but would the hostages, quickly removed from their hospital beds really have cellphones on them?
9. And speaking of those hostages, couldn’t Morgan Freeman have just called up Commissioner Gordon and told him that the clowns were the hostages? He has all the cellphones in the city coming in to him, but can’t get a line out? Shouldn’t the Swat team have known that those were the hostages anyway? Don’t those guys watch movies?
10. How in the blue hell does Gordon get to be Police Commissioner? In two movies he has never shown any leadership qualities or any assertiveness at all. He never stands up to Batman, and places his trust in all the wrong people. Movie Gordon sucks.
11. Speaking of Movie Gordon, how and why did he fake his death again? Was it a spur of the moment thing, decided after he jumped in front of the mayor? Did he plan on doing that ahead of time? How many people did he have to let in on this conspiracy? Certainly an EMT driver, and the medical examiner, and whoever was in charge of assigning him to drive the armored car, etc. I know that the movie tried to explain the why by saying that he did it to protect his family. Was Gordon ever threatened directly, or indirectly, enough to merit such a swerve? What was the point of this crap, aside from jerking around the audience?
12. And speaking of Gordon’s family, did you ever notice that he’s the only person in Gotham with one? Dent has a potential fiancée, but no mom or brothers or sisters or anything. Batman and Alfred have no family, naturally. Rachel doesn’t seem to have a family. The Joker doesn’t even have a right hand man.
13. Who was in charge of the quality assurance with regards to dialogue in this picture? The hero it has is the hero it deserves and not the hero it wants, but the hero it might get on the new moon when. . .
14. And speaking of dialogue, you too can learn to speak like Christian Bale’s Batman!
Step 1: Pout out your lower lip a la “Wanda the ugly girl” on In Living Color. Make sure all of your bottom row of teeth are visible.
Step 2: Do a bad impersonation of Richard Moll’s Two-Face voice from Batman: The Animated Series.
Step 3: Say a bunch of simplistic action hero lines like “You’ll be in a padded cell forever!”
There you go!
15. Wait a second, how can Two-Face just walk away from that horrifying car crash he caused? Did he get Darkman-esque burn victim powers? He was just in a hospital bed! He runs a high risk of infection with his exposed muscle tissue.
At the very least, he should be worried about his eye falling out.
16. How come Two Face was shoe-horned into the movie only to be killed off unceremoniously? Did they think he was Venom or something? Man, I bet the film-makers are kicking themselves for killing off the living actor’s character and not the dead guy’s.
17. Practical effects and stuntwork, these are nice things in a CGI reliant world. Although, I would’ve enjoyed that Semi flipping over a bit more had I not seen it 7,008 times previously in previews.
18. Speaking of the action, am I the only one that was confused as hell during the first action sequence? You know the one with all the Batmen and the pointless Scarecrow cameo? I couldn’t tell which was the real deal. We hadn’t seen the real Batman in the film prior to that scene. The fake Batmen looked as much like the Batman of my mind’s eye as Christian Bale does. Couldn’t a fake Batman have dressed in blue and grey Halloween costume style outfit or something, so I could tell these guys apart? Batman doesn’t even get his own theme in the movie because of The Dark Knight‘s fancy pants score.
I was just hella confused.
19. That Batman barfight, prior to him dropping Eric Roberts, was also terrible. All I could see were some random punches in the dark. It looked like some sort of multi-player melle version of Urban Champion for the NES. Batman has spent 20 years studying the martial arts; can’t he do better than that? Any given Batman cartoon has better fight scenes than that thing. I would rather have had a Pow and a Bam.
20. Did anybody else get the feeling that Nolan and company were just trying to make a bigger budget version of Heat with Joker and Batman replacing Deniro and Pacino?
All right, it is just me.
