Sick Product of a Sick System

Rating: 1/10 (25 July 2008)

"Batman: The Dark Knight" is a tacky, trashy, mindless, ultra violent piece of garbage. It will bore anyone with a mature mind. "The Dark Knight" consists of one sadistic, pointlessly violent scene after another. There is no point to these scenes except to extract money from the pockets of teenage boys who have had no experience of real life. "The Dark Knight" is a drug. It pushes violence and sadism. That's it. That's what you get for your ten bucks.
"The Dark Knight" is a sick product of a sick system. What's the difference between a blockbuster death-fest like this, and an act of actual terrorism? How many deaths do films like this contribute to? How much suffering? Pointless, ugly, violent, sadistic movies peddle violence as the drug of choice to mindless consumer hoards who lack discrimination, life experience, wisdom or balance.
Teenage boys who spend all their time playing video games and having no experience of three-dimensional reality see a movie like this and conclude that the world is like this: cool criminals torture passive victims and meet no resistance. Hey, Thanks, Hollywood, for flushing your refuse into young male minds. Ka-ching. How much more violent and sadistic will such films have to be in the future to make that cash register sing? Let's up the ante.
The Plot? Heath Ledger puts on a ridiculous series of ticks, costumes and make-up and tries really hard to get taken seriously as a master criminal / master actor. There is no real performance there because there is no real life there. In one scene, Ledger, a slight young man, murders a very large, muscular, professional criminal, and a black man  white supremacists will like that part  with a pencil. No. In real life that would not happen. Nor, in real life, would a man who shoots his every accomplice be able to do pull off any of the stunts ledger does in this film.
The movie is utterly implausible. This won't matter to its fans, who talk only to other fans who worship films like this as they do. In their solipsistic, computer-generated echo chamber, "The Dark Knight" is the greatest film ever made. These fans have little contact with anyone not exactly like themselves, and can't see any flaws in their judgment. Though saturated in violence, these fans can't even see why a skinny guy like Ledger murdering a muscular, hardened criminal with a pencil is a silly, nasty, scene that exists only to up the sadism ante, not to have any relationship with reality. Though saturated in violence, these fans would panic at the merest contact with the real world, with the real violence occurring in places like Iraq, or federal prisons.
Christian Bale is an interesting actor and was fun to watch in the previous batman. He's hardly on screen here. There is nothing interesting about the sets or costumes, and as for the special effects, how many chase scenes and big explosions have been on screen recently? Nothing new. Nothing interesting. The intelligent viewer will move along, or simply select a better film.