Joker’s origins NOT told in THE DARK KNIGHT

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Posted by Matt Holmes. Last modified on October 24th, 2007 at 12:27am

Joker’s origins NOT told in THE DARK KNIGHT

In comic book lore, it took DC Comics 11 years to print a back-story and origin for their most popular villain The Joker, as printed in Detective Comics No. 168. For over a decade he terrified and thrilled children as a white clown faced, purple suit wearing mass murdering psychopath who seemingly had no rhyme, reason or method to his madness.

Of course in comic book films, it hasn’t really worked that way with The Joker or any other major hero or villain. In Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie we started the flick from the point of view of Jack Napier and we witnessed a full character change from evil gangster to homicidal joker. Indeed, we learnt a far lot more about him than we did our masked hero.

One thing I believe many comic book films have missed out on in the past is the power of mystery and sometimes writers need to tell us EVERYTHING about a character, shows me that they don’t have as much faith as they should in their storytelling. With some characters it’s surely better to NOT know their origins, especially at first, as it makes them a far more creepy and terrifying prospect when an evil presence just shows up, un-human like.

I refer to Darth Vader and his incredible power in the first Star Wars movie but then we we see him as a kid in the prequels - and the character’s evil presence is stripped away completely.

We don’t need to see that The Joker was a human being. Infact I rather wouldn’t. And thankfully The Dark Knight producer Charles Roven has updated us on a few things today, the main one being the movie is not “The Joker Begins…”

- The IMAX preview with I Am Legend is the first five minutes of the film.

- “The whole thing is not ‘Joker Begins’, because we did not tell how the Joker became what he is,” says Nolan. “During these five minutes it is shown how the the small crook becomes the most-dreaded gangster of the city - it is more like “The Rise of the Joker.”

- Batman’s new mask will have white lenses on the eyes when he turns on the Bat-sonar detection.

- Batman will go to Hong Kong for some kind of “gangster hunting”, but Roven doesn’t say why Batman travels to Hong Kong.

Good or bad news for you?

Did you want to see The Joker’s full origin or do you just think some things are more powerful when we just don’t know why?

source - coming soon, kino.de

Categories: Movie News, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight (July 08)

6 Comments »

Hmmm, I was kind of hoping on seeing a fresh look at the origin. I was wondering if they’d go into how he got those grotesque scars on his face. But I actually kind of am intrigued by this new news. I like the idea of “The small crook becomes the most-dreaded gangster of the city” and him being the Joker the entire time. I guess they can still show how he got the scars with that.

I wonder if they’ll keep the whole “escaped from Arkham” that they established in BB?

Comment by Professor Chaos | October 24, 2007

Matt,

Good news definatly. Great points you made here. I could not agree with you more. Well, maybe a bit more because this story inspired me to take the argument a bit further.

This totally cheapens the villain.

Comment by Chris | October 24, 2007

[...] friend Matt Holmes has written an article about the new upcoming Dark Knight, and I agree with him completely. As a matter of fact, I [...]

Pingback by The Rec Show | October 24, 2007

Perfect, we really don’t need to know the Joker’s origin. It would just waste 15 minutes of screen time telling some slightly altered version of a story we have heard 10 times before.

Comment by MDOC | October 24, 2007

I agree, it’s a good thing so we don’t get fed too much info straight away. I like the way that this new series is looking at things over the long term - e.g. character arcs over several films rather than the “here’s a new character, here’s how they became a villain, Batman kills him at the end” setup of the Burton/Schmacher movies.

I’d hope they don’t just kill the Joker, then maybe we get more of a backstory filled in later on - we don’t need everything straight away.

Comment by PaulT | October 24, 2007

Paul T,

I’m 99.9% certain the next Batman movie will have a cliffhanger ending which will spill over into the third movie, which will see The Joker have a big part still.

It would be unwise to kill off The Joker, especially if Heath Ledger has nailed the character like we all hope he has. It would be great to see him return to the character for movie 6 say… but I also don’t want the movie to turn into an X-Men flick where Joker is always the bad guy in every movie.

Comment by Matt Holmes | October 24, 2007