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The Lens: Dark is the 'Knight'

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: July 29, 2008 - And now, $300 million (and counting) later, the backlash begins. After the kind of opening-weekend frenzy that only a 4,000-screen, Imax-enhanced superhero movie can provide, a few dissenting voices are suggesting that, its inflated IMDB rating notwithstanding, "The Dark Knight" may actually be just a little bit ... messy, shall we say?

This could be where I get to quote one of Michael Caine's lines  from the film, but I'm not necessarily taking the side of the film's detractors. My own feeling is that there is much to enjoy in the latest Batman film, but there's also an underlying tone of cruelty and callousness that could almost be dangerous if the filmmakers' overall message weren't so muddled.

As many commentators have already remarked (to the great irritation of the fanboy element), "The Dark Knight" could very easily be interpreted as a defense of an extremist approach to law and order at the expense of individual rights. The forces of good suspend due process, torture prisoners and informants, and tap every single cell phone in Gotham City. (Suddenly that commercial that was shown before the film heralding a connection between Batman and Verizon seems a little ... suspicious.) The hero seems to have a few pangs of conscience about some of these matters, but the film itself gives them an unhesitant endorsement.

(For those who have described the film as a celebration/justification of the policies of the current president, I wouldn't gloat too much: The tactics that Batman and Commissioner Gordon employ don't seem to be working nearly as well in the real world.)

Over at Screengrab , Andrew Osborne complains that "The Dark Knight" suffers from plain old bad storytelling, while Michael Atkinson's IFC blog makes some strong points about the shortcomings of the whole superhero trend.