Suddenly It Makes Sense

I’ve been trying to describe why the last forty five minutes of The Dark Knight didn’t do it for me and getting thoroughly mixed reactions. Some, like the blogmaster here, agree wholeheartedly. Others fervently disagree. I meanwhile have been attempting to reconcile how a movie that was so incredible in the first hour and forty five minutes could collapse so quickly in a relatively short period of time.

To my surprise, the answer came from an unlikely source.

“An Associated Press critic called "The Dark Knight," a movie of recycled comic-book clichés, "an epic that will leave you staggering." The Arizona Daily Star compared the film favorably to Michelangelo's "David." “

That is from Greg Easterbrook, (italics are mine) better known as ESPN.com’s Tuesday Morning QB. Now, I don’t agree with what that comment probably meant, which was as a description of the whole movie, nor do I like that Easterbrook might be becoming the long winded, penned version of Skip Bayless’ “Professional Hater”. However his comment turned on the light bulb for me.

Why was the first two thirds of The Dark Knight so damn good? Because it wasn’t a comic book cliché. Sure, it had moments, like the high tech kidnapping from Hong Kong. But overall the tone, subject matter and storyline were compelling. It wasn’t your typical fluffy comic tale. It asked questions, gave you moral ambiguity and seemed to be heading towards a climatic, natural conclusion.

Then the final forty five minutes flipped all of that on its head by turning it into… a comic book movie.

The scenarios presented become a cliché, melodramatic clap trap. Harvey Dent’s character goes from interesting to bland and one dimensional, as most comic book movie villains end up. His rationale for his behavior seems to change more frequently than he can flip his coin, which ironically enough doesn’t jive with the character as it was created.

The Joker continues to be his usual psycho self, but he creates such a ridiculous scheme that it’s hard to take the character seriously. What made the Joker menacing in the first part of the movie was how he was over the top psychotic killer going about it in a low key way. In other words, he made select, high profile and telling displays of power and chaos that affected few people personally but created a mass effect of fear. Killing the commissioner, judge and then destroying the lives of Rachel Dawes and Dent made him menacing just because on that level he could inspire a realistic fear. By attacking those specific, protected people, no one was safe. Thus chaos ensued.

But then the prisoner’s dilemma is straight comic movie junk. “Oh no! Now he’s going to put hundreds of people in danger! Ooooh! BAD!!! That makes him sooo evil.”

Um no. It makes him cartoon-ish. And the resolution, no offense to anyone who liked it, was insulting to my intelligence. If you really want to believe human beings, who have been shown willing to do all sorts of unsavory things to one another for lesser things than their own lives, would not blow up a boat of nameless, faceless, convicts to save their skins, you can. Here in the real world, we’ll shake our head and lose a bit of respect for what the movie was trying to accomplish.

It sounds overly negative, but in the end I have no choice but to lose respect. The Dark Knight was living up to its name; a deep and interesting look at a very depressing situation without a clear right answer. It could have continued down that path (or ended after Dent became Two-Face) and followed events to their logical conclusion. Can you imagine if someone on the ship pressed the button only to have their OWN ship blow up? Immensely depressing, but it would have been incredible as a cruel, sick and twisted joke. Not like they had a villain who would be into that sort of thing.

But instead the movie whores itself out to the cliché that good must always win out in the end. People will always rise above the temptation of evil, the bad guy will always come up short and even if the world doesn’t know it, the hero is always watching over them.

In the end it feels like an insult to the first part of the movie, which did it’s best to set up an impossible situation for Batman, only to have him come out relatively unscathed. Sure he lost Rachel, but she was ditching him anyway. (He actually ends up with a better memory of her than if she had lived, in an ironic twist) Dent’s “dead” but Bruce only thinks something of him in the first place because he believes if he lets Dent become the legal Batman, he can get Rachel back. The Bruce Wayne that has been established in these movies WANTS to be Batman. He doesn’t want to be Bruce Wayne and since Rachel was never going to be with him anyway, the only reason he had for changing is gone. So losing Rachel and Dent mean little to him, no matter what BS the movie claims in the end. That Batman is a fugitive also means nothing, since he goes where the law doesn’t anyway. Besides if the mob can’t take him down with their resources, will some BS effort from Commissioner Gordon actually be a concern? Not to mention he couldn’t exactly walk the streets of Gotham in mid day before, so what does it change?

I once told everyone who would listen the first Spider-Man movie could have been the movie of the year had they actually had the balls to do a true rendition of The Night Gwen Stacy Died/The Green Goblin’s Last Stand arc. Those two comics are widely considered to have ushered in the modern age of comics we know today precisely because they broke trend. Comic books always put the hero in that aforementioned impossible situation that he, and occasionally she, managed to find his way out of.

The Night Gwen Stacy Died changed that. The comic book resolution didn’t happen. Peter Parker didn’t save his girlfriend. The Green Goblin’s death in the next issue is almost anticlimactic, as Parker notes himself. The reader is left shocked because that’s not what they are accustomed to. It was built up as a comic like no other and ended that way. We know Peter Parker’s world will never be the same again and in fairness, that is the second most important moment in the Spider-Man mythos.

The Dark Knight stood on the threshold of doing that with the comic movie. It could have made the comic movie something more; it could have turned it into a serious medium taking complex and difficult concepts and given us a real world answer. In other words, the imperfect answer. Batman could have lost Rachel (without her having leaving a note saying it was essentially moot), he could have had to deal with a psychotic mirror of himself in Two-Face. He could have had to actually sacrifice something to defeat the Joker, or see the Joker proven right about basic human nature.

Instead, the movie took a look over the edge and retreated. It ran back to comfortable confides of the comic book realm. Don’t like the shitty, unrealistic resolution of the prisoner’s dilemma? “You’re just are a naysayer who doesn’t have hope! I mean that is what they were trying to show, right?” (Forget the fact that the prisoner’s dilemma itself states you BLOW UP THE OTHER BOAT!!!) Dent become an idiot without any depth at the end? “Dude, lighten up, it’s a comic book movie.”

Sadly that wasn’t how it began. But that’s how it ended; along with any chance it would be considered one of the best movies I ever saw.