Holy Post-9/11, Batman!

So I went to see the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, the only movie besides WALL-E and The Last Mistress that I was looking forward to for this summer.  No, I didn’t see the first one.  But I was quite pleased with this latest installment, in which Christian Bale plays Batman, facing off against mob bosses’ moneylaundering operations….and gruesome crimes performed by the Joker, played EXCELLENTLY by Heath Ledger…..Rest in Peace.  Some people get depressed when the last role of an actor’s life is something franchised.  Take Orson Welles, for example – his last role was the bad guy in the English dub of the Transformers animated movie.  But Ledger is incredible here – on the set, even Michael Caine (who plays Batman’s butler Alfred) was afraid of him.  The creepiness of his character extends beyond the makeup or psychotic humour of the writing – he adopts a whole set of physical ticks and a manner of speaking that create a truly disturbing personality.

Christian Bale….  the first movie I saw him in was American Psycho, and I can’t get that character out of my head whenever I see him in another movie.  Bruce Wayne is also a playboy businessman with a secret life of violence, so there’s actually a few similarities between the characters.  But here’s something that bugs me.  I don’t know if it’s post-production craziness or an acting choice, but whenever Wayne shows up in his Batman suit, his voice starts sounding like he’s drunk a bottle of scotch and dropped an octave.  It’s very noticeable.  Is this some kind of voice-masking thing built into the bat suit?  Or does Wayne have to have a drink to get pumped up before he goes off to fight crime?  I wonder if Michael Caine….er….Alfred has a drink with him too?    Yes, I get it, he’s gritty and badass.  You don’t have to put it into the voice that much!

Morgan Freeman is Batman’s gadget inventor here.  And he’s….well….Morgan Freeman.  You know, the morally upright older dignified gentleman.  Yep.

But onto the real subject of this post…. This movie is pretty loaded with post-9/11-ness, for lack of a better word.  Anxiety about terrorism, the “give in or the hostages die” predicaments, the mutilation of corpses by the Joker, the failure of traditional law and order, and the… er, need for vigilante justice perhaps?  No, that last one wasn’t serious.  But seriously, part of terrorism’s impact has been the disappearance of a sense of “fair play” in war, etc.  And that’s definitely present in this film.

Want to read a better review of this film?  Read my friend Max’s.