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Tag Archives: Christopher Nolan
The Dark Knight and the Dangerous Legacy of the Charismatic Villain
The Joker had left an indelible mark on pop culture long before Heath Ledger assumed the role. He’s one of the few super villains to be consistently featured on merchandise going as far back as the 1960s. His classic semi-origin story in 1998’s Batman: The Killing Joke spurred a dramatic shift in the medium that left fans demanding more of its darkness in their comics. The Joker’s place in the cultural firmament was enough to lure the likes of Jack Nicholson to portray the character on the silver screen. For decades, despite his myriad misdeeds and sizable body count, The Joker nevertheless garnered a consistent crowd of acolytes who saw him as a sort of harlequin antihero.
Posted in Movies, Superhero Movies
Tagged Batman, Christopher Nolan, Essays, Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Trilogy, The Joker
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Tim Burton’s Batman Is an Evolutionary Step Between Batman ’66 and The Dark Knight Trilogy
Someday, in the not too distant future, we’re going to get a raw, documentary-style Batman film, about a regular guy who just so happens to dress up like a bat and get into ugly fist fights with criminals. And when that happens, we’ll turn around and laugh at how cheesy and unrealistic the Christopher Nolan films seem by comparison. Today’s cultural sensation is tomorrow’s hokey relic. So it goes.
But until that happens, it behooves us to look at Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film, which scans as corny and even rudimentary relative to Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, with some perspective. After the semi-grounded approach to the character in recent years, it seems odd in hindsight that Burton’s take on the character was praised for its serious approach to the source material. But contemporary critics were comparing it to William Dozier’s Batman ‘66, the overtly comedic, Adam West incarnation of The Caped Crusader. So, as I discussed with Robbie Dorman on the Serial Fanaticist Podcast, while much of Burton’s tack in the 1989 Batman feels broader and even goofier than the Batman of today, his version fits into a wide spectrum of portrayals of the character, on the page and on the screen, that’s taken shape over the last eighty years.
Posted in Movies, Superhero Movies
Tagged Batman, Christopher Nolan, Movie Reviews, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Tim Burton
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Man of Steel | The Andrew Review
Superman is an alien from beyond our solar system, but also a part of humanity. He’s a boy from Kansas, but also a demigod. He is, at once, both the other and the familiar. It’s a duality that director Zack Snyder and screenwriter David S. Goyer explore in Man of Steel, and they demonstrated the similar duality that’s inherent in attempting to adapt Superman for the screen.
In the film, Superman struggles with the tension between his knowledge that he is a living monument to a world and a people who have long since been destroyed and the feeling that he is a part of our world with friends and loved ones who are just as meaningful. By the same token, the film’s creative brain trust (which includes the director of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan) struggles to both honor Superman the icon, the character who has come to represent so much over the course of decades of stories in every medium imaginable, and make him a relatable character who movie audiences can connect with.
It was a noble effort, and a difficult one at that, but ultimately, an unsuccessful one as well. At the end of the film, Superman is still more icon than man and more symbol than individual.
