Joking Apart

Since the Spiderman film series seems to have lost what made it great, anyone who is still interested in watching a decent superhero movie needs to turn to the rebooted Batman series - at least if they don't want to watch excerably crap or terminally dull movies. Of course, to date the only film released in this series is Batman Begins but The Dark Knight is released next summer - you can see the trailer here.

I'd imagine, given the legions of Bat fans out there, that elements of the film will prove to be very controversial. And one aspect that immediately stands out as strikingly different from previous presentations is the physical appearance of the Joker. Frankly, he looks like a refugee from a Cure concert who slept in s skip all night after getting pissed on meths:


It is very different from other, more sanitised presentations:

And, indeed, the cliched, camp version:

So, no doubt, some will complain about the way the character looks in next year's film. But actually, the new look Joker actually makes sense if you think about it. The guy is a psychotic, disturbed, mass murdering psychopath. He is the nemesis of Batman, who in himself is quite a dark character. Why would he look like a stylish clown? Or like an old man with white paint over his moustache?

The new Joker looks dangerous, and looks unpredictable. It bodes well for The Dark Knight: hopefully it will be a dark experience; a thousand miles away from standard superhero pap and a million miles away from some of the previous movies claiming to represent the Batman story.