Alan Moore is one of the greatest existing masterminds of the comic book medium.
His ability to coordinate his meaningful writing with suitable artwork, coloring, and panel framing as well as nontraditional pacing and story structure have led to the creation of complex and entertaining stories with a certain capacity for literary interpretation that has furthered the scholarly perception of the format and furthered the idea of graphic novels as a format to the public at large (despite his own personal irritation with the term).
The nature of his stories taking full advantage of every tool exclusive to the comic book medium tend to make adapting his work aiming to capture the full impact of the material problematic to say the least.
For this reason alone, adapting one of his major and most influential works, “The Killing Joke,” was always going to be a challenge. It’s a shame that “Batman: The Killing Joke” wasn’t sunken by that fact so much as the same problems that have been plaguing almost every adaptation from the DC Originals line of the last 4 years or so.
The problems here are not particularly hard to crack and are an unfortunate effect of 2 sad factors that sink any project out of the gate; misunderstanding and miscalculation.
“Batman: The Killing Joke” is an uneven film that never manages to reconcile its elements into something whole. Adapting a nontraditionally structured Joker story about analyzing the psychology, sociological views, and obsessions of a man whose mentality is constantly in flux juxtaposed with the escapades of an individual of an opposite mindset that may very well be as crazy as he is in a different way is a tricky task but a good place to start would have been to tell it as a Joker story.
The three man team of Bruce Timm, Brian Azarelllo, and Sam Liu's decision to address the need to expand beyond the events of the story have looked to the other pieces of iconography that weren’t the direct focus of the subject matter; Batman and Barbara Gordon.
The infamous choices that went into the portrayal of Babs has been beaten to death but ignoring the sexist (deliberately or otherwise) connotations of this Batgirls decision to pursue crime fighting vigilantism to impress a man she’s attracted to that is old enough to be her father, they bear deserved criticism from a storytelling perspective. Even if her role needed to be expanded upon, how exactly was making her an obsessive, naïve, borderline unstable thrill seeker that quits after failing to get her way supposed to add anything of value?
While the bizarre misunderstanding of Batgirl’s character that has brought the film under media spotlight is a substantial blow however, it’s far from the biggest problem that sinks the movie.
Azarello, Timm, and Liu’s jobs as writer, producer, and director in general leave a certain impact on the movie that has various portions and aspects of it feel very definitively like their own trademarked works. Liu’s very clear cut directing style along with Timm’s stylistic cartoonish aesthetics never meld well with Azarello’s script, which is so focused on the expanded material that the actual Alan Moore written source material feels like an entirely different production when it finally comes about.
The chaos born from this is a movie plagued with sloppy art continuity, occasionally choppy animation, and 3 distinct stories that gel poorly with each other and even more poorly with the faithful aspects of the source material that wants to be dark and intense but ultimately does nothing to earn the R rating that it was confusingly given.
Only Mark Hamill and Tara Strong managed to walk away unscathed. The latter managing a surprisingly adult performance given her usual filmography despite the wretched material offered. Meanwhile, the former manages his single best performance of the Joker yet despite having virtually owned the character's perception for nearly the last two and a half decades. Their performances would almost be worth the price of admission alone were they not isolated from the bulk in favor of Kevin Conroy's Batman who almost appears to be sleepwalking through his role in an effort to bite his tongue about actively acknowledging just how bad the script is.
There are a lot of ways this film could have gone wrong but this is probably the one way that didn’t surprise me in the slightest yet left me with the most profound sense of disappointment, mainly because it points to a bigger problem with many of DC’s Animated Originals of recent history.
The Animated Originals line was quite possibly one of the best ideas to come out of DC since the Bruce Timm’s Animated Universe; a way to cinematically test out less popular C-List characters with features to see if they can hold their own for future investment and a way to share the great diverse stories of the more popular characters that may be a little too off beat for the budget of a production aimed at mainstream theatergoers. In between that, they can dabble with an original story here and there.
Possibilities of that plan were pretty much endless and have brought about some of the best films featuring DC characters that many people have probably never heard of.
“Superman: Doomsday” was a far more emotionally resonant and cohesive narrative than the “Death of Superman” story arc and a far more intelligent and effective deconstruction of Superman than “Man of Steel” ever managed to be. “Batman: Under the Red Hood” was more R rated than this film ever came close to being and manages to add some much needed polish to the original comic storyline.
With less traditional stories like these alternating with features like “Green Lantern: First Flight” and “Wonder Woman,” these flicks served as a great testing ground for untested ideas to be brought to the masses. Hardcore comic book fans get to see stories brought to screen that they never would have imagined seeing, polished in a fashion that could only be handled with hindsight and casual fans get to see sides of the characters that they’ve never seen before, perhaps even encouraging them to give comic books a shot.
Unfortunately, in the same vein as the mangled New 52 decision, the choice was made somewhere along the line to more or less gentrify the films to the tastes of a demographic so casual that they were probably never going to be hardcore fans of the property no matter what you were going to do.
Between the decision to inexplicably split “The Dark Knight Returns” into 2 parts and the sanitation and removal of some of the best aspects of “Batman: Year One,” this trend came to a boil by 2012. With the release of “Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox” opening the doors to a New 52 animated continuity consisting of adaptations of stories born from or tying into the current slate of DC comics, the death knell of this line’s creativity hit full swing.
If the creative tombstone of these movies was the 8 or so entry string of bland New 52 Batman and Justice League adaptations, then “The Killing Joke,” with its confused direction, misguided perceptions of character, and inability to keep narrative perspective in focus is the epitaph on which said tombstone is written upon.
Where clever ideas like “Justice League: Gods and Monsters” were once the rule, they appear to now be the exception for the foreseeable future. If the recent 180 degree turn that they’ve made in their film and comics division is anything to go by, however, hopefully that will be a very short future.
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