Gritty stuff

The foregrounding psychological battle between Batman and the Joker ventures into a gritty extremity that to a certain degree inflects the usual genres in superhero films - a hero turns into an anti-hero without an end, and a damsel caught in a twisted game theory, which subsequently provides the emotional arc for Two-Face to adjudicate justice through the binary flip of a coin. The subtext locates the potential anarchic collapse of modern (Gotham) urbanity as the result of a blind thrall - and faith - to public morality and social order, as Joker designs a prisoners' dilemma that pits the human will against the tyranny of the majority. Maybe Foucault's 'ship of fools' is not too far off the grid in Christopher Nolan's thematic build up. Darkness, revenge and madness - each is never concretized in the absence of the other. This perhaps explains Batman's eventual immolation into the shadows of Plato's philosophical cave, as means to preserve the imagined iconoclast of virtue, justice and incorruptibility in the unenlightened minds of Gotham metropolitans.

Watch it for Ledger. He's legendary stuff. Certainly my best movie of 2008 thus far.

We missed the 1st 5 minutes though. According to Wiki, it says: "The film begins with the Joker robbing a mob-owned bank with several other accomplices, whom he tricks into killing each other". I guess we didn't miss too much :)