THE DARK KNIGHT

Maybe the reason the Joker always loses is that no matter all his talk of chaos, he wants to win by perverting idealism. Even he's an idealist. He openly abhors the way we citizens accept some lossses and not others. To be as unspoiler-y as possible to make my point--what the Prisoner did on the ferry made sense from a narrative point of view and was cool. It made sense. What the jackass bridge-and-tunnel guy did made sense from a narrative point of view, but was hardly redemptive. The world is being wrecked by just this sort of guy and my first thought about his actions was "I bet he suddenly wished there'd been tort reform after all". His actions ultimately just weren't believable.

I wanted Batman's answer to be "So what if people can be bad? Don't tell me you're surprised, Joker. Don't tell me you think it wasn't obvious to anyone." That's really a very tiny flaw in a major motion picture, that it doesn't use my dialogue. But seriously--a superhero movie this good means a change is ahead. Either the themes grow or we beat it flat into the sand like the Western. Please please please don't let the next theme be the price of fame. Another movie with famous people in it playing famous people who are tired of the attention makes me want to make the pencil disappear...

The movie was fantastic; but it was so well done that it underlined the fact that the whole vigilante justice issue is getting less relevant in an age of increasing acceptance of real horrors. It might well signal the coming downward arc of superhero movies. The SPIRIT trailer made me want to go hide under something. Is this to be the ONE FROM THE HEART of superhero movies?

For me, the scary bit is using emotional distance to commit horrors. Them's the psychopaths.