The young folks and I caught The Dark Knight Monday at the Rave, and I must say - the movie is 100% engaging; Heath Ledger’s Joker absolutely MAKES the movie. It has more than a few laughs, but it struck me as about 15% incoherent and, I have problems with about 75% of the political miasma that enshrouds the whole thing.

The movie pretty regularly presents the Good Guys, most especially the Dark Knight himself, torturing the bad guys to get information from them.(The Good Guys pretty quickly begin referring to the Bad Guys, Joker and his henchmen, as “terrorists”).

Toward the end of the movie, a theatrical fig leaf is appended by the movie makers, wherein the hero (Christian Bale) loses his best, most conscientious employee (Morgan Freeman) over a dispute regarding the rightness or wrongness of illegal wiretapping, but not before Freeman helps conduct an “extraordinary rendition” (or kidnapping!) of a bad guy, earlier in the movie!

Toward the end, the ethics of the movie become (to me) simply incoherent….and granted, the movie is really only intended to be is a big budget summertime flick, made to generate gonzo cash (which it seems to be doing right now).

But the movie really is just about too intense for younger (say, 12 or younger) children, so it IS aimed at tweens and teenaged males (and as many 20 and 30-somethings as can be netted!), and therefore the political petina and the assumptions and the visceral appeal of the thing is more than a little troubling.

In the movie’s garbled attempt at relevancy to current day issues, I think it is akin to ideological pornography - raising important, serious issues soley for wham-boom salacious sizzle of it.

The movie is very like one of those 'virtual rides' wherein you sit there and almost feel the motion; the director LOVES continuously turning, spinning, rotating pans; the point of view on the screen is swirling so much of the time that it really does begin to make one dizzy ('course, I START OUT a bit light headed, most times!)