I found an article today that discusses the new Batman movie. Growing up, I remember the Batman and Robin TV show from the 1960's, and I assumed that the Dark Knight movies would be along the same lines. Boy, was I wrong!!! Reading about just the beginning of the movie is enough to provide a sane person many nights of pure, hellish nightmares. It seems that Hollywood tries to see how far they can push the violence in the movies they put out. In the Dark Knight, it appears that they have gone all out.
The reviewer of the movie in the below link says this:
"But the greatest surprise of all – even for me, after eight years spent working as a film critic – has been the sustained level of intensely sadistic brutality throughout the film.
I will attempt to confine my plot spoilers to the opening: the film begins with a heist carried out by men in sinister clown masks. As each clown completes a task, another shoots him point-blank in the head. The scene ends with a clown – The Joker – stuffing a bomb into a wounded bank employee's mouth.
After the murderous clown heist, things slip downhill. A man's face is filleted by a knife, and another's is burned half off. A man's eye is slammed into a pencil. A bomb can be seen crudely stitched inside another man's stomach, which subsequently explodes. A trussed-up man is bound to a chair and set alight atop a pile of banknotes.
A plainly terrorised child is threatened at gunpoint by a man with a melted face. It is all intensely realistic." Dark Knight review The above is just from the beginning of the movie, and evidently the whole movie is filled with the same type of violence. I never saw the first Dark Knight movie that came out a couple of years ago, so I don't know if it is filled with the same type of violence. What happened to the days when a person or family could go to see a movie like Superman, etc. without seeing things that would put Hannibal Lecter or Freddie Kreuger to shame? I realize that there must be a demand for such things, otherwise the studios wouldn't add it as part of the movie. Personally, my Partner and I can't stand to see such things (even moreso since I have personally survived a terroristic act), and needless to say, our options of what to watch are somewhat limited. When watching a movie or TV show, we change the channel at the very first sign of gore (Not the Al type of Gore-lol) and extreme violence, whether it be to a human or an Animal. Thankfully, there are a few select action movies that keep the violence in check, and don't go overboard. I have found the Transformers movies to be fairly decent and at least tolerable, as they show a lot of action, but they don't get graphic by blatantly showing body parts flying everywhere accompanied by blood and guts. A movie does NOT need to be graphically violent to be good. It saddens me that a faction of society enjoys seeing people being sadisticly tortured, maimed, blown apart and sliced up in the most horrific ways imaginable as if it were nothing. It unfortunately happens all too often in real life, so why do people demand and enjoy to see it in the movies? I just can't comprehend. It's no wonder there is so much more bullying and hate nowadays. When people become used to seeing the butchery in the movies they become hardened to the point that it seems like normal behavior. It can also give bad people ideas of how to creatively hurt and torture another person or Animal. I hope that one day the producers of these movies realise that there are better ways to draw people to see them than to try to entice them through overkill violence, each time trying to outdo the last. The days of a cultural family icon such as Batman, where basically the only violence used to be a fake punch or kick followed by a balloon caption of Bam! Pow! and Zowie! are long gone, only to be replaced by scenes of graphically filleting someone's face like a fish. Sad. I feel distraught thinking about the shootings yesterday. At first, several of the victims thought it was just a promotional stunt and part of the movie until they realised that it in fact was real. Even more messed up was the fact that before the Dark Knight started, the theater showed a preview for a gangster movie where a gunman was shooting at people in the audience from behind the screen in a theater. Little did those unfortunate people know that they would be living the drama in real life only several moments later. There are no words to describe how those people felt, and my Partner and I share the heartbreak that the world is feeling over this tragic event. Humanity needs to get back on track really quickly before we literally destroy ourselves. I can't help but wonder if the violence portrayed in the movies had any influence on the shooter, and if so, to what extent. In the past, I've talked to people who feel the same way, so I know that it's not just me who feels the way I do about the violence. I have no idea what can be done to change things, but I refuse to give in and start watching such things. Each to their own I guess. Just putting my thoughts out there...Thanks for listening!