Fancast: The Big Picture

By Andy Hunsaker
Fancast Movies

Comic book movies are generally assumed to be movies you can take kids to see, just as comic books are generally assumed to be for kids. Both of these assumptions will make asses out of you and your kids if you take them to see The Dark Knight. In this case, despite the lack of gore, nudity or bad words, the PG-13 should be stringently observed.

It won't be, however. There are toys on shelves, commercials on TV and eight-year-olds saying they wanna see Batman. It's not quite as safe this time around as Batman Begins was, which had no Batman for the first half of the movie, and thus would put 10-year-olds to sleep. The Dark Knight is two and a half hours of unrelenting suspense and pressure fomented on the audience by a truly creepy and unnerving psychotic murderous clown who is definitely not the nutty funster that Jack Nicholson was in 1989. Heath Ledger's greasy, disturbed performance could very well give kids nightmares, and it's made all the more eerie because he's dead. The friend I left the theater with declared he would definitely not want his 9-year-old to see it.

People won't listen. They'll wander in expecting Batman and Robin going "Zowie!" and come out with crying children who won't sleep well for days. They will then proceed to blame the entire movie industry for traumatizing their kids. The question is just how many people will do this, and whether it'll earn angry parent mobs, or if Ledger's Oscar-caliber performance will help them realize that superhero movies do not all have to be Happy Meal events.

What's also a curiosity is whether or not a backlash, should it materialize, would actually hurt business or help it. No such thing as bad publicity? Ang Lee's Hulk would beg to differ. Will angry parents browbeat a nervous Hollywood into dumbing down all further superhero adaptations into day-glo kiddie-flicks, or will the startlingly good quality of The Dark Knight as a film be augmented by the lure of this kind of controversy and allow for the fantastic word-of-mouth it deserves?

The smart money says that respect for Ledger and the tragic circumstances of his untimely demise will overshadow and mitigate any organized complaint as far as box office goes, but that's not to say parents won't have a point about the intensity levels. As much maligned as the MPAA is, however, they're right on this one. PG-13 doesn't always mean 'oh, my kid's got a good head on his shoulders, so he can see this.' Sometimes it means 'seriously, if you bring a kid under 13 to this movie, Finding Nemo might not calm him down so well anymore.' Even clownfish will be suspect.