Yeah, pretty sure Two-Face is alive. Whether or not we'll actually see him again is another matter, given supe-movies' habit of throwing out used villains for brand new ones.
My stepfather and I are placing bets on Penguin for the big bad of the next one. He's the only obvious one who fits, though I'm personally rooting for Clayface.
They may not go obvious (remember the first movie); I'm rooting for Clayface too.
And of course, as Arc noted, Lucius's remark about cats.
Anyhow: overall I got the impression that this was the Empire Strikes Back of the new Batman series - that interim movie where the good guys get their asses kicked to shit and back and manage only a token victory at the very end - which implies that there may just be a beginning, middle, and end to this. Probably not, but if so then that raises the question - how's it going to "end" in the next 2-3 hours?
This is actually a great place to bring in Robin. Batman may be at his lowest and his darkest. Robin is an anchor, someone who brings him back from the brink.
Also, what's up with all the importance around Gordon's son, and Barbara Unnamed Gordon having nothing but a cameo? Is there some significance that one of you comic book reading assholes can explain to me?
I don't think the daughter is Barbara; she's too young. My guess is Barbara's somewhere else at this point (college? How old is Gordon supposed to be here? Oldman himself is 50).
As Rico noted, emphasis on Gordon's son is from Batman: Year One, though he was an infant in that one.
I'm rooting for Charles Victor motherfucking Szasz.
I saw a trailer for that movie.
Riddler is the Nolanverse villain. It allows him to play around with flashbacks, and the Riddler isn't some beast of special effects. Just imagine the virals that would come along with that motherfucker. He also provides ample opportunity to delve into the Dent cover-up, and the loose threads dangling around concerning Batman's true identity.
Some of the Joker's clues -- the fingerprints that required heavy ballistics analysis to discover, for example -- were complex to the point of being more Riddler-appropriate.
...Anyway.
High-level: the way this plays with archetypes, icons, mythology and philosophy was really what made it special. Batman, Joker, Harvey are all presented as inspirational figures -- Batman and Harvey for humanity's better aspects, Joker for its worse.
Joker and Two-Face give us two different depictions of the devil -- the Joker is the snake, bringing others down to his level, while Two-Face is the fallen angel, the brightest star who falls the farthest.
And through all this, the characters examine these things, examine their purpose as symbols, but it never gets didactic; it clearly has implications beyond the fourth wall, but they never break it.
The Joker combines the best of many different versions of the character. The taunting hints, the naming names of who he's going to murder, and then pulling it off anyway even when they're surrounded by police protection -- that's straight out of Batman #1 from 1940. The suggestion of a symbiosis with Batman, the indication that they could not exist without each other, is from Dark Knight Returns. And his motivation to bring heroes down to his level is Killing Joke. I'm sure there are some other influences in there (I never read Long Halloween), but those were the ones that leapt out at me.
The ending recalls Watchmen, except where Veidt's sacrifice for the greater good was a few million human lives, Batman's sacrifice is of himself, his own reputation and relative safety. It's all about platonic truths and the heroic ideal, the notion that a myth can be greater than a man. (Tangentially, this is why Bubba Ho-Tep works so well: we would rather see Elvis as a heroic figure than the man he really was.)
And finally, all right, on to Rachel. There's been plenty of talk in the thread about what a worthless character she was, but everybody seems to have waited for me to show up to bring up the 600-pound gorilla in the room:
women in refrigerators. As I've noted more than once in the past, I fucking loathe stories where the girlfriend dies simply to motivate the male hero (or villain) -- and in this case, neither the hero nor the villain NEEDED that motivation. I believe this is the only real sour note in the movie. I find it distasteful, and I feel both movies would have been greatly improved if her character had never existed.
Also: I quite liked how they played with some of the previous movies. The Joker's fall from the rooftop was very reminiscent of the ending of Burton's version, but this time, Batman saves him -- because this Batman doesn't kill.
Anyway. All in all an excellent movie. I'll probably have more to add later; I'm still chewing on it.
