But it is not drek 2 or crybaby-man3, its the best superhero movie by a couple thousand miles.

a B+ is slapping and spitting on The Dark Knight.

I just have respect for Box, and it saddens me that he didn't like it is all, plus it is slightly offensive that he claims we all have a weak sense of morality, which is what I am getting from his post.

People, I'm writing my review. Just wait a bit longer before passing judgement!


And for the record: I had a fantastic time watching this film. It was a great experience.



And re: backlash. Oh please. That's almost insulting.

DIB, we're overreacting at this point my friend

I know.

overreacting A B+ for the Dark Knight is like giving a B level film an F.

This "pedestrian" thing has me mildly intrigued, to the point that I'm willing to lower my pitchfork slightly, but still in attack position.

Box does have a point. The movie does embrace certain ideas that many would find to be unacceptable. One such idea is that the ends justify the means. You can completely take away civil liberties if it means you end up catching the bad guy. Or even that it is in the best interest of people at certain times to be lied to. I do disagree with Box, however, that these things show weak morality.

Ignorance is bliss.

I thought Box's point was that the script isnt as smart as it thinks it is....

Was he? If so, woops. It's late at night and I may have read his post a little too fast.

But the bloody script is better than it thinks it is.

Hmm, I could see that complaint having more weight against BB than TDK, actually.

Ehem....Backlash.

Seriously, Frenchie is right, let Box have his moment, why are we getting so fed up, afterall it is going to be nominated for Best Picture

It has no weight against the dark knight, negative figures certain.

The Dark Knight



Let me begin in two ways.


First, I suppose as a counterpoint to my critique below, let me say outright that I found this to be a marvellously entertaining, stunningly beautiful film which was brave, thoughtful, and daring. The acting is great, the writing usually good, and the narrative, though occasionally tiresome, generally taut. If any film was meant to be seen on IMAX, this one is it. The vistas of Chicago (Gotham) and Hong Kong are magnificent. The camera knows this, and the film lingers intermittently on the grandeur of the cityscapes, as if it is that grandeur that, in its assurance of how large the setting is, imbues the action itself with its own kind of grandeur. If The Dark Knight seems epic, it is in part because of the two cities it showcases.

Second, my viewing of the film was affected by my personal understanding of the history of Batman as a figure. Based on what I have read (and I don't claim this to be the truth, I only want to share with you my understanding of Batman's history), is as follows: Batman was created in the late 1930s/early 1940s, and from the outset signified a more serious superhero than the likes of Superman. The character, however, quickly came to function as a kind of fool in a bat costume, with several writers/artists engaging him in an essentially fun, ridiculous series of adventures, such as those that entailed him fighting aliens. This is how Batman managed to remain popular despite a crackdown on comics in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the figure became at once more serious than before, with storylines such as those involving aliens being cut out, and at the same time, because of the ridiculously campy show, more foolish than ever. I believe it was Frank Miller who, in the 1980s, established the foundations for the kind of overly serious Batman which we are now most familiar with. The first four Batman films , I think, vacillate between these two representations of Batman, with Batman and Robin pushing Batman once again toward the camp extreme. Batman Begins, and even more so The Dark Knight, form the other extreme.

I want to take this last point up because I think it's important. Although I've tried to avoid reviews, comments, etc. regarding the film until now, I couldn't help but notice that several people commented that this doesn't feel like "just" a superhero film, that it seems like something else. I think those people are right, and I think that this is exactly what the Nolans were aiming for. Three questions arise: How does this idea relate to the fact that this film is so avowedly serious? Why is it different? How is it different?

Regarding the first question (and I think the second), I don't think it's possible to answer in any other way but to say that this is what the Nolans decided would make The Dark Knight a film outside the bounds of the conventional superhero film (I mean, its seriousness). The implicit assumption here is that superhero films do have conventions, and therefore boundaries. That's true enough, and The Dark Knight does not rid itself entirely of all of them (how could it?). So, you have a fixation on gadgets and equipment and stunning vehicles (is it just me, or is there a heavier fixation on this stuff in Batman films? I think it's because unlike Spider-Man or Superman, Batman has no superpowers other than those his equipment supplies him with). And so also, you have an emphasis on action (and the action sequences are wonderfully done).

Much more importantly, the relational structure between various characters that forms the basis of all superhero comics I can think of exists here as well: you have the superhero (or anti-hero), the villain(s), and what may broadly be called the crowd ( and which includes those 'normal' humans who assist the hero).

But this is where the film becomes strange. The film is different, more serious, if you will, because it meddles with that structure. And this is where we get into the morality of it all.

Let me map the simplest of moral structures onto the relational structure I outlined above. So, we have the hero/anti-hero who is good, the villain who is bad/evil, and the crowd, which moves between the good and the evil (it's never this simple, not if the comic/film is good, but let's use this structure as a starting point). Batman, by his very nature and because of his personal history, makes for an uncomfortable fit between the moral and performative dimension of the hero figure. What I mean, simply, is that his status as a hero does not automatically go along with the moral assumptions of that role; Batman isn't a hero because he's particularly good; he's a hero because he doesn't want to be bad/evil, and because if he were not a hero, he probably would be bad. Remember that in Batman Begins, he almost killed the man who killed his parents. His entire moral code as outlined in The Dark Knight is not to perform that ultimate act (ie, murder). The result is that Batman is perpetually defined by what he is not (ie, the villain). His function in the film as a superhero is a relational one. The ending of the film makes this very clear: he is whatever Gotham needs him to be at the moment. This is a vastly different conception of the superhero than is found in the case of Spider-Man or Superman. This is why, for example, the Spider-Man films are so different (better in some ways, far worse in others, but essentially incomparable).

The film seizes on the status of Batman as a relational hero to subvert the structure I outlined above. It does so through the figures of the Joker and Harvey Dent.

The rampant corruption in Gotham forms in some ways a necessary background to all of this, but corrupt officials and cops are nothing news in comics or elsewhere. This is part and parcel of the ambiguous position of the crowd with respect to right and wrong. Some are bad, some are good, sometimes almost everyone is bad, and at other times (such as on the two boats), it seems almost everyone ends up doing the right thing. There is nothing unusual in all of this.

There is, however, something very unusual about the Joker figure and Harvey Dent's plight, and in both cases it is a matter of extremity. In the case of the Joker, it is the extreme position he takes with respect to morality (essentially, that he is outside of it), and in the case of Harvey Dent, it is the extremity of the reversal in his position during the progression of the film, away from the white knight toward Two Face. The two are interrelated.

The Joker considers himself to be an agent of chaos. He calls on Harvey Dent to create anarchy. Is this actually the case? In my opinion, no. The Joker's actions are not an effect of his amorality. They are an affect through which the illusion of amorality is expressed. The Joker is the most moral of characters; precisely because he insists on his status as a being outside the bounds of morality, he repositions morality as a central conception in his worldview. He needs the moral framework to function in order to define himself with respect to and against it (thus, I think, his insistence that he needs Batman at the end; Batman as a conduit, a means of rendering this futile rejection/need for conventional morality which troubles the Joker so much). But he does so in a way that subsumes him under the moral framework.

The reason for that, and the reason why I find the Nolans' formulation of morality to be pedestrian, is that the means through which the Joker expresses his status as an agent of chaos are a series of games that essentially posit a moral dilemma. Thus, the choice between Rachel and Harvey. Thus, also, the choice between the two boats. Either alternative is impossible. By their nature, moral dilemmas strain the bounds of morality; you can't do the right thing in such situations.

But the point here is that, whether you do or not, you are aware that the options you have available to you are rendered impossible because of their moral implications. Moral dilemmas, their status as games from the Joker's perspective, rely on the potency of their function as sources of intense moral tension. Batman gets the people on the two boats out of the moral dilemma they are in by preventing the Joker from blowing both boats up. The decision not to blow up the other boat does not get either party out of the situation, no matter how much the film insists that they are good people for making that decision. In deciding not to blow up the other boat, both essentially condemned themselves to death. Is this right or wrong? Is it right to do so when you have dozens of other people, including children, on your boat? It's arguable, which is my point.

If the Joker really was an agent of chaos, he would have blown both boats up irrespective of what the people decided (one suspects he'd have done that anyway, but my point is that he wouldn't have given them an option at all).

Moral dilemmas are dirt cheap as a means of rendering a particular scene or story serious. What the Joker does repeatedly in the film is the same thing that happens at the end of Spider-Man 1. Spider-Man has to choose between saving Mary Jane and a bus full of children. He saves both, of course, because that's an entirely different film with different aims. The Dark Knight insists on being a much more serious film, and so the stakes are higher. Rachel dies; the people on the boats would have died too if not for Batman's intervention, and at various other moments in the film, people die when demands are not met in time (or even if they are met).

Getting back to Harvey Dent, Dent's transformation into Two Face supposedly marks the Joker's triumph at the end. First, why?

Let me answer this in a perhaps unconventional way by going back to the status of Batman as a relational hero. If Batman is a hero in opposition to the bad guys, what happens when the good guy whom he posits as the correct, conventional, good hero becomes the bad guy?

Batman's answer is to re-position him, Harvet Dent, or least his image, as the good guy again, taking upon himself the features that rendered Dent as Two Face the bad guy.

Let me try to relate some of the seemingly disparate threads in this languorous review here. I said earlier that the Joker operates within a moral framework while disavowing it, and that his turn to moral dilemmas shows that. What he does with Dent betrays a similar dependency on morality. Here, it's not the moral dilemma, but what I suppose we can call vengeance/moral relationalism/relativism which does the work. Basically, Dent's transformation into Two Face is concomitant with his adoption of a morality wherein retaliatory suffering forms the appropriate standard of behaviour. This is partially counteracted by his insistence on chance as a determining factor, but chance seems to have a secondary role here; chance has nothing to do with his decision to track down and kill the people he wants to kill. Chance is only given a function once the course of action is already decided. What I mean is that chance has nothing to do with Two Face looking for the drivers, for example, even if it has something to do with deciding whether they will live or die.

I don't find anything particularly profound or impressive in any of these constructions of (a)morality, and I wouldn't make a big deal out of it if the film did not insist that all of this is so significant. The Joker and Harvey Dent command this film; they are haunting figures, and Batman's association with them renders him a (more) haunting figure as well. But I think this has much more to do with what Ledger, Eckhart, and Bale make of their characters than the writing or the script. There is only that much that they can do, however, and ultimately, I don't find the ideas that underpin the film to be very brilliant. Stated otherwise, I don't think The Dark Knight ever gives us a proper justification for why it is so serious.


B+

I have a little theory on how Joker got some of these bombs around town so easily, like in the Hospital, or under the bridges (preventing Gotham citizens from using them to escape at the end of the movie), or wherever else he might have needed them. Before he was "THE Joker" my guess is that he ran around planting a bunch of random bombs at a bunch of crucial places for any number of reasons. It certainly isn't realistic, but I can see the character doing it adding to the whole chaotic cloak around him, and how he always seems in control of it.

Frankly though, I like how it didn't need to be explained. Not only does it leave it up to the imagination, but it totally adds to Joker's character and his complete devotion to insanity.

He also has like the entire mob and crime world on his side, so it wouldn't be that hard to get someone to plant it for him. Or even just go in there without makeup himself, he'd probably be hard to recognize.

Keep rockin' out Thegun. Ignore the Batfreaks.

If we don't nitpick every review then how are we going to get the most posts for a review thread?

I thought I'd rescue this from the depths of spamalot hell... Maggy boy covered all sides of TDK's greatness beautifully

Gonna bump this up to make sure everybody catches it. Wonderful post there Magnus.

Box, Dent and the Joker are human, to expect them to perfectly execute there philosophy I think is asking to much, Nolan also likes to make his characters as human as possible as well, and I think in both cases the characters are clearly crazy.

I also think that the Joker knew allowing the two boats the chance to blow each other up would cause much more chaos than simply doing it himself, his goal is to produce chaos not be chaos itself.