Theme Park at its Darkest

The Dark Knight Rises is an above average-action film, and certainly enjoyable. The first thing that came to my lips was, ‘It’s not as good as the last one’, but  the truth is, The Dark Knight was something entirely different from the other films in the trilogy.

I rewatched The Dark Knight for the third time a few days ago, and once again, was utterly mesmerized by The Joker. No fingerprints, no labels in his clothes, ageless; no friends or associates. No criminal record, or history of any kind. When he tells the stor(ies) of his facial scars, you can’t be sure how much is true and how much is manufactured to torment his listeners.

He is a self-proclaimed ‘Agent of Chaos’. He refuses to kill Batman, saying, ‘You complete me’, and his avowed mission is to incite Batman into becoming a murderer and descending to his level. And, while he will stop at nothing to achieve his ends, his real designs require tempting the good to commit evil and to make the citizenry-at-large the true executors of his plans.

The genius of the writing is that the Nolan brothers have invoked the definitive Satan of the Western World. A distinctly American nightmare, he is cloaked in visions of terrorist agitprop videos and reproductions of Ground Zero, staged in the rubble of the Gotham City police station.

He killed Heath Ledger. And, it appears, he is still killing people.

This entry was posted on July 26, 2012 at 7:30 am and is filed under Film, Observation with tags Batman, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, Ground Zero, Heath Ledger, James Holmes, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, The Joker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.