Plot Holes

Christopher Nolan's 2008 mega success about Batman's attempts to defeat a criminal mastermind known only as the Joker.
Posts: 2
Joined: April 2022
Dado wrote:
August 10th, 2012, 5:32 pm
Yes, but one thing remains though: Joker was standing in the sidewalk, in the middle of the day, in plain view with his mask off. I assume his figure (make-up, clothes and green hair) would've caught the attention of anybody else who walked past him in the streets.
Whenever I see this commented on, I always wonder about it for a second - and then I remember, not everyone lives in a big city.

When you're in a big city (like Chicago, where the movie was filmed), you see these types of guys all the time. You become desensitized to it, and you learn to simply look the other way and move on, because you don't know if they're unstable and you don't want to risk provoking them.

So yes, his make-up and hair might have been "noticed" by people walking past (his clothes were normal) - or they might very well not have been, since we're so used to it. But even if it had been "noticed," so what? Nobody's going to do anything about it or care - there's no law against wearing makeup or dyeing your hair.

Keep in mind, this scene occurs before the Joker's videos sent to the news - there is no city-wide manhunt for him, and he's not well-known. Nobody's going to call in a weirdo clown guy on the street, he's just one of the many homeless crazies wandering around.
Not quite "low-profile" for someone who is about to rob a bank.
Already explained above, but it also bears mentioning that the Joker doesn't *care* if he's "low-profile" or not. Why would he? He's about to get into a car and leave the scene.

Even if someone recognized him as a serial bank-robbing clown, and even if someone called the police about it, and even if the police took the call seriously, how long do you think it's going to take the police to respond and send someone down? 20 seconds later, the Joker's gone - nobody's following his car. 15 minutes later, the bank has been robbed.

What can be done to prevent it, and how quickly can it be done? Joker doesn't care.
Not to mention the rest of the gang, driving around in clown masks.
When I'm driving, I tend not to pay attention to what the other drivers on the road look like. And if I happened to notice that another car was full of clowns, I really wouldn't care - it would be an amusing anecdote at best, not a cause for concern. Usually, when I'm driving, I'm more focused on the road and not crashing than anything else.
Also, the other team blows up a window in a busy part of town. Wouldn't all that glass fall on people in the street bellow?
The glass is high enough - and pulverized into small enough pieces - that it would be dispersed pretty widely. I'm not sure anyone would notice at all. But even if they did....
or wouldn't somebody at least notice that glass hitting the sidewalk, look up, and see those guys crossing on the cable?
...so what if they did? Most would not look up - when you're downtown, you're usually busy trying to get to where you're going - but if you did look up, you'd see a few guys crossing on a cable (if the sun didn't blind you and you had good vision). So? That's not necessarily illegal, and even if it was, and even if you cared enough to take some time out to report it (and remember, this is from the pre-smartphone era), what would you call in? How quickly would police respond, if they did?

The robbery's complete 15 minutes later.
I thought about that too. The logistics of the Joker's terrorist acts are pretty grand and demanding. He says "gunpowder, dynamite and gasoline are cheap", but in that amount?
Yes. $68 million is a mind-bogglingly large amount of money. That's just math.
Just to move and place all those explosives (into the precinct, both warehouses, the hospital and both ferries) would require some serious work
Yes, it would require a lot of labor. Fortunately for the Joker, we've seen he has quite an extensive labor force, between the crazies he's recruited and the mobster lowlifes he's co-opted. And the large sums of money required to pay such a labor force, of course.
not to mention that he did it without anybody noticing (how stupid is the people and the authorities of Gotham?)
Most "authorities" are pretty stupid. Have you been to an American airport? TSA is incredibly moronic - and that's going to have much higher security relative to an overpopulated transit ferry.
One more thing: he would also need an experienced demolition engineer to rig and place the explosives in the right place to cause the desired fx.
Joker's not trying to "cause any desired fx," he's just trying to blow up the hospital. The fact that it looks good on screen wasn't because the Joker cared about making it look good on screen, that was just a conceit from the director to make it more fun for the audience. A "happy coincidence," if you will - and given the detonator seems to fail at first, I'm not sure it was actually rigged all that well!
Plus: he blows up the precinct, everybody gets blown but him?
Nope, there are plenty of cops that we see in that precinct show up later on in the film.
Here's one: Batman and Rachel fall from the Penthouse, landing on the car. After checking that she's OK, why didn't he rushed back up there to face the Joker?
Because he just fell out of a building onto a car. After getting stabbed in the gut. That all tends to knock the wind and energy out of you. One of the premises of the Dark Knight Trilogy is that this is a more grounded take on Batman. He's not a superhero who can rush back into the building right away - his injuries accumulate and affect him throughout the film. That's why his voice gets more gravelly as the film progresses.

And if he did, what would be the point, from a storytelling perspective? The movie implies that the Joker didn't find Dent, so decided to move on before a SWAT team shows up (he wasn't interested in holding hostages, he was interested in killing Dent - who he didn't know was in the security room, and even if he did, likely didn't have the tools to get him out easily).

So if Batman rushes in and finds the Joker gone, we've got a boring scene that slows the pacing of the film.

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Joined: April 2022
DHOPW42 wrote:
January 6th, 2021, 2:19 pm


I am only posting it in Plot Holes because it, like, the third topic from the top, but also maybe this was some sort of a plot hole for many. I, for one, never understood why the cut in this particular scene seemed so odd, but, apparently, here's the explanation for that: they cut it after Ledger had passed away, so that they would make Gambol's character dead. Wow.
Yeah, this is mostly bogus. I like Michael Jai White, but he tends to exaggerate his stories - and this one in particular - more and more as the years go by.

Frankly, none of the story makes sense, nor is it corroborated by any other source.

-Nolan makes films one at a time, he has no interest in setting up sequels with minor characters like this or constraining himself to future storylines.

-If a character is going to be set up for a sequel, it'd probably be a major character. Even if Nolan wanted to constrain his future stories by picking such a character ahead of time, it's unlikely he'd cast a lesser name like White for a major role down the line.

Now there is a very good reason for the quick cut - and why any scene depicting Gambol injured, mutilated, but alive on the floor would have been deleted even after being filmed (if it was filmed, as implied by White). And that's because of the desire for a PG-13 rating.

With the quick cut now, it's clear White dies, but it's a bloodless death and a clean kill. If he gets his mouth sliced open and is screaming and bleeding, however, it's going to be a lot more shocking, violent, and gory. And "The Dark Knight" was already really edging close to an R-rating, which the studio absolutely did not want (for fear of limiting the theater audience and box office returns). "The Dark Knight" may have been the closest a movie has ever come to crossing the threshold between PG-13 and R without actually going over (though Reeves' latest "The Batman" is another contender).

We know Nolan already made several decisions or alterations to avoid an R-rating - there was fake blood on hand for the filming of the interrogation scene, to be slathered on Ledger as Bale was punching him, but ultimately they decided not to use it. Also, the Joker card pinned to Brian Douglass's (fake Batman) chest ("Will the real Batman please stand up?") was originally attached to him via a large knife blade - a later alteration used a safety-pin instead, presumably for the less violent imagery, for ratings purposes.

Gambol's status is changed for the same reason that the movie features no cursing and there's shockingly little blood, despite the many gunshot wounds incurred. It had nothing to do with Ledger's death, nor were there any plans to bring Gambol back later.

Posts: 20
Joined: July 2022
haytil wrote:
April 27th, 2022, 4:06 pm
DHOPW42 wrote:
January 6th, 2021, 2:19 pm


I am only posting it in Plot Holes because it, like, the third topic from the top, but also maybe this was some sort of a plot hole for many. I, for one, never understood why the cut in this particular scene seemed so odd, but, apparently, here's the explanation for that: they cut it after Ledger had passed away, so that they would make Gambol's character dead. Wow.
Yeah, this is mostly bogus. I like Michael Jai White, but he tends to exaggerate his stories - and this one in particular - more and more as the years go by.

Frankly, none of the story makes sense, nor is it corroborated by any other source.

-Nolan makes films one at a time, he has no interest in setting up sequels with minor characters like this or constraining himself to future storylines.

-If a character is going to be set up for a sequel, it'd probably be a major character. Even if Nolan wanted to constrain his future stories by picking such a character ahead of time, it's unlikely he'd cast a lesser name like White for a major role down the line.

Now there is a very good reason for the quick cut - and why any scene depicting Gambol injured, mutilated, but alive on the floor would have been deleted even after being filmed (if it was filmed, as implied by White). And that's because of the desire for a PG-13 rating.

With the quick cut now, it's clear White dies, but it's a bloodless death and a clean kill. If he gets his mouth sliced open and is screaming and bleeding, however, it's going to be a lot more shocking, violent, and gory. And "The Dark Knight" was already really edging close to an R-rating, which the studio absolutely did not want (for fear of limiting the theater audience and box office returns). "The Dark Knight" may have been the closest a movie has ever come to crossing the threshold between PG-13 and R without actually going over (though Reeves' latest "The Batman" is another contender).

We know Nolan already made several decisions or alterations to avoid an R-rating - there was fake blood on hand for the filming of the interrogation scene, to be slathered on Ledger as Bale was punching him, but ultimately they decided not to use it. Also, the Joker card pinned to Brian Douglass's (fake Batman) chest ("Will the real Batman please stand up?") was originally attached to him via a large knife blade - a later alteration used a safety-pin instead, presumably for the less violent imagery, for ratings purposes.

Gambol's status is changed for the same reason that the movie features no cursing and there's shockingly little blood, despite the many gunshot wounds incurred. It had nothing to do with Ledger's death, nor were there any plans to bring Gambol back later.
Really well laid out. I also think this was before the peppering of movies with as many nods to characters as possible. Now in comic book movies (maybe more DC) they have so many versions that they have to start interacting and you get duplicates. Meaning you can't really trust any casting or name dropping.

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