“Why so serious?”

IMDB users have voted The Dark Knight the top film of the decade, beating the likes of the The Departed, Inglorious Basterds (Tarantino’s best in my opinion, tied with Pulp Fiction) and Spirited Away.

I’m not arguing that Nolan’s second take on the Bat franchise isn’t good. It’s an amazing film, with solid action sequences (the huge lorry flipping over is an awesome stunt) and plenty of emotion with the dialogue being on the right side of cheesy. The film gives out several messages; such as there is evil in the world but there is also human courage, and a hero does what he has to, and sometimes that means becoming a villain. All very deep stuff. But think back to where Batman came from, way back before Christian Bale,  Val Kilmer, Michael Keaton and Adam West (legend). Batman lived in a comic book, and not just any comic book; a comic book about superheroes.

The word ‘super’ comes from Latin, and it means over, or above. Over time it has come to mean many more things in the English language, but if you take the original meaning, then a ‘superhero’ should be above everything else. In most cases, they are, in strength, brains or levels of radioactiveness. However, ‘super’ should also mean above reality. Superheroes don’t exist in real life (contrary to the upcoming film Kick Ass), they exist in comic books and now films and television. Therefore, they are above reality (stay with me, I have a point and it’s coming very soon). Christopher Nolan has taken Batman away from the nippled-batsuits and the cheesy sidekicks (even though I do want Nolan to introduce Robin and see how he does it) and planted smack bang in the middle of reality. I loved how in the Kilmer and Clooney films, Gotham is this over-the-top city with monstrous architecture and an unreal quality to it. The city complemented the freaky villains; as unreal as the caped crusader himself. It is very noble of Nolan to place Batman in what is essentially post 9/11 New York…at nighttime…in its most dangerous areas, and he does a pretty good job of guessing what it would be like if there was a masked vigilante running the streets, but Batman is a superhero, meant to exist above reality, not in it. Yeah, the film’s great, but do we really need another form of escapism snatched away from us. It’s what I call Jason Bourne-itis; named after the eponymous hero of the Bourne trilogy*.

Jason Bourne came along and wowed cinema-goers with his no-nonsense approach to kicking ass. No quips, no gadgets, just himself and a Bic pen. People lapped him up, loving this new kind of hero. Which was fine. The Bourne series is meant to be troubled and it uses the grimy rainy streets of Europe perfectly to reflect the atmosphere in Bourne’s mind. I suppose he was the backlash to meatheads such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sly Stallone. Again, the films are good, but they are over complicated in parts and, in the words of the Joker: “why so serious?”

Then other films started to take notice and you could just see the workings of all the studio heads…”Hey, lets make our film ‘dark’. It worked wonders for Bourne”.

As a result we got Casino Royale as all the franchises decided they needed a reboot. Daniel Craig’s first outing was genius (until the end when it got too mushy) with the fast cars, women and crazy stunts but none of the campness that Roger Moore tarnished the Bond name with. Quantum of Solace, however went too far, with a plot which was at best a Macguffin (which should never happen in a Bond film) and a storyline that was impossible to follow. It tried to go too far into ‘darkness’ and reality that it got boring. The Dark Knight, while being far from boring has certainly strayed into the darkness a bit more than is needed, as I believe Batman Begins had a nice balance. I’m not talking about sugary sweet happy endings, I’m talking about a film being dark and real not always equaling the best film ever. Six of the films on the list on IMDB involve fantasy or the supernatural in some way which means that over the past decade people have wanted to escape from the real world. The Dark Knight is not completely real world, but too real for a superhero movie in my opinion, as Bruce Wayne doesn’t have the super powers to fall back on as a way of divorcing himself from reality. Superman has them, and also he lives in a soft focus city seemingly stuck in the 1950s, and Spiderman has the radioactiveness and the almost too bright Technicolour world where girls scream directly into the camera.

I’m not saying that The Dark Knight and the Bourne films aren’t good because they are; they are amazing, in fact. I just don’t think they “all that”. Weird words to describe them but it is the perfect impression to use. I was once reading a movie message board, with a thread entitled “Films everyone loved, but I didn’t” and The Dark Knight was mentioned a few times.

I know this is a contentious topic among movie-lovers so what’s your opinion on it? What do you think? Are most people jumping on the ‘lets go dark’ bandwagon or do you think that superhero movies should still have an escapist quality to them? Maybe the Superman and Spiderman franchises are escapism enough, and we do need a truly troubled superhero on our screens. Who would you rather have come to your rescue; the tortured hero who has to stop and brood over things for a while, or the one who will just fly in (there’s a big hint) and take you away from the danger. You decide.

*I should add, a film that gloriously escaped the ‘reboot but make it dark’ disease was Star Trek, which went out of its way to be filled with light, both literally and figuratively while not losing any of its gravitas and brilliance. Another big thumbs up for JJ Abrams.