The Dark Knight was the best film I’ve ever seen. Hands down, no competition. Maybe the camera was shaky or whatever, but that made it all the more real and believable. And as for the torture aspect? No one in the movie ever said it was acceptable. In fact, the Commissioner even tried to get in and stop him when he was beating the Joker up. But, with someone as crazy, irrational, sociopathic and mentally unstable as the Joker, how could you expect that cops or Batman would sit politely in a chair across from him and try to get an explanation out of him?? They’d be going in circles for hours, days! The Joker doesn’t listen to reason, so Batman starts beating him up out of anger. It’s a pretty natural response to a criminal like the Joker. Anyway, the movie rocked my world…all 4 times I saw it. Everyone should see it at least once.

Personally, I believe that this was the best comic book movie ever. For those who did not grow up with comic books, this was their revelation and initiation to that world in a very seductive and irresistible manner.

WoW! Heath Ledger! He simply made you want to be a bad guy. OSCAR, OSCAR, OSCAR! His death was certainly and truly a sad experience for many of us, but his performance was uncanny! Maybe the psychology behind this sad clown drove him to madness but was certain was that the character he created for us was a diabolical genius with so many mental issues that would drive any average individual to madness.

Many of us would agree that even the first sequence of the movie was a plan with a superior mastermind individual behind the whole thing. You haven’t seen the movie yet, once you do, you’ll see that you get hooked right away from the very moment the story starts. Once you are submerged into the storyline, you wake up to reality not even noticing that you were watching a movie the whole time.

All I have to say is congratulations to the entire cast. Every single actor played a marvelous job. Shout out to Christopher Nolan for writing and directing this brilliant movie. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger
Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Gary Oldman. Basically, Batman himself was what you need to add to your ketchup and make it taste like an Italian grandmother’s pasta sauce that she has been cooking for over a day. Can’t have a Batman movie without Batman doing batman stuff.

At the end of the day, whether you are starting to learn about all these comic book heroes for the first time just like me, or you are a big fan, GO TO THE THEATER AND SEE BATMAN!!! Please go watch this phenomenal movie and help THE DARK KNIGHT beat Titanic to become the largest grossing movie of all time. GO NOW!!!

I for one loved this movie, simply because the heroes and villians were so twisted up into each other. My friends have spent the last two weeks arguing the tactics of Harvey Dent/Two Face. The Joker we see today is the product of Alan Moore’s interpretation of Batman, when DC had him release the tremendously dark The Killing Joke in 1988. What discomfort we feel for Batman’s tactics (which I do believe were written to have failed), we are surley going to feel tenfold upon next year’s release of Moore’s graphic novel classic The Watchmen. I’m certain these conversations will come up again.

We may very well want to be concerned about how those of us who aren’t looking at the movie so analytically will take these torture and wiretapping issues. Crooks and Liars posted a clip this morning of Glenn Beck using Batman as a defense for the very things Michael Dudley’s article rejects.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/08/07/glenn-beck-bush-is-batman/

There’s another take I just came across, by Jim Kunstler, but it’s a real sledge-hammer attack: see
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/08/dark-knight.html

He’s suggesting that the film is essentially a work of sado-masochistic porn, and that it’s popular because we’re all f*cked up, just loving this sort of stuff because we’re …well, big-time sado-masochists and wanna-be Nazis.

Hmm…

QUOTE (from Kunstler):
The rich symbolism in this spectacle represents the tenor of contemporary America as something a few notches worse than whatever the Nazis were heading toward around 1933. We like nothing better than to see people suffer and watch things get broken. The more slowly people are tortured (including the movie audience) the more exquisite the pleasure derived from the act. Civilization offers no consolation. In fact, its a mug’s game. Thus, civilization is composed only of torturers and their mug victims.
UNQUOTE

(Full disclaimer: James Kunstler’s take on cities really annoys the heck out of me; he’s one of these “theorists” who’s just itching for the apocalypse to arrive so he can say, “I told you so.” He’s convinced that Peak Oil’s imminence will mean we’ll all be using horse and drey rigs soon, and that highrise buildings are a priori evil. There’s a weird melding of Luddite tendencies with a Malthusian faith in scarcity. Technology is a mirage.)

Here’s an example of how he manages to drive the knife into cities (obviously, Gotham is to be loathed), and turn the blade:
QUOTE:
By the way, Hitler had a brighter sense of decor in the final days of the bunker. Bruce Wayne’s personal apartment is one of those horrid glass-walled tower condos beloved of the starchitects, which, in its florid exposure to everything external practically screams “no shelter here!”
UNQUOTE

I’m not sure what that last clause (“florid exposure to everything external”) actually means, but maybe I’m just thick.

OTOH, he really gets into some masterful rhetoric in shredding this movie (and what he sees as the “us” who like it, but who are beyond redemption — and therefore just ripe for the picking, too).

Since you saw the movie (as did all the people who’ve commented so far), do you any thoughts on Kunstler’s take?

Or is Kunstler (like Dudley) reading a tad too much into a mere film?

OTOH, I think the author got more out of the movie than most movie-goers (= me) will. I think most of us (= me) will see Batman extract true and valuable info by breaking Eric Roberts legs and thus conclude that the movie is casually assuming that torture works, except when waged against a villain as supernaturally wily as the Joker.