Batman: The Dark Knight
I haven’t been watching too many movies lately, obviously. This one has been sitting on top of the TV since December some time. I’ve mostly been catching up on old tv shows.
But anyway.
A petulant Batman (Christian Bale) encounters a psychotic Joker (Heath Ledger) in his attempts to clean up Gotham City. Along the way the Joker kills just about everybody in site, including Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal), Batman’s once- and Attorney Harvey Dent’s (Aaron Eckhart) current girlfriend. This makes Dent insane and he becomes Two-Face.
The characters here were quite good, especially Two-Face. Was Ledger’s peformance Oscar worhty? I don’t know. I thought it was very good, but I’m not sure it was Oscar material. Then again, I’m not sure who he was up against, so he may well have been best of the bunch.
The Two-Face character really is the most interesting. One of the complaints I’ve always had about these Batman movies is the villains just aren’t convicing in their sociopathy. The worst of the bunch, I think, was Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman. Yes, she was thrown out a window by a bad man, but why did that make her crazy? Angry, vengeful, yes. But a man-hating rager? Now, had she been subject to rape or some other very physical violence, I could, perhaps, believe it, but the way it was done, there’s nothing to base the craziness on.
Two-Face, OTOH, was totally believable. An explosion that killed he girlfriend but that he survived (sort of) albeit disfigured, and the circumstances that brought that about explained his character totally.
Joker? Who knows what that was about. Very well done, but no back story. Not that there needs to be one, necessarily, as it does add to the mystery of the character.
Batman? I don’t know. Superheros certainly are a screwed up bunch, but I kind of like my superheros a bit more than marginally more sane than the villains.
Good movie overall.
