Senseless Evil

Rating: 1/10 (20 August 2008)

This comment is labelled as containing spoilers. In fact, it describes no actual events from the film, but it does talk about underlying themes, and it refers to 3 lines of dialogue. Read on if you wish.
Batman has a new enemy - the Joker - and a new potential ally, Harvey Dent, the new up-and-coming District Attorney. The film quickly develops into a study of good versus evil.
We discover the Joker's motivation for the evil that he does ... he has no apparent ultimate aim, he simply enjoys being evil. The sheer senselessness of his acts makes him unpredictable. As the film unfolds, the forces of good appear powerless; whatever they do, there is a greater evil, a more twisted motivation that they are unintentionally feeding. The film's title is, in fact, a triple pun ... it is metaphorically a "dark night" for the city, and much of the significant action takes place in a single night. By the end, we are asked to consider whether good or evil are simply a matter of luck, and whether truth as well as law are an inconvenience to doing good.
The film is therefore thoroughly postmodern. It could be described as doing for justice what "Titanic" did for love ... showing it to be worthy and desirable, but ultimately unsustainable in the face of evil, corruption, and random blows dealt by Fate. There are some events in which good is seen to triumph, but in hindsight these are plot contrivances ... to do evil would have been so much easier.
The film itself is also senseless in some ways. The factors that made the Joker what he is are never laid out. Nor are the (sometimes incredible) feats of anticipation and cooperation, which allow the Joker often to have an extra card up his sleeve, ever explained.
There are two subtexts beneath the central theme of overwhelming evil: one is intentional, the other (I think) not. The first one is Batman's credo: "sometimes, to do good, you have to act outside the law". The second is based on a line spoken by the Joker: where good and evil clash on equal terms, evil is more powerful, because the good have to follow rules, whereas the evil have no rules.
The film is well made: the special effects are very impressive, the acting is generally good, and it's technically very well made. But I found it disturbing and (literally) hopeless.