When he went to the party I don't think he was really looking to kill Dent but rather to begin the process of turning Dent into what he hated. Otherwise he'd have killed Dent the same way as he did the commissioner and judge.

Plus, as he admitted to Batman that he did for a while think that Dent was Batman based on the way he jumped out the window after Gyllenhall. So, the fact that Dent was in a closet is irrelevant if The Joker thinks he just jumped out a window. So yeah, they could have shown him leaving, but I don't think it was really necessary.


As far as Maggie goes, the character was so one dimensional and simply there to provide motivations to others that she could equally well have been played by Eddie from Frasier. Sure on the acting skill scale she was a step up from Holmes, but she wasn't really ever asked to use that skill. All I know is that she better really be dead in the inevitable future movies (and I'd really just prefer that they rest on their laurels now).

Another aside, I think Nolan set up a "Lady and the Tiger" discussion piece with the ferries. If one of the boats really had pressed the trigger, which boat do you think would have gone up? Personally, I love the idea that the switch really would have blown up the boat on which it was pressed, the people on the other boat would all know that they hadn't done it but the rest of the world would forever believe they did.

I was thinking that the detonator was going to blow up their own boat.

I was thinking about that scene. First, sign that convict guy up for the starting rotation on the Gotham Prison baseball team, that was a damned precise throw out the window. Secondly, it would seem to me that tossing the trigger out the window would be a sure-fire way to set the bomb off. Either the switch could be triggered by the impact with the water, or it'd be likely that such a remote trigger is rigged such that any loss of signal would set the bomb off to prevent someone from just smashing the thing.

Just sayin'.

True, and I will say that this is a sign of how a fully engrossing movie forgives a lot of sins.

The same thing in Indiana Jones and I would have been all over it. But since TDK fully grabbed me I didn't care at the time and my first instinct when thinking about it later is to find an excuse for it.

But if I sat down I could find lots of problems. As I mentioned above the level of omniscience evidenced by The Joker is something that otherwise generally pisses me off in movies.

Oh totally. I could spend hours nitpicking things in this movie, but none of those nitpicky things detracted from my enjoyment, so I haven't bothered. Same for Begins, lots of stuff that could be picked apart (most glaring being the "I swear, I'm the DA" scene where Rachel gets across the bridge with no questions asked) but the whole package is good enough to not really care.

My only real complaints are Chicago-as-Gotham, batgrowl, and too much meandering back and forth between traps/misdirections. The good stuff in there more than makes up for any shortcomings in the little details but not those biggies.

I'm glad I've never been to Chicago ... and never saw any Saw movies. ;)

I'm glad I don't see any of that. Didn't see LA in Transformers, didn't see Chicago in DK. I always pictured Gotham as a real city-like city so it totally worked.

Saw 3 of the Saw movies but it was only a passing thought that the ferries remotely resembled something in Saw (and it wouldn't even have played out like that in Saw. They would have been rigged to the other boats, and if directions weren't followed everyone would have died).

I never claimed it was exactly out of Saw, it just reminded me of what I know of the genre, which is an ever increasingly complex series of dilemmas along the lines of, "You can either save this friend or yourself, but if you get out of that, you can either save one friend or the other, and you may think you're saving yourself this way but really that's just setting yourself up for this even more diabolical scenario."

Perhaps I have the wrong impression of Saw (or Hostel or whatever other similar movies I've seen trailers for), so really we should all just forget I made that comparrison as it was based on an incorrect assupmtion anyway.

All I meant to say was that the succession of "ticking clock episodes" as mousepod termed them eventually wore thin and left me wanting the movie to just get on with itself and make its point (which it eventually did and I liked).

Can someone clue me in to the Catwoman reference?

The Saw movies have a really good story line behind them, totally different then Hostel and the other torture porn out there. I'm not big on the psychological thrillers, walked out of the 2nd one and barely slept for 2 weeks. Then again I am well aware that my taste in movies is extremely primitive compared to most of the LoT, and I'd be surprised if anyone here liked them.

I second that....