Don't forget that in the Dark Knight, there are some comments along the lines of "they will all hate you for doing the right thing, but someone has to do it." Then in the end of the movie, Batman is the bad guy for doing the right thing. Kind of like how supposedly the rest of the world hates the U.S. now? I only saw the movie once so I wish I had more direct quotes than that. Also, how about the interrogation scene with the Joker where Batman is beating the pulp out of him? Kind of like all the fuss about Guantonomo Bay?

I see The Dark Knight as probably the most intelligent movie response to 9/11 yet. The bombs on two boats scenario is based on `the prisoners` dilemma` derived from game theory. The idea being that two players in a game can choose between two moves; either `cooperate` or `defect`. The idea is that each player gains when both cooperate, but if only one of them cooperates, the other one, who defects, will gain more - but they can`t confer. (U can Google 4 more.) Joker wants to demonstrate that ultimately everyone is as murderous and ruthless as he is. The passengers could attempt to save their own lives by destroying the other boat, providing they act first. Joker expects one boat to do so. But there is also a moral dimension, by destroying a boat the survivors will also be mass murderers and both boats choose not to become so.
It`s telling this particular scenario was chosen for the film. On 9/11, if those in one tower could have saved themselves by choosing to destroy the other tower would they have done so? (But then becoming terrorists themselves.) Nolan is saying that no they wouldn`t have; they`d decide to take their own chances and someone else would have to take the moral responsibility as to whether they lived or died. The boat passengers decision not to blow up the other is a demonstration of basic humanity that is the real defeat of Joker and what he stands for.
Batman plays rough, but wants to hand over to a sufficiently strong civil police authority; he also has rules he won't break (though he comes close). Harvey Dent suffers greatly in the film and arrives at a mental state that believes everything is arbitrary, that there is no morality, good, bad, justice or fairness in the world. Everything is morally equivalent. Two Face crucially abandons being led by moral choices, letting the coin flip do the work. He`s thrown into a nihilistic moral wasteland between Joker and Batman. And that is where US foreign policy is now with Guantanamo Bay and Iraq whilst pretending to itself that it is the world`s White Knight; preferring to believe the legend of Harvey Dent rather than the reality of what he became. (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is referenced in TDK.) Another key plot point is about the use of surveillance technology (ends and means), immensely topical given the Patriot Act and UK`s anti terror laws. There’s obviously more, it’s a very dense, complex film.

What I love about these superhero characters is that they’ve becoming a pantheon of modern mythical figures – similar to those of Greek, Norse or Arthurian legends – whose stories can be endlessly retold and refashioned.

As the king of an amoral universe, as a purveyor of unrestricted evil for fun, Ledger’s dastardly villain, attired as sort of a rotting Clarabell, has chosen his own damnation. He’s jumped into an abyss he has dug himself, and he wants to pull us along.
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Remember, though, all the movie does is just raise questions. And conservatives gladly welcome questions-it's liberals who seek to shut down debate. Thus the 'consensus' on global warming and their constant crowing about net neutrality and the fairness doctrine, etc. Questions about torture and surveillance are valid and should be addressed. I would expect no less from a conservative movie. And in the movie, torturing the Joker saved one life when 2 could have been lost, and surveillance saved 2 boatloads of people and many hostages.

To a man with an ideology, everything looks like a confirmation.

Torturing the joker saved exactly no lives. It was obviously always part of his plan to set up a moral puzzle for Batman. If anything, his motivation throughout the film is to turn good people bad, which means that all the games were about making Dent and also Badman reveal their inner joker, something he succeeded in perfectly.

kyb, true that torturing the joker saved no lives; but permitting the joker his Constitutionally-protected right to contact his attorney via phone call *cost* lives, and got the joker sprung.

Anyway, our host himself said it wasn't a pro-Bush propaganda piece. It was just a great movie, the best since the first two LotR's.

P.S. Slu: your "Knocked Up" poster wins the Internet.

If only Hollywood would wise up to to the amount of success and interest this phenomenon of faithfully considering and posing complex and well-thought out circumstances and plots to the American audience brings to the film industry... then maybe movie-goers could leave theatres a bit wiser and intellectually and morally challenged rather than feeling as though they'd been vomited on and forced to clean themselves or ingest the filth afterwards.