It will be an improvement over Batman Begins, mainly because BB was overlong, overdark, and, in its action scenes, unintelligible, with a terribly uninteresting villain.  I couldn’t have cared less about “The Scarecrow.”  Also, ”origin” stories inherently contain an uphill battle to win my interest. 

I know, I know:  ”It’s necessary to align yourself with the mythos of the story and to appreciate the scale of the created world.”  Fair enough, but if extratextual material is necessary for, rather than a contribution to, the enjoyment of a film, that created world better be pretty damn interesting.  To this extent, how interesting can a superhero movie really be?

I know, I know:  “A superhero film both reflects and distends the emotions and situations that one encounters in daily life, thereby creating a useful prism through which to view our toils.”  Fair enough, but superhero films aren’t born in a nurturing creative environment.  They all have been, first and foremost, product designed to appeal to the target audience and sell soft drinks.  Pop can matter, but this is another uphill battle. 

I still have high hopes for The Dark Knight, but I doubt it will be the masterpiece that some are claiming it to be.  Is The Dark Knight really the best cinema has to offer, a statement of who we are, what we can do, and where we’re going?   To this end, two very useful reviews that hit on this feeling:

Glenn Kenny:     

I’m not a guy—or for that matter a critic—who believes or has ever believed in genre hierarchies, but I don’t know, maybe my aesthetic arteries are hardening—entertaining arguments about the value/meaning of the likes of Hancock is increasingly making me (metaphorically) throw up my hands and say, “For feck’s sake, guys, this isn’t Stalker or The Red and the White or Kanal or Satantango or Muriel or what ever we’re talking about here, it’s a commitedly vulgar frickin’ superhero movie that’s been cut to shreds the better to flatter/insult its target audience.” Come on. Can we at least pretend we’re adults for 20 minutes or so? Apparently not, is what I’m thinking much of the past few weeks, entertaining dark thoughts about how if what 1968 embodied was a cultural explosion, what 2008 is building up to is an implosion into a state of permanent cultural adolescence.

Armond White:

Aaron Eckhart’s cop role in The Black Dahlia humanized the complexity of crime and morality. But as Harvey Dent, sorrow transforms him into the vengeful Two-Face, another Armageddon freak in Nolan’s sideshow. The idea is that Dent proves heroism is improbable or unlikely in this life. Dent says, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” What kind of crap is that to teach our children, or swallow ourselves? Such illogic sums up hipster nihilism, just like Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. Putting that crap in a Batman movie panders to the naiveté of those who have not outgrown the moral simplifications of old comics but relish cynicism as smartness. That’s the point of The Joker telling Batman, “You complete me.” Tim Burton might have ridiculed that Jerry Maguire canard, but Nolan means it—his hero is as sick as his villain. 

Man’s struggle to be good isn’t news. The difficulty only scares children.