| my batman thoughts, let me show you them. LONG IS LONG. |
[24 Jul 2008|01:26am] |
To tell you the truth I was not interested in watching The Dark Knight. I'm quite tired of the Batman franchise: how many times can you tell the same story over and over again until it just gets old? No matter who Batman battles, it's always the same theme that gets repeated in every movie: Gotham City is filled with crazy criminals, Batman is conflicted, maybe just like them. Over the years as each movie became progessively darker each movie sported increasingly darker Batmans. It felt exploitative after a while, so when Batman Begins was on screen, I never bothered watching*.
The marketing hype for The Dark Knight did little to impress me either. It seemed as if they couldn't make Batman any darker, so they decided to make the villains darker instead, and the Joker transformed into a creature from some horror movie. Anyway, curiosity got the better of me, so I went to watch it.
What worked:
1. The movie was believable. Despite the amorality of many of the characters, the movie is about morals: a member of the audience will be able to place himself or herself in any difficult moral situation the various characters find themselves in. On one hand, the movie reveals that in times of distress and difficulty, the only thing we have are our values. The characters who choose survival over values are punished, the characters who choose values over survival are rewarded. On the other, the movie also questions the impracticality of moral consistency. Batman, for an example, will not break his own rule of not killing, and when the other side has no wish to obey that same principle, it becomes impractical.
2. The Joker was believable, and thankfully, not a mindless horror creature. Yes, I could slightly empathise with Heath Ledger's Joker; one only needs to observe members of anarchic subcultures on the Internet to fully understand his values. "Why did you set a virus out on the university cybercafe?" -- "Oh, I did it for a little anarchy; I did it for the lulz". "Why do what you do, Joker?" -- "It's fun!". Even the choice of words of the Joker uses sounds like stuff I've heard on the Net: "I am going to conduct a social experiment!".
I am worried about is that whoever who will replace Heath Ledger might not get it that the Joker isn't about creepiness or psycho-ness or evil-ness or whatever. As mentioned by the Joker himself: he is an anarchist looking for a little bit of fun. And I may just be getting older, but I am also worried that we have such a figure shown in the movies and getting glorified for it (even if it is just an acting performance). The Joker is an anarchist and is everything anarchists desire: complete anonymity, complete freedom, and complete power over the behaviour of others. So maybe no one's going to actually copy what he does, but what are the chances for me if I bet that some people think that he's really cool?
What did not:
The Joker was believable; Two-Face, unfortunately, was not. Part of this lies in the fact that Rachel is probably the DULLEST love interest I've seen Batman ever paired with. She irritated the heck out of me in the interogation scene: fierce like Tyra Banks is fierce! She's supposed to be gutsy, intelligent, and seductive; but she is none. She's pretty, but after Nicole Kidman and Michelle Pfeiffer at their prime, she is just pretty.
And unfortunately, she becomes the reason Harvey Dent becomes Two-Face. Except everytime he gets upset over her, I keep thinking to myself: eh, why are *you* so upset? -- frankly, I'm happy that what happened to her happened to her.
In conclusion:
The movie is less of a superhero movie ala Iron Man or Spiderman and more similar to one of those more critically acclaimed Hong Kong action movies, where good and evil is played out in movie gunfights and car chase scenes, and heroes and villains change places in webs of intrigue, friendship and betrayal.
* yes, I read manga that are structured like sitcoms: no matter what the plot is like, it's always the same themes, the same issues, the same kinds of character interactions over and over and over and over. But these manga that I read are comedies.
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