Heath Ledger will astound forever, but what else is really left of Christopher Nolans Batman trilogy?
This week: The Scarecrow returns and returns again.
Last time:Richie Rich meets the Plague Ninjas.
Heath Ledger as the Joker in ‘The Dark Knight’.Warner Bros.
Later this week, because we’re running out of time: Batman becomes everything Ben Affleck isn’t.
Obviously, no superhero movie is worth a human life.
He should have been there at the world premiere on July 14, 2008.
Ron Phillips/Warner Bros.
(ImagineAmy Poehler, pregnant, in murder mascara.)
Today, you’d see rumors about a Ledger cameo inThe Flash.
Instead, we lost him.
So inTheDark Knighthe is unfathomable.
WithDark Knight, director Christopher Nolan perfected his default tone of stern awe.
The other actors are fine and firm.
Christian Bale turns down hisBeginsvolume: Bruce less boozy, Bats less croaky.
There are early plot threads about gangster coalitions and fiscal globo-crime.
A trip to Hong Kong features an airborne prologue that was cool in IMAX.
Then the Joker starts breaking through the dollhouse walls.
The whole gray stalwart movie exists as something for him to attack.
Something meta, too, in the way he tapdances over how these stories are supposed to go.
Then the mad clown strolls into Mob Parliament and makes a pencil disappear.
Michael Jai White plays a gangster just long enough for Joker to kill Spawn.
Even true believers might have plot questions about the last hour.
Cell phones give Batman sonar, it looks jank.
Every Joker plan demands fifth-dimensional logic, but the Joker is there to remind you logic doesn’t matter.
He invents Two-Face out of thin air by putting on nurse’s scrubs to prattle about dogs chasing cars.
His mountain of money is a bonfire.
He reveals one sad origin, and then another sad origin.
Really, he’s making fun of the whole idea that origins explain anything.
This madman sees your traumatic past and cackles.
Thank goodness no one ever made a whole dumb film about the Joker’s backstory!
This villain has a nominal mission.
He wants to corrupt the incorruptible, and reveal that common civility is a mask.
“I’m not a monster,” he says.
“I’m just ahead of the curve.”
These are characters unadorned by any personal life, and their henchmen have no personality.
You have to remember, then, thatDark Knightwas experienced as a ripped-from-the-headlines fable.
Actual geopolitical forces have a long past, and hope for a specific future.
Is anything scarier than a troll just doing it for the lolz?
I’m only talking about the Joker.
Now it feels rather dry, a bit flavorless, as atonal as the James Newton Howard/Hans Zimmer score.
I only care when I remember.
I first saw it a full year before the movie hit theaters.
Was he filming the chase scene that night?
I thought he was changing Hollywood.
I thought movies would never stop getting better.
I actually saw the film properly on opening night, sitting in the front row of an IMAX theater.
Nothing is worse than the IMAX front row.
The view was not ideal.
After two and a half hours, I could draw Eckhart’s chin dimple from memory.
I saw it twice more that month.
I was in the cult.
I was a shareholder inDark KnightEnterprises.
In fairness, so was everyone else.
The film’s influence spread.
The superhero-desperateOscarschanged their rules again and again.
Multiple blockbusters copied the Joker’s wholeI-meant-to-get-capturedprison gambit:Skyfall,Avengers,Star Trek Into Darkness.
Nolan even xeroxed himself.
“Was getting caught part of your plan?”
asks the baffled good guy.
“Of course!”
That dialogue comes early inDark Knight’s sequel, one of the worst movies ever made.
Where to begin with 2012’sThe Dark Knight Rises?
Batman is a public enemy, except all the good cops love him and the nice children worship him.
Instead of just killing Batman, Bane (Tom Hardy) sends him to an underground prison.
Hell is Positive Reinforcement.
Don’t you dare tickle those face tubes.
A big swing for topicality is the much-discussed Dent Act, which has created some kind of local Guantanamo.
A complicated portrayal of post-9/11 overreach?
The only inmates we see are gun-hoisting bad dudes, while the entire Gotham P.D.
winds up in a self-sacrificing battle to stop an actual nuclear blast.
You’re getting the general pointless mood here, so many important things turning irrelevant.
Batman gets stabbed, it doesn’t matter.
Batman sacrifices himself, he doesn’t.
The problem is it’s all stupid.
Hathaway’s attempts at theatrical impudence get swatted down by thinkpiece-y dialogue.
“Everything we do is collated and quantified,” she has to explain, “Everything sticks.”
The weirdest thing about the Talia twist is the obvious point missed.
She is avenging her dead father.
Don’t expect self-awareness.Risesexudes hysterical confidence, even as it regurgitates fan service in place of inspiration.
“Yes, Mr. Wayne,” says Lucius (Morgan Freeman), “Itdoescome in black.”
Robin, gag gag gag.
I’m being cruel to be kind.
No, I’m not.
I’m being cruel because I was too kind.
My status as a shareholder inDark KnightEnterprises made my early appraisal ofRisesa retroactively embarrassing experience.
It all had to mean something.
I saw the naked emperor and I praised his clothes.
Surely there were magnificent depths lurking herein.
Big holes in the ground: Bad or good?
Nolan and his collaborators, we learn, examined Fritz Lang’sMetropolisand Gillo Pontecorvo’sThe Battle of Algiersfor inspiration.
Bane is stupid, but he is wonderfully stupid.
Hardy looks likeThe Dark Knight Risesfeels.
His big speech can only be understood as a parody of big speeches.
“Rrrrm Grthrm’s Rrckrnrng,” sure.Batman & Robinhad less brain cells than a pet rock.
But nobody working on that poisoned film thought they were doing Sidney Lumet.
Heaviness once seemed to be theDark Knighttrilogy’s best virtue, and it was just keeping up with traffic.
The 2000s were a great time for dejected-paranoic reconsiderations of cheeky-geeky material.
(007 was sad now, it was a whole thing.)
You constantly heard some variation of the same line,There’s a war coming.
“You’ve given me an army,” says Batman inRises.
Does all that look prophetic, in a week with war and nuclear arms back in the headlines?
SoThe Dark Knight Risesserves a crucial historical purpose.
It proves the whole moody-downbeat mode of genre storytelling can be just as dumb as anything else.
Which is why we have not yet reached the end of the long tail of Bane parody.
Making fun of him is a straightforward way to make fun of a whole generation’s hyperbolic pretensions.
Everything around him is equally inflated.
The Bat airship is floating mulch.
And, oh no, the big giant ball is exploding!
In response, everyone can only wear that somberJoseph Gordon-Levittlook on their face, wide eyes watching awe-inspiring horror.
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