Saxar den. http://www.cracked.com/article_19923_6-movies-with-political-agendas-you-didnt-notice.html
The Dark Knight - Batman Kidnaps Foreign Citizens (Just Like the CIA)
The Scene:
It's a subplot that largely gets forgotten in a movie that winds up being all about the Joker. At the beginning, a guy named Lau, the accountant of all the mobsters in Gotham City, flies to Hong Kong to hide their money. Lt. Gordon really needs to interrogate Lau, but obviously Asia is a little outside his jurisdiction. No problem: His pal the Batman simply flies over to China, grabs the accountant from his highly protected office and escapes back to Gotham by reverse-parachuting up into an airplane. It's kind of awesome.
It's a subplot that largely gets forgotten in a movie that winds up being all about the Joker. At the beginning, a guy named Lau, the accountant of all the mobsters in Gotham City, flies to Hong Kong to hide their money. Lt. Gordon really needs to interrogate Lau, but obviously Asia is a little outside his jurisdiction. No problem: His pal the Batman simply flies over to China, grabs the accountant from his highly protected office and escapes back to Gotham by reverse-parachuting up into an airplane. It's kind of awesome.
The Intended Point:
We've mentioned before that The Dark Knight is an allegory for everything about the War on Terror, and this sequence is undoubtedly the most transparent attempt by Christopher Nolan to draw a parallel between Batman and George Bush (OK, maybe it's second after the "We have to tap every citizen's phone for their own safety" thing). Swooping into Hong Kong and dragging Lau back to Gotham to be interrogated is supposed to mimic the CIA's controversial policy of forcibly extraditing citizens from foreign countries and dropping them at Guantanamo, while dressed like bats.
How It Messes Up the Plot:
Some of you are already thinking, "What? Where the hell are you getting this Bush stuff from? Why can't it just be a cool scene?" But stop and think about how the whole sequence sticks out like a sore thumb. First, how often do you even see Batman leaving Gotham, in any film incarnation? This is Batman, not Mission: Impossible. Spectacular globetrotting raid missions isn't what Batman does.
We've mentioned before that The Dark Knight is an allegory for everything about the War on Terror, and this sequence is undoubtedly the most transparent attempt by Christopher Nolan to draw a parallel between Batman and George Bush (OK, maybe it's second after the "We have to tap every citizen's phone for their own safety" thing). Swooping into Hong Kong and dragging Lau back to Gotham to be interrogated is supposed to mimic the CIA's controversial policy of forcibly extraditing citizens from foreign countries and dropping them at Guantanamo, while dressed like bats.
How It Messes Up the Plot:
Some of you are already thinking, "What? Where the hell are you getting this Bush stuff from? Why can't it just be a cool scene?" But stop and think about how the whole sequence sticks out like a sore thumb. First, how often do you even see Batman leaving Gotham, in any film incarnation? This is Batman, not Mission: Impossible. Spectacular globetrotting raid missions isn't what Batman does.
But more importantly, taking Batman out of the country creates a bunch of
weird inconsistencies. For example, to set up the whole thing, there's a scene
where Gordon and Harvey Dent talk about how Batman could retrieve Lau from Hong
Kong since he's "under no one's jurisdiction" (and the Joker says pretty much
the same thing to the mobsters). But why would they even assume that Batman has
the resources to pull that off? They don't know he's a billionaire.
Think about the strings that would have to get pulled, not just to perform that elaborate kidnapping under the noses of all of this guy's armed guards (in his own building, in his home country), but to then get out of the country after. We're talking about escaping who knows how many police waiting on the ground at every nearby airport and/or all of the jet fighters that Hong Kong would use to intercept the slow-flying plane that just took one of their citizens hostage. It's the kind of operation that very few governments could pull off, yet Dent and Gordon are saying, "Yeah, our local costumed vigilante could do it for us."
This also means that you have to think of a very convincing alibi for Bruce Wayne -- by the way, "He absconded with the entire Russian ballet" isn't one, because there's an entire Russian ballet that knows it isn't true.
Think about the strings that would have to get pulled, not just to perform that elaborate kidnapping under the noses of all of this guy's armed guards (in his own building, in his home country), but to then get out of the country after. We're talking about escaping who knows how many police waiting on the ground at every nearby airport and/or all of the jet fighters that Hong Kong would use to intercept the slow-flying plane that just took one of their citizens hostage. It's the kind of operation that very few governments could pull off, yet Dent and Gordon are saying, "Yeah, our local costumed vigilante could do it for us."
This also means that you have to think of a very convincing alibi for Bruce Wayne -- by the way, "He absconded with the entire Russian ballet" isn't one, because there's an entire Russian ballet that knows it isn't true.
And it wouldn't have been hard for somebody to figure it out after the fact.
Lau disappeared right after meeting with a Wayne Enterprises employee (Morgan
Freeman), who traveled across the world for basically no reason. Did no one
think that was weird?
The point to all of this is, why does the movie introduce all of those complications? If you just wanted that cool skyscraper/plane scene, couldn't the accountant have escaped to Denver or Metropolis or something? No, they wanted to insert that whole bit about how justice trumps those petty rules about "jurisdiction" and "the sovereignty of other countries." Besides, cutting it would mean that Nolan would have been left with just the other 19 allusions to the War on Terror in the movie, and we can't have that.
The point to all of this is, why does the movie introduce all of those complications? If you just wanted that cool skyscraper/plane scene, couldn't the accountant have escaped to Denver or Metropolis or something? No, they wanted to insert that whole bit about how justice trumps those petty rules about "jurisdiction" and "the sovereignty of other countries." Besides, cutting it would mean that Nolan would have been left with just the other 19 allusions to the War on Terror in the movie, and we can't have that.
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