The best, in my opinion.
Joker Origin Story Announced
- Thread starter Starbreaker
- Start date
Your avatar feels betrayed by that.
I will make no apologies for it. Life is full of disappointmentsYour avatar feels betrayed by that.
I just watched the trailer for this movie. While it looks interesting, it doesn't look anything like the Joker has ever been portrayed. In other words, why call it The Joker at all?
I don't know. It isn't so far off that you can't feel like this might be what a real life version of a Joker would look like. Which was kind of what we got from the last two as well. Only difference is it seems we won't have Batman in it to counter balance him. Which kind of makes me think of the Joker in "Lego Batman" when he got dissed by Batman.
I think maybe that is what will make this movie more unique. Batman and Joker or each others opposite. They kind of need each other. Well what if you didn't have that opposite. I could see this Joker being the most insane of them all because he doesn't have a Batman to give his life some meaning. I could see him dying at the end of the film and then we know this Batman won't have a Joker in it so will Batman in this universe become a villain instead of a hero as well? Maybe that's the sequel. A Batman without super villians were he is basically just a vigilante beating down low level street thugs.
Jason
OK, after watching the trailer, I think I'm much more willing to approach this with an open mind. They've definitely got the essentials of a solid Joker performance here and while I think it's a mistake to give him a solid backstory, there can be value in exploring one possible iteration.
Here's the thing a lot of fans seem to forget about this character: there's no such thing as a definitive Joker. His personality, disposition, temperament and style have always been in flux, not just from one portrayal to another, but from one moment to another.
That said, there's definite similarities there to several previous Jokers. Not just Ledger, but Hamill, Nicholson and Romero too.
Here's the thing a lot of fans seem to forget about this character: there's no such thing as a definitive Joker. His personality, disposition, temperament and style have always been in flux, not just from one portrayal to another, but from one moment to another.
That said, there's definite similarities there to several previous Jokers. Not just Ledger, but Hamill, Nicholson and Romero too.
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Ledger’s Joker was unlike how it had been portrayed previously. Should there be only one way, one look?
Why make anything new if it’s going to be exactly like it has been before? Why use these characters over and over if you’re not going to bring something new to it?
I wasn't a particular fan of the character choices in Nolan's movies to be honest. They were great movies for the most part but, to date, we haven't really had a comic book authentic Joker on screen, have we?
Depends on which books you've read.
Wait, that boy genius who hacked the US Defense Systems in "Little Hercules" was Joaquin Phoenix? Why didn't I know that? But him wearing the Superboy costume was from a daydream sequence, if I remember correctly, he didn't actually play Superboy.
Hey, Supergirl is kind of c....oh wait, that's Joaquin Phoenix?
There have been so many different versions of the Joker over 80 some years I have no idea what "comic book authentic" means.
I would certainly say Cesar Romero's was authentic.
I would even say Nolan's.
Certainly Hamill's version in the cartoons.
But, ultimately, how does one defined "comic book authentic" for a character that has been around for 80 years and has different versions? The same goes for Batman. What is the "authentic" Batman?
It's something I like about all of these different "versions." There's a Batman and a Joker for everyone that is authentic. I like reinvention. I don't need or desire extreme fidelity to an ever shifting source material.
Cesar Romero used a lot more of the gadgets and practical jokes, does that make him more definitive? (In many ways, for me, yeah. I think his performance, given the context of the era, was more interesting and more "comic book" than Nicholson.)
Though, push come to shove, I have to go with Ledgers performance as the performance to top. He was genuinely scary. Anarchic. A true force of chaos. It doesn't matter to me that he didn't have the acid flower. He was more of the embodiment of what the Joker means to me.
And I use "means to me" specifically. I think everyone has a different "means to me" for Batman and the Joker, for all of it. That's why the characters can live on. That's why there's no "authentic" or "definitive."
It seems like the only authentic Batman that you can now have must feel like he has been inspired by Frank Miller.
Jason
FAKE NEWS! That was Leaf Phoenix in Superboy, not Joaquin.
I disagree. The current comics version is still based on the work that Neal Adams and other writers of the late sixties and seventies did. They made a distinct shift from the whimsical fifties to create a version of Batman that was more hard-boiled detective and serious in style. In the decades since, Miller's eighties influence on the character as waxed and waned, but the current Snyder and King version of the character is still essentially Neal Adams version. And it is a version that we really haven't seen yet in the movies--nor have we seen the Joker that has been with us throughout that time.