I don’t think the magical freeze gun is too big a stretch. It needn’t great instant ice sculptures; just freeze organic matter. That way it’s no good for shattering bank vaults, but it still kills nicely.
Is that for real? Seriously? He just wears clown makeup? The new Joker is a slenderized John Wayne Gacy who dyes his own hair green as a fashion statement?
Dang. The odds of me seeing this film on opening week just went from ‘indubitably’ to somewhere south of 30%. I can’t believe how much this distresses me.
I agree that the Penguin should be rescued from the unfortunate DeVito depiction. Personally (don’t laugh please) I always thought of him as sort of a reverse-Batman, what with the gadgeteering skill and the avian fixation. He’s exactly what Bruce Wayne might have become if he’d been short, pudgy, and didn’t have Alfred to guide him as a child.
Also, with all respect for the need to keep the Bat-franchise distanced from the Adam West series… the Burgess Meredith laugh must stay.
The ‘water-microwaver’ plot device from Nolan’s first movie was just as implausible (if not more so) than Mr. Freeze’s cryogenic suit.
To say nothing of Scarecrow’s ‘fear gas’ and its miraculous antidote-- which had to be administered within a set number of minutes to avoid permanent insanity, if I recall aright. Wasn’t that the whole deal behind the mad dash to save Girl? “Faster, Bat-Penny Racer! Only 29 minutes left until permanent insanity!”
Killer Croc is already among the most plausible of Batman’s disfigured foes, insofar as there actually is a disease that causes discolored, scaly skin. Victims of ichthyosis were often billed as “Human Alligators” in carnival sideshows. So Croc could easily be a big bruiser who just happens to coincidentally resemble his reptilian namesake a bit more than usual. File his teeth, give him Mike Tyson’s demeanor, and you’ve got a truly formidable antagonist. You couldn’t hang a whole movie on him, of course; but he’d be an impressively colorful henchman.
I suppose there may be some concern over the use of a genuine disfiguring disease as the trademark of a comic book maniac. But let’s face it: ichthyosis sufferers aren’t numerous enough to mount any kind of effective protest, so Hollywood is free to mock them with impunity. For 21st century movie psychopaths, I foresee ichthyosis as the new albinism.
Another not-implausible villain (antihero more like) is Anarky. A genius savant with a teenager’s attitude towards authority.
Owen Wilson isn’t a bad actor at all. One of his early roles, The Minus Man, had him playing a serial killer and he did it well.
Just a quick hijack…I thought MCD as Kingpin was inspired casting so I have no qualms with him being in the movie. As for everything else, well…
She had been given a concentrated dose. So it was more like “only 29 minutes before the overdose kills her.”
Oh good lord… The idea of this just sent chills down my spine. Seeing Owen Wilson gently stroking a child’s hair, maybe singing a nonsense rhyme from Alice…
shiver!
What’s wrong with just using liquid nitrogen for Mr. Freeze?
Damn you! I was just about to post this very suggestion. If you’ve ever seen him perform, you’d realize just what a charismatic performer he is.
How about leBeouf to play Jason Todd? 
You know, I was honestly thinking of Matt Damon for the role, but I could see Owen Wilson pulling it off really well. Is Dave Coulier still alive?
Watch a preview for the movie. The Joker’s character seems to be done absolutely brilliantly… the chemical disfigurement aren’t what make him, it’s the maniacal, sociopathic killer aspect. Ledger explores the other side of Joker rather than trying to follow Nicholson’s footsteps.
Reasonable point… especially if you had him in a movie with Great White (another fairly plausible batman villain) in it. Unfortunately, those are two esoteric Batman villains that it’s probably wouldn’t market to anyone not a Batman geek. 
No, fantastic casting… but being the most delicious nugget of corn in a shit sandwich still reminds people that you were in that shit sandwich.
I could get behind this. Wilson did a good turn in that movie where his plane was shot down in mock-Serbia.
You know, I think you could make the lab-accident angle work…just go full-hog. Not that tepid Schumacher version, or even one of the decent comics version. If she’s from a lab accident, it’s going to be a bad one. She’s not Uma Thurman in a green cocktail dress, she’s an unnatural freak. She’s sick, not meant to exist, and she’s deteriorating, body and mind. Artistically, going for a Gigeresque haunting, unworldly yet disturbingly “erotic,” increasingly becoming an outright horrific perversion of two kingdoms of life.
Like a cross between “Alexia Ashford” and “Swamp Thing.”
Anyhoo, the “eco-crusader” motive can basically be worked with, and it’s certainly timely enough to work.* But with the requisite twist of showing a good person purely noble cause going out of control, becoming twisted, diseased, pushed by rabid fanaticism and their own intrinsic flaws into something as ugly and antithetical to human life as what she sought to oppose.
Y’know…all things considered, I think I just described a cross between “Captain the Opposite of Planet” and the last 15 minutes of Akira. :smack:
*(and, if I may be so bluntly cynical, good enough to lay a sanctimonious guilt-trip on the audience with, a la the first movie)
Agreed 100%. Killer Croc was just a big strong guy with a skin disease in the first place, and frankly, he was way cooler in that incarnation than he is now as a ripoff of the Lizard. He’s one of the most obvious Bat-villains to Nolan-ise, I think.
I agree that the Penguin is a good choice, too. We can get a proper screen adaptation instead of that dumb mutant version from Returns (even though I love that movie).
And as for Jason Todd/ Robin;
At 22, he’s too old. I want an actual teen-ager in the role, which means someone new, or someone from an existing kids show.
He does? I just watched two trailers on YouTube, and I saw no evidence of that. If anything, it seems like Ledger’s performance is a careful homage to Nicholson’s Joker, right down to the clipped, hoarse delivery and mannerisms. I kept waiting for him to growl: “Winged freak… ‘terrorizes?’ Wait’ll they get a load of me…”
I would argue that the maniacal, sociopathic killer aspect was never the defining characteristic of the Joker; otherwise he’d be interchangeable with Mr. Szasz or any of the arch, taunting Dennis Hopper-clone psychopaths in recent suspense movies.
In fact it seems obvious to me that the new Joker’s deliberately grotty makeup is a deliberate nod to the Lion’s Gate crowd. That’s why I’m shocked to learn that he apparently doesn’t look that way as the result of a toxic chemical accident-- the blotched face and nasty hair make him look like he was soaked in industrial bleach or something. But it makes no sense for him to adopt such a slapdash, shoddy look intentionally. If the Joker is obsessive about anything other than Batman, it’s his own appearance. You don’t deliberately cultivate a killer clown theme, and then not bother to put on your own makeup neatly.
Seems that when we meet The Joker first, his make-up and appearance is pretty pristine. And later on, too (the ballroom scene in the trailer shows a pretty dapper Joker). There’s even a scene where
he’s shown without make-up, just his hideous facial scars
However, as the film rolls on, he becomes more and more grotesque looking as his make-up “rots” off his face, due to sweat, grime and Bat-kickings. So he becomes progressively nastier as the film rolls on. Really can’t fault Nolan et al for this decision…
Ah, well that makes a bit more sense then. I couldn’t really tell that from the clips I watched.
I’d like to see Thora Birch as Batgirl. I imagine her as being an amalgamation of the 60s live-action, and the 90s animated series. She’d still be the (adopted) daughter of police commissioner Gordon (perhaps her biological parents were rubbed out by the mob), and by day she’s a somewhat retro-nerdy librarian - decidedly Lisa Loeb-ish. But this time, she’s also in grad school to become a computer systems analyst (foreshadowing what will eventually happen to her).
However, she has an obsessive fan interest in the Batman (whom she’s run into once or twice - being the Commissioner’s daughter). By night, when her father thinks she’s out club-hopping, she’s actually donning her own batsuit and kicking criminal ass.
She starts out small - intervening in muggings and bringing in small-time criminals. She also makes mistakes, and narrowly avoids some nasty consequences. Then, mostly by luck, manages to collar a fairly high-profile Gotham mob figure - and thereby becomes a target for the mob, and a source of police & media scrutiny. This goes to her head, and she’s convinced she’s in the same league as the Batman himself.
The Batman, of course, is rather annoyed. Not only is this young woman horning in on his ‘bat’ gimmick, but she is also performing vigilante-style heroics in “his” city without “his permission.” Once or twice, the Batman confronts her and warns her to quit trying to prove herself. Batgirl feels antagonized by his heavy-handed dismissal of her. She actually manages to impress him by giving him the slip (as he often does to her father), and staying one step ahead of his efforts to deduce her identity (something no villain has managed to do.)
Of course, it all comes to an end with one bullet from the Joker…