By now, everyone knows the story of Heath Ledger. He just finished filming the latest movie in the Batman series and died unexpectedly. I liked Heath Ledger. His film roles were really good, in my opinion, and he seemed like a good guy in real life.
This role is amazing. I was not prepared to agree with that, after all the hype about it. It felt like he was being canonized after he died. I figured it would be a good performance, at best, and that the praise was the movie equivalent of not speaking ill of the dead.
The movie is interestingly written. While never an avid reader of comics myself, I've always enjoyed the movies that were derived from comics, from X-Men to Spiderman. The other Batman movies seem like cartoons, a little too childish or contrived. This movie, while still full of the comics book-like special effects and toys, manages to have some depth to it.
I'm not going to spoil it for anyone reading this. Partly, this is because I'm not certain what the actual deeper meaning here is. They explore the nature of good and evil, the way one almost creates the other. They talk about chance and fate versus effort and choice.
Mostly, you just enjoy watching Heath Ledger paint the depth of the character of the Joker, in a way that the original series or Jack Nicholson's 80's portrayal could not touch.
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