When the Darkness Overshadows the Light

Just read an article by Matt Kaufman called "A Knight Too Dark," that touches on some of the themes of the latest Batman film.

When I watched this film, I left the theatre more disturbed than probably any other movie i've seen in the theater. One of the things that bothered me the most about the film was the fact that it wrestled with some very intense themes, like the prisoner's dilemma, but did not really spend enough time working out the details to make me appreciate the end results. We saw quick cuts of evil forces or changes of heart, and were left with a lot of loose ends. Perhaps the part of the film that disturbed me the most was the ending: Batman giving himself not to redeem Harvey as much as to preserve what was essentially a lie-enabling the public to live in a false sense of reality, for the sake that if they knew the truth it might be too much for them. Maybe others did not feel this way, but this ending really bothered me. I felt like it was cheap and unsustainable; perhaps because the movie was already fairly long the filmmaker could not take the plot in a different direction, but I felt that it needed to go in another direction. The film itself was certainly well-done and the acting was incredible, but the way the plot played out struck a difficult chord in my heart. Matt's article touches on this difficulty, and I think it is worth a read as we try to sort through the messages of this film.