The Dark Knight (spoilers)

[kate_nepveu]

You all will probably be shocked to hear that . . . I thought this was very good.

My reaction may have been helped by my having ramped my expectations down. I inferred from reviews (and confirmed from someone who'd seen it) that I could expect two plot elements, one of which is not to my taste and the other of which I really doubted could be done well. But the first was handled relatively non-sporkily, even if I still would have preferred something else, and the second worked much better than I expected. And I'll give a movie a lot of leeway for head-on engaging with hard questions that Iron Man, for instance, just shrugs aside.

(Speaking of which, I highly recommend The Kids Aren’t All Right: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com, which is fanfic set a year after the end of the movie and done as a pitch-perfect article by Christine Everhart, complete with glossy magazine page mockups. If the movie had been half that smart and complex, I wouldn't have been so bored with it.)

Back to The Dark Knight—so, plot better than I expected, and also, really quite an intense experience. Even at two and a half hours—at one apparent-lull I got up to go to the bathroom, looked at my watch, and said to myself, "I can't believe we still have another hour to go." But when I got back things had jumped into high gear and I don't think I looked at my watch again.

Anyway: Heath Ledger's Joker is indeed astonishing (and, good grief, people, not something to subject your five year old to! There were points at which I thought the movie was almost too dark for almost-thirty-one-year-olds!). The low-key supporting players (Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and Morgan Freeman) were delights. Christian Bale was unobjectionable, which is all that I ask in a Batman, considering, as were Aaron Eckhart and Maggie Gyllenhaal. The action sequences were exciting and visually impressive without killing the entire movie under their weight, and while occasionally they did rely on action-movie lack-of-logic, I was willing to roll with it.

In short: good stuff. And since I suspect this is the end of our new-release summer movie viewing, yay, ending on a satisfying note.

Spoilers:

Right, so, the two plot elements I expected were actually part of the same thing: Rachel gets killed horribly to trigger Harvey Dent's transformation into Harvey Two-Face. Which, first, whee, another woman in a refrigerator! And second, in a movie that already had the Joker, is there really room for another villain?

Well, I still am not quite satisfied with the Rachel thing—yes, true, she wasn't lingeringly raped and tortured to death (*rolls eyes at having to be glad about that*), but as a motivation for Harvey's transformation, I think I would have preferred it to be part of a larger destruction of faith that combined the personal and the professional—maybe make her the target of the Joker's threat to blow up a hospital and have a cop succeed, or something (she says, airily, through her fatigue). But, anyway, I'd resigned myself to her death as a plot element, and it could have been worse.

As for Dent to Two-Face: this worked a lot better than I expected, and I think part of it was the length of the movie. Looked at as a whole, I think one could make a very good argument that the movie is actually about Two-Face and not the Joker, for all that he's the one in the previews. At which point it's not just throwing in another villain at the last minute, it was all leading there from the beginning. And in a more gradual and therefore more plausible way than I was expecting, too, again with the caveat above.

The other spoiler thing of note to me is the scene on the ferries (which, yes, really should have been checked for traps before putting off . . . ) On one hand, of course movie logic demands dragging that out past midnight, for all that I'd hoped that someone would immediately and reflexively just toss the things out the window. On the other, it made the eventual payoff feel earned—especially since, in this movie, I really didn't know which way it would come out. And not hooray-uplifting but skin-of-teeth-escape from our own worst nature—note that on the prisoners' boat, it comes about through an acquiescence to force, and you can't tell me that the guard was supposed to have understood what the prisoner was going to do, even if in retrospect (as Chad noted) his resemblance to Michael Clarke Duncan, who played the Magical Negro of The Green Mile, was striking . . .

(Compare the scene in Spider-Man 2 where the people on the train pass Spidey from hand to hand overhead, like he's Jesus or the Sleeping King, which was just too much.)

Finally, not even Gary Oldman can pull off that awful end-of-movie monologue. (As Chad noted: how weird is it to see Gary Oldman playing subdued? Not what you usually cast him for. But I enjoyed his character a lot, with the minor caveat that I'm not sure whether his blindness about the bus hostages was plot-induced stupidity or intentional stupidity to prove that no-one's perfect and everyone likes things to go as planned. Also, I was completely faked out by his death, and expected the driver in the full-face helmet to be a Joker henchperson.)

(Oh, and it stands alone just fine. There's one little bit in the beginning that doesn't make sense if you haven't seen Batman Begins, the drug dealer in the odd mask, but it really doesn't matter.)

(Additional note: there is a series of special effects late in the movie that I found motion-sick-inducing, but if you're prone to that, you'll spot them almost immediately, and you won't miss anything by squinting through them.)

Comments

[logicalargument.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the movie yet but I've read plenty of spoilers, so I know the basics of what happens. When I noticed that at least one of the promotional tie-ins for the movie included a copy of the graphic novel "The Killing Joke," it started to add up that a major female character in this version of the story would have to die to prove how bad The Joker really is, and yes, cue the "women in refrigerators" syndrome.

I had to check Wikipedia on Rachel Dawes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dawes) to be sure that she had never appeared in the comics (I hadn't seen or heard of her in the comicverse, but there are a lot of comics out there that I haven't read), but given that she doesn't exist as a character in the established Batman mythology, and that Barbara Gordon hasn't been established yet as Batgirl in the Christian Bale movieverse, killing off Rachel would be the only way to get a "Killing Joke" level of emotional impact from any action by the Joker in this movie.

[kate_nepveu]

I haven't seen the first movie and hadn't read that page before now . . . did she really have relationships with _two_ District Attorneys, that is, her bosses?

[skwidly.livejournal.com]

That is the implication in the first movie, although I can't recall how explicit it was, and clearly the case in the second.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Sam showed me that Iron Man fanfic--it's astonishingly good, not least because it's also politics/news-media fanfic with pitch-perfect characterizations of people like Keith Olbermann and Maureen Dowd. Very slick.

[kate_nepveu]

That's good to know--I do my best to avoid most media types, so I couldn't evaluate that, but I'm not surprised.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

expected the driver in the full-face helmet to be a Joker henchperson

Having seen it this evening, I was under the impression that the driver was. Was there a bit that clarified it? I'm just curious--it's probable that I missed things, even obvious ones.

[kate_nepveu]

I'm pretty sure that was the reveal that Gordon wasn't dead after all--revealed when the Joker was standing over Batman on the ground, after Batman ditched the bike, and then Gordon came up and arrested him?

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

I did notice that :) though I hadn't connected the two. hmm. Thanks!

[kate_nepveu]

I welcome correction from others who've seen it, of course.

(This seems to be a movie that's hard to really encompass in one's head. The Washington Post's review seems to think that Harvey Dent will be appearing in the next movie, and the Locus spoilerific essay thinks Lucius's typing his name was his resignation, not the destruction of the espionage machine. If the (semi-)pros can get all that wrong, I can certainly be wrong about this . . . )

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

For my part I thought that Lucius's typing encompassed both his resignation and the machine's shutdown.

The friends who saw the film with me discussed whether Dent is really dead, though at least one sees a body that doesn't move for some minutes; instead, I seem to have missed the part where the SWAT team seizes the Joker from his upside-down position, or kills him, or whatever.

[genarti]

Yes, we discussed the "Is Dent actually dead?" question, too.

My suspicion is that he's not -- or, at least, that Harvey Dent is either dead or in a coma expected to be permanent, or something, but Two-Face is alive and well and presumably in prison/asylum/whatever. The logistics there are a bit problematic, in terms of conspiracy cover-up stuff, but I still think so. In part because we did see the body, but only that he was utterly motionless; there was no pulse-checking and headshake or anything like that.

And in part because, as one of the friends I saw it with said, if he's dead, that means that Batman killed a man. And not by accident, either. And that is a HUGE departure.

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, wow, do I really hate the idea that Dent is alive. Really. His arc is _done_, that story's over, bringing him back would be . . . pointless, artificial, cheap. The whole weight of the movie is that it's his tragedy, the appropriate ending for which is his death.

And while it may be a huge departure for Batman--I think that's rather the point.

[genarti]

They could sell me on it. It depends how it's done. I'd trust the people who made this film to sell me on most things, but we'll see.

Or, you know, he could just be offscreen and that question never answered. Or I could be wrong and that he's dead.

I just was waiting for final confirmation of the fact that that motionless body was DEAD, and I never got it. Which made me think even at the time that the eternal comics question of seeing the body is still a relevant one. But it's entirely possible that they meant him to be dead, and just left it that way to make us wonder rather than to give themselves an out for later.

[kate_nepveu]

It never even occured to me that he wasn't dead, until your comment. Gordon's comments didn't sound to me like he was agreeing to bundle Dent off never to be seen again, just for instance--which I think is what would be required.

Anyway. Not a resolvable question on with this data, alas.

[genarti]

Yeah. Well, we shall see.

Eventually, anyhow. :)

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

I find it difficult to imagine what would be presented as Dent's motivation to act further, since so much of what he did after his traumatic split was fueled by simple revenge. Powerful, but not very nuanced.

and just left it that way to make us wonder

Indeed--it'd fit nicely with the other switches (switchings?) of expectation, both within the story and for the audience....

[kate_nepveu]

Mmm, I distinctly recall him saying that he won't stay _as long as the machine exists_, to which Bruce responds that when he's done he should type his name; and then when he does at the end, it's accompanied by Gordon's voiceover saying how people deserve to have their faith rewarded sometimes.

So I think he didn't resign because he didn't need to.

I'm pretty sure the last we see of the Joker is the SWAT team coming to where he's dangling, because I was waiting for something else too.

I really hate the idea that Dent might not be dead, but more on that in response to genarti.

[genarti]

I thought he resigned; however, the machine did blow up, and I wasn't sure watching if we were meant to see Lucius walking away as a sign that he was done with Wayne Enterprises and Batman, or if he would reverse that resignation now that the machine was gone.

I like the latter. Especially with the voiceover, I'd like it to turn out that way. I like Lucius a lot, and I think he's a valuable influence on both Bruce and Batman.

(However, another friend did point out that the machine is a great set-up for future stuff with Oracle. Whether or not they intend to actually go that way.)

[kate_nepveu]

Oracle

I can haz female character, pls?

[genarti]

*crosses fingers and hopes*

I have no idea if they like the character or hate her or anything in between, but -- man, a good Oracle would be an awesome addition.

So would a good Batgirl. And/or a Robin -- I know that Bale, at least, is very much not a fan of the whole Robin concept, but to me there were several points in this movie that just highlighted the whole ONE MAN CAN ONLY BE IN ONE PLACE AT ONE TIME problem.

But a good solid kickass female character would be so very welcome.

[kate_nepveu]

Even if Lucius doesn't resign, he must be awfully busy, right?

And surely the vast isolation that Batman is plunging himself into at the end of this movie needs to be broken as part of the next?

*resists urge to lapse into LOLspeak again*

[genarti]

True on all points!

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

My interpretation is the same as Kate's.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

So I think he didn't resign because he didn't need to.

Fair enough--it also gives Lucius an out in case he's tired, I suppose; faith rewarded, but also faith previously stretched past Lucius's tolerance.

Re: Joker, I'd really thought I'd missed something because of the very quick pace post-phone call (the explody one).... And I think we don't see a confirmed terminus for Lau, either, perched atop the pile.

I really like feeling that I am not smarter than this film. There must be a better way to phrase that, but it's lovely to have things to niggle over instead of the usual thing of being annoyed by broad flat strokes of uncomplicated characterization and plot arcs.

[kate_nepveu]

re: Lau, no, we don't, though I put that down to PG-13.

Yes, I did find it pretty chewy, particularly in thematic stuff.

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

Women in refrigerators --

(http://www.superstupor.com/sust12272007.shtml)