Here's the thing, Hollywood: If you're making a movie about, say, the plight of homeless veterans, then by all means feel free to insert a political message into that. The audience might not agree with it, but you're fully in your rights to make a movie with a message. You'll probably even win an Oscar for it. But if your movie is about, say, giant robots or ghost police, that's probably not the time to try to cram in some message about how we should vote next November.

6 The Dark Knight -- Batman Kidnaps Foreign Citizens (Just Like the CIA)

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The Scene:

It's a subplot that largely gets forgotten in a movie that winds up being all about the Joker. At the beginning, a guy named Lau, the accountant of all the mobsters in Gotham City, flies to Hong Kong to hide their money. Lt. Gordon really needs to interrogate Lau, but obviously Asia is a little outside his jurisdiction. No problem: His pal the Batman simply flies over to China, grabs the accountant from his highly protected office and escapes back to Gotham by reverse-parachuting up into an airplane. It's kind of awesome.







Above: The audience's expression during this scene.

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The Intended Point:

We've mentioned before that The Dark Knight is an allegory for everything about the War on Terror, and this sequence is undoubtedly the most transparent attempt by Christopher Nolan to draw a parallel between Batman and George Bush (OK, maybe it's second after the "We have to tap every citizen's phone for their own safety" thing). Swooping into Hong Kong and dragging Lau back to Gotham to be interrogated is supposed to mimic the CIA's controversial policy of forcibly extraditing citizens from foreign countries and dropping them at Guantanamo, while dressed like bats.

How It Messes Up the Plot:

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Some of you are already thinking, "What? Where the hell are you getting this Bush stuff from? Why can't it just be a cool scene?" But stop and think about how the whole sequence sticks out like a sore thumb. First, how often do you even see Batman leaving Gotham, in any film incarnation? This is Batman, not Mission: Impossible. Spectacular globetrotting raid missions isn't what Batman does.



Somebody get CBS on the horn!

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But more importantly, taking Batman out of the country creates a bunch of weird inconsistencies. For example, to set up the whole thing, there's a scene where Gordon and Harvey Dent talk about how Batman could retrieve Lau from Hong Kong since he's "under no one's jurisdiction" (and the Joker says pretty much the same thing to the mobsters). But why would they even assume that Batman has the resources to pull that off? They don't know he's a billionaire.