A couple more Dark Knight thoughts

[eye_of_a_cat]

I liked Batman Begins, and probably a little better than the sequel as a film in its own right, although Heath Ledger deserves all the praise he's getting and probably the posthumous Oscar as well for The Dark Knight. Setting up the Joker's introduction in Batman Begins as something Batman is directly responsible for - you go around the city in a mask and a cape and fight crime like you're in, well, a cartoon, and the bad guys are going to end up changing in response - was a particularly neat segue. The Joker is not working with the Mafia so that the film can illustrate conventional organised crime in some exaggerated film-noir chiaruscoro way; the Joker is not, in fact, working with the Mafia at all in any sense beyond (it seems) wanting something to do of an afternoon. The Joker's the same kind of bad guy that Batman is a good guy, and I appreciated that the film and the teaser in Batman Begins made enough out of that to take all the 'you're just like me!' beyond a script-filling Bad Guy vs Good Guy cliche.

How-ever. I kind of feel that the film contradicted itself on that very issue with the Harvey Dent plot. Batman chooses to sacrifice his own reputation to preserve Harvey Dent's image as the better-than-life golden boy, after the competitive bickering over Rachel Dawes in which he seemed to be teasing Dent for how comical that all sounded, because in the end that's what Gotham needs whether it's true or not. But.... didn't we just establish that this kind of logic resulted in Gotham ending up with the Joker in the first place? Hm.

Comments

[akaihyo.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was also unconvinced with "the hero the city needs" pseudo-philosophy. Especially as it was very unclear as to what Gotham needed, even from the point of view of the characters involved.

Still, quite a enjoyable movie.

[kashicat.livejournal.com]

I might even have bought the "hero the city needs" stuff if it had been built up more slowly and fully and plausibly. But there was so much in the movie that I didn't think they had the time to buid up every plot and subplot properly.