Man, I promised myself that I wouldn't do anymore of these "reviews", but this is just too much. The Dark Knight. I don't get the fawning. In-fucking-explicable. I really wanted this movie to be good. I wanted to like it. Yeah, the beginning was very good and Heath Ledger was excellent (if too beefy. Sorry, the Joker should be freakishly skinny), but, dude, Batman is George W. Bush. I shit you not. He's all like listening in on your phone calls and performing illegal renditions and shit. Batman as George W. Bush...as the GOOD GUY. You know what that equals? That equals a steaming pile of poo. And people are eating it up. They can't get enough of that poo. Delicious poo. Poo. Look, I can understand that, as filmmakers, you saw an opportunity to work in some of the themes of this screwy modern world, but seriously, when that leads to you having to have Batman be George W. Bush you have to rethink that shit. And if you are going to say something about something, have a fucking point of view about it and stick with it, okay? Are you for it or against it? Lets look at our illegal rendition. Dude gets snatched from Hong Kong to Gotham. Okay, so that's good, right? He's gonna face him some justice. But he doesn't. He gets nabbed by the Joker who cooks him. Or is that justice? Wait, I mean, I think he got cooked. That was a casualty of the PG-13 rating, I guess. It was very broadly implied. Really, it was just kind of left dangling.

Hey, that leads me into my next point! Okay, that whole George W. Bush thing is what really pisses me off. The thing that lingers. But the reason why I didn't like the movie was that I didn't believe the world they constructed. Their world was bullshit. They were going for a certain degree of realism but they made this totally pussified (is that a word?), bloodless PG-13 reality. I've seen people comparing Dark Knight to Heat, and it has a similar surface sheen, but Heat has blood. Heat has pain. I believe the the world that Michael Mann constructs. I've seen people compare the Dark Knight to Godfather II, but the Godfather movies have pulp bloodshed that fits with their pulp violence. I've also heard people compare Dark Knight to Empire Strikes Back but I'm not dignifying that with a response.

Lets talk about the Joker. Health Ledger is great, don't get me wrong, his character had some brilliantly written moments and he had some utterly brilliant character flourishes, but, overall, the Joker in the Dark Knight is a horribly written character. He's a fucking Mary Sue. He's God! He can be anywhere, at anytime, with whatever ordnance he needs. It gets ridiculous. I read a review where they gushed about how brilliant the Joker's scheme was, how he brilliantly dismantles everything the Batman holds dear, but it's really just one thing after another, it's not even random. Poor Joker. He thinks he's this agent of chaos but he's just a pawn of lazy narrative. Come on, his goal changes mid scheme, for Christ's sake! The goal changes but the scheme remains the same! No, wait, it changes twice. First he wants to kill Batman, then he wants him unmasked, and then he just wants to fuck with him indefinitely, right? Nice. Also, how does the Joker know that, no matter how far he's pushed, Batman will not kill him? We know this because it's been made explicit over the, what, seventy or so years of Batman's existence, but how does the Joker know this? Oh, yeah, BECAUSE HE'S A MARY SUE! He knows everything!

One last thing that galls me: contempt for the audience! Faking a death in your story is cool, okay? Faking the death of a character to the AUDIENCE when the audience knows that character can't die yet is a big old FUCK YOU to the audience. You have to let the audience in on that shit.

The sad thing is that this only scratches the surface of what is wrong with this movie. But I'm all tapped out. I give up!