Where Does ‘The Dark Knight’ Leave Us?

Not surprisingly, The Dark Knight has done sublimely well at the box office. We knew it was going to happen, but maybe we didn’t know just how well it was going to do. Given the way the world works, however, this means that there will almost definitely be a third movie in Christopher Nolan’s reinvention of the Batman franchise.

And according to an article over at MTV, Nolan and his co-writers — brother Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer — have already discussed the theme and villain for a third movie.

But of course, no one is saying anything, which leaves us to speculate.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

The overriding theme that we got from TDK concerning the future for Batman was that he and Gotham City were going to be at odds. This was brought to the fore during Batman’s conversation with an upside down Joker, and leading right into the final scenes between Batman and Gordon. Being chased into the shipping crates by Gotham’s finest’s canine unit and their human handlers, Batman is now the villain in a city which has just lost its white knight, Harvey Dent.

And this is not something that is new to the Batman universe, where oftentimes he is painted as a criminal vigilante. So in all likelihood, a large portion of a third Batman movie under Nolan’s direction will focus on Batman having to hide from the law. But just like Gordon’s young son, there will be those in Gotham that know that Batman is innocent of the crimes labeled against him.

But Batman versus Gotham is not going to be the title of the next film; there needs to be a villain. But this villain has to allow Batman the chance to redeem himself in the public eye. Enough must be put on the line, at stake, that Batman’s sacrifices and struggles to bring whomever to justice will allow him to be the hero that Gotham needs.

Add in to this equation the need to keep a measure of reality to the villains, and your list continues to diminish. Because as much as I love the Riddler or Bane, I can’t see them appearing in a third Nolan movie as Batman’s big enemy.

I’ve been asking my Twitter-peeps who they think will be making a return for the third movie, and the one answer I keep getting is Two-Face. Now I was at once saddened when the movie finished that they had killed off Harvey Dent. However, I was soon alerted to the possibility that he wasn’t actually dead. Nothing is said on the scene of Two-Face’s fall from the construction site, and the need to keep him redeemed in the eyes of the city was what sent Batman running in the first place, so it isn’t a huge leap to think that they faked his death and locked him up in Arkham Asylum.

So write Two-Face in as the number one choice of fans. But there are others, two in particular that have all of a sudden seen an opening in the position of “female lead”: Poison Ivy and Catwoman.

Catwoman will never play the big bad villain, and for good reason. She is a very talented burglar, but she’s not going to be vying for world domination or committing mass murder anytime soon. So she will play a small role in the next film, of that I am sure. She will be Bruce Wayne’s love interest and Batman’s constant annoyance in a city that doesn’t like either of them, which in and of itself will make for some fantastic scenes.

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But in my movie, I would have Bruce Wayne and Catwoman forced into partnership by the evil doings of one Pamela Isley, aka, Poison Ivy.

Though the fantastical element of Ivy’s ability is to control plants and the like, take a step back and what you have is a fan favorite villain who is out to protect the planet and its plants. In this day and age of environmental awareness, the idea of making a movie where the main antagonist is trying to protect a city by destroying it is not a big leap to make. And even if Nolan and Co want to drop the attachment to realism, Poison Ivy still manages to be one of the better villains in the pages of Batman.

You’ve heard what I and my Twitter-peeps have to say, let’s hear what you have to say. The comments are just below, leave as long a reply as you would like. We would love to hear what you think. Who should be the villain(s) for the third Batman movie?

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/Film British Gossip Endorsement: Tom Cruise Should Make Top Gun 2

Across the Atlantic, The Sun—a tabloid that our commenters loudly detest—has decided to blow on the sails of the Internet and report that Top Gun 2 is in the works. Apparently, a script-outline is out to Tom Cruise and if he approves by recreating the image above, get ready to rock like it’s 1986.

As we witnessed with Crystall Skull, revisiting the ’80s can conjure spilling a bunch of pills on a bathroom floor, but I think this would be a really smart move for Cruise. If this guy was a Transformer, he’d still be a fighter jet. (Slashfilm Statements Hall of Shame). Moreover, Mission: Impossible is beat. Cruise will never play up the “team” aspect required to make that franchise work/make sense. He’s too big and too perfect a star. Valkyrie? Edwin A. Salt. Stop with the reconnaissance. Next month, his work in Tropic Thunder will be crowdsurfed across the globe and have the press blah blahing about the direction his career should go (Answer: if you listen to me, up). Until then, let us grab a milkcrate: the two highlights of his recent career are 1) his website, seriously, Neo-Tokyo, eat your heart out and 2) the scene where he talks shit and tosses around a baseball in War of the Worlds before the aliens make a thunder storm.

Tom Cruise, upside down, screaming in an airplane, killin’ it or chasin’ ‘tang: that is what we (and our world of wars) want to see. I want American flags flowing under the credits. And Val Kilmer might be too old to play Diamond Dave in The Dirt, but The Iceman can be chunky. He needs to be there. Tony Scott? Sure. Bring it. Top Gun 2, we’re throwing a couple pennies in the wishing well for this…

“The idea is Maverick is at the Top Gun school as an instructor — and this time it is he who has to deal with a cocky new female pilot.”

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The Big Question: What is the history of Batman, and why does he still appeal?

Why are we asking this now?

Because the Caped Crusader's latest movie had its British premiere last night – just after news emerged that The Dark Knight had topped the all-time US league for an opening weekend box-office take, with a remarkable $155m, as well as rave reviews about the late Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker. That success snatched the record from another superhero movie, Spider-Man 3.

Where does he come from?

Batman was the brainchild of the artist Bob Kane and the writer Bill Finger, who collaborated on a new character for Detective Comics in 1938. Their first sketches were a long way from the Batman image most people are familiar with today: the first drawings gave him wings and red tights. A few drafts later, a Batman who looked more like the 2008 movie version was born. He was soon starring in his own self-titled comic.

Why was he such a success?

From the start, Batman was unlike other heroes. His rivals, Superman and Spider-Man, are festooned in the primary colours of the American flag, whereas Batman dresses in dark blues and blacks. And no other superhero has a story quite as bleak. When Bruce Wayne was a little boy, he watched his parents' deaths at the hands of Joe Chill, a heartless mugger, and vowed to dedicate the rest of his life to gaining revenge on the criminal underworld. Superman's arrival from another planet is kids' stuff in comparison. To quote the film director and comics geek Kevin Smith: "Batman is about angst; Superman is about hope."

How did he move from comics to the mainstream?

The first big fillip to the Dark Knight's career came in 1966, with the US TV series based on his comic-book adventures. It was a huge success for two years, and the POWs, WHAMs, and Holy Mackerel have an enduring ironic appeal. But the kitsch style, coupled with Adam West's goody-two-shoes performance dealt a near-fatal blow to the the comics, which were sullied for the hardcore aficionados and quickly forgotten by fans of the show. For the next 20 years, the series floundered through numerous relaunches without ever shaking off the high camp reputation of the series. Finally, just as Batman seemed to be on his last legs, Frank Miller wrote the four-issue mini-series The Dark Knight Returns, and changed everything.

Why was Miller's version so important?

As the cultural commentator Jabari Asim put it: "Miller revived what had been a declining character by plumbing his tangled psyche and exposing what he found there." Miller was fascinated by the horrors of the hero's childhood, and bears responsibility for the sense of Batman that most of us have today, as a uniquely downcast hero. That idea's influence on Hollywood, from the Batman series itself to the gloomy thrills of the Bourne movies, can be felt to this day.

What made this Batman different?

In Miller's version, Batman is a 50-year-old who comes out of retirement and has to battle the ravages of time on his body as much as the supervillains terrorising Gotham City. Tim Burton's 1989 Batman drew heavily on Miller's version, giving Michael Keaton's Batman the obsessive, dark personality Miller had imagined. It placed the same emphasis on the fact that, almost uniquely amongst superheroes, Bruce Wayne is not "super" at all, but an ordinary man who sometimes seems more like a vigilante than a hero, and who makes use of high technology, piles of money, his famous wits, and an awful lot of weight training. Critics saw the movie as the first about a superhero to treat the audience like grown-ups: typically, The Washington Post called it a "violent urban fairytale", "an enveloping, walk-in vision".

What happened next?

After a less successful sequel, Burton was dumped by studio executives in search of a more family-friendly director. Sure enough, Joel Schumacher's first effort, Batman Forever, starring Val Kilmer, enjoyed some box-office success; but the next time round, Batman and Robin was widely ridiculed for its garish, overblown style. George Clooney barely survived the mauling. Since then, there's been a renaissance in superhero movies, with Spider-Man and X-Men leading the way – both clearly inspired by Burton's original, darker vision. As a result, Batman himself came roaring back in the form of Christian Bale, in Christopher Nolan's 2005 revival Batman Begins. These days, comic-book movies are everywhere.

Why the box-office surge for superheroes?

It's simple: the audiences keep lapping them up. Hollywood first caught on after the surprise success of X-Men in 2000, and so far the formula hasn't run dry. That's partly the result of the die-hard comic-book fans who routinely see each new title two or three times, and partly because studios can use the fantasy element of the superhero universe to unleash all their most spectacular special effects. There may be more intangible reasons too. According to the comics blogger Josh Flanagan: "This is the kind of movie that can be patriotic and tap into what the United States is craving in a movie right now. That resonates with a lot of people."

So will they continue to be a success?

The Dark Knight's huge success suggests so – but more telling still might be Iron Man, which made $565m and, despite having two big stars, Robert Downey Jr, and Gwyneth Paltrow, was a franchise without anything like Batman's fan-base. If the obscure story of the arms dealer Tony Stark can do so well, the critic Ross Douthat wrote, "the road is cleared for literally dozens of efforts featuring characters just as obscure as Iron Man, if not more so". Tellingly, Marvel, which owns the rights to many of the most popular comic-book heroes (although not Batman himself) has now set up as an independent studio, seeing its future as much in movies as in the comic books it has published since 1939.

What about Batman himself?

His future looks rosy. The success of the new film guarantees a sequel. The current comic book series, Batman RIP, has the fan community in paroxysms of excitement over whether the hero will live or die. But even if he is bumped off, that won't signal his permanent demise. To quote the prominent comics critic Douglas Wolk: "There's no such thing as a 'definitive version' of Batman... there are as many interpretations of Batman as there have been creators who've worked on his stories."

Is Batman the greatest superhero ever?

Yes

*He's often called the World's Greatest Detective, in homage to his formidable deductive intelligence

*His tragic personal history and dark, brooding psychology make him far more interesting than the clean-cut, square-jawed likes of Superman

*He drives the Batmobile

No

*He can't compete with X-ray vision, spider-sense, or super-strength; he can't even fly, only use his cape to glide

*The 1960s TV version will always make him slightly ridiculous

*Lois Lane and Mary-Jane Watson, female foils to Superman and Spiderman, have no equivalent for the Caped Crusader (unless you count Robin, of course)

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