The Gaming Den

My only complaint, and it is a complaint I've had since the 1992 movie (I didn't know any better in the 1989 movie) is that the Batman I know and love wouldn't use demolitions / guns so freely if at all.

I was a regular collector throughout the 90's but stopped in 2001 or so. Maybe Batman has changed. Maybe he carries a gun now.

But I doubt it.

I could buy demolitions, since Batman's thing against guns was a psychological thing based on the fact that his parents were shot with a gun. Since Golden-Age Batman, at least, vowed to retire if he ever used a gun, profligate use of guns is kind of odd.

Batman doesn't use any guns in the movie except for his grappling gun. He does use a lot of explosives though.

Bullshit.

On the Batcycle, he is constantly using the guns to blow things out of his way, even firing into a crowded shopping mall to knock out a glass door!

Oh right, those guns. Forgot about the ones on his car/bike.

You do know that Golden Age Batman originally carried the gun that killed his parents and used it on criminals as a form of poetic justice, right?

Like everybody, I was impressed with Ledger's performance. I like that the Joker went from being a genius trickster-clown to an anarchist with a cheerfully cynical view of human nature and ideas about how to prove he's right. His 'social experiment' at the end of the movie was twisted, but it's actually an uplifting moment when he's proven wrong--by the criminals, no less.

Oh, and the chase scene/street fight was pure awesome.

I saw The Dark Knight tonight (or last night, now) and it's as good as advertised. It may be the best superhero movie ever made. I figured I would come in at a disadvantage, since I never saw the first movie in this run of the franchise, Batman Begins. Fortunately, the film gave enough clues about the characters' past history that I was able to get up to speed.

The most obvious starting point for a review, given that this is the second Batman movie in two decades to feature The Joker, is a comparison between Heath Ledger's Joker and Jack Nicholson's interpretation of the role in the 1989 Tim Burton movieBatman. Though I didn't see anything that immediately struck me as Oscar-worthy in Ledger's performance (possibly because I've heard so much hype about it that my expectations were too high), it's arguably the best performance of a comic-book villain role ever. Ledger's performance is much more nuanced than Nicholson's (at least to the extent that a sociopathic nutjob character can be nuanced). While Nicholson was over-the-top and played up the cartoonish aspects of the character, Ledger's Joker is relatively blase about the psychotic things he's saying most of the time. That makes the trademark maniacal laughter all the more chilling when he actually brings it out.

Note that by ranking Ledger's performance ahead of Nicholson's, I don't intend to put down Nicholson's performance or Tim Burton's movie. In fact, the two Batman movies Tim Burton did with Michael Keaton (before Joel Schumacher came along to reduce the franchise to one step above lite musical theater) stand the test of time even today, in my opinion. And I will always have fond memories of Jack Nicholson's joker from my first round of college days. To me, the two visions of Batman given in those movies are two legitimate interpretations of the character that are both respectful of its roots. Batman has always been most at home in a nether realm where superhero comics meet hard-boiled detective fiction. Burton's movies were more focused on the superhero part of that sweet spot, while the rebooted franchise focuses more on the pulp detective aspects of the character. While Burton's movies were stylized comic-book myths, the new movies are set in a Gotham that resembles a contemporary big city and emphasize the politics of both the police department and big-time organized crime.

In fact, to a certain extent, one of the conflicts in The Dark Knight is the question of whether people in general are good or evil. One of the Joker's favorite tricks is to give the people of Gotham City incentive to kill one or more people and sit back to see if they'll do it. And the film keeps you in suspense about which side of the fence people mostly fall on right up until the end. I think it's this theme that is responsible for a lot of the critics' assessments that this movie marks the point where comic book movies grow up. The Dark Knight deals with questions of morality in responsibility in much deeper ways than Iron Man, and Iron Man was a pretty darn good movie. This is the difference between a pretty good movie and a great movie. This one's a classic. See it while it's still on the glorious big screen.

It's interesting that they killed Two-Face in this movie but left the Joker alive. It's nice to see that they're not adhering to the rule of the original Batman movie franchise that the villain has to die every time. OTOH, Heath Ledger's untimely demise makes any return of the Joker problematic, as you would need an actor of Heath Ledger's (or at least Jack Nicholson's) caliber to convincingly step into the role.

Anyway, I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that Catwoman will be a major villain in the next film. After all, Batman's just lost his major female crush, so he really needs a hot female villain with a leather and whips fetish.

Apparently for the first year or so of his existence. I'm assuming that the gun went away when he adopted Robin and became a paternal figure for America's youth. By the time Detective Comics #500 was published, it was well-established that Earth Two Batman wouldn't use a gun. Now, I don't know if they ever wrote in a change of heart or just did an unexplained retcon as Golden Age comics were wont to do. The point is, for well over 90% of Batman history, the idea of Batman wantonly using guns was anathema, and most people don't remember far back enough to have heard of the original gun-totin' Batman.

And I did notice that in The Dark Knight, Batman never actually shot a human being with a gun. He came pretty close when he was blowing the rear-view mirrors off of the cars, but he never actually hit anybody. Now it is odd that he put guns on his motorcycle just to shoot inanimate objects.

My comments have nothing to do with the supposed competence or incompetence of the character's physical and literal acts, and everything to do with the effective portrayal of a terrifying person.

What the character literally accomplishes is largely in the realm of the scriptwriter, the director, and (nowadays) the special effects team, and I'm not very interested in commenting on that. This is rather with regards to what the actor has accomplished in making the character into an emotional reality.

Bardem and Ledger both portray men who have embraced a code of behavior and morality at utter odds with what we might term civil society, true psychopaths, and that's a difficult thing to accomplish and bring to life in a way that resonates emotionally. Comparing them to the endless list of Bond villains, I find that not one of Bond's adversaries has ever made a serious emotional impact on me in the fashion that Ledger and Bardem have.

From Goldfinger to Le Chiffre, the Bond villains might scare me if they had a gun pointed at me or such, but the mere fact of their existence isn't frightening to me. They are bad people, and they commit monstrous acts, but they are not portrayed such that they become monsters in my mind as well as on film. In contrast, Bardem and Ledger have both shown me men that shook me emotionally.

The whole boat thing.

If you were on a ferry laced with explosives, and the guy who put said explosives on said ferry told you that you could save yourself by using a detonator that would blow up another ferry full of people, why would you believe him?

You already know he's completely out of his mind, why would you think he's playing straight this time? If I'm on there, I'm assuming he's lying and that each boat has the detonator to it's own ship.