Everyone's a critic

Now that I’ve fully transitioned to my “new" (old) department, I thought I would try this old thing out again….seeing as I now have a little more free time to update this……at least for now!

While I was away, a new guy started working here (as my replacement) and since I’ve been back, we’ve been chatting & getting to know one another; he seems like a pretty cool dude with similar tastes & preferences for things like Lord of the Rings and Batman….! 

…or he did until I mentioned The Dark Knight to him. 

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

Even though he’s a big fan of the Batman comics (and loved Batman Begins), he thought that The Dark Knight was terrible – not so much as a regular action movie, just as a Batman movie.   

Needless to say, I thought he was nuts.  But then he handed me a 4-page essay, outlining his reasons for disliking the movie (and citing specific examples throughout the movie).  Having a written essay handy for just such an occasion worried me for a bit, but I’ve also been known to write a few choice blog posts about movies I thought were less than great too, now haven’t I? 

So I read it – and while I readily dismiss the majority of his arguments (ex. Movie inconsistencies, plot holes, etc.) as movie goofs -- he had many issues with Batman’s new costume, his “Bat-cyle” and the scene where Harvey Dent & Batman set a trap to catch the Joker – I have to admit that his character issues are pretty strong. 

For example - the backstory for Harvey Dent / Two-Face differs from comic to movie adaptation.  Harvey is a lot more bi-polar in the comics, being secretly abusive to his wife and family while generating a clean-cut image for Gotham’s media.  In the movie, he’s “Gotham’s White Knight” through and through.  And while this may have served the movie’s theme better, my co-worker’s problem with this is that it’s not true to the comic.   So, praising this as “the best Batman movie ever made” is a false claim. 

The same issue comes up with Heath Ledger’s depiction of the Joker.  

While Heath Ledger's Joker was indeed a great villain for the movie, my co-worker felt that he just wasn’t the same Joker that he grew up with in the DC comics.  Not only is the physique wrong (the Joker is always depicted as being a lot thinner and more feminine than Ledger’s character was), but he also got the very essence of the Joker wrong.  According to my co-worker, the Joker isn’t a psychopath who orchestrates grand schemes in order to prove a point to people like Batman, he’s just a random doer of evil, changing plans on a whim for no reason other than “he feels like it”.   (This one I’m a little iffy on, but I’ll take his word for it for now)

But while he may be right that this movie may not have been as ‘true to the comics’ as Batman Begins was, it was a pretty damn good movie.  And maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up with Batman like he did (I went with Marvel over DC), but I personally think these discrepancies from the comics made the characters *better*. 

And now that I’ve said that, I almost feel dirty after my last rant about how untrue to comics X-men: First Class was.