13 Things You Learn Rewatching The Dark Knight

2. The Ferry Set-Piece Isn't As Clever As It Thinks It Is

The big third-act centrepiece of The Dark Knight is the famous ferry sequence, in which The Joker rigs two ferries with explosives and provides their occupants with the detonator to the other boat's bomb.

One of the ferries contains regular folk on their way home from work, while the other is filled with criminals. Nolan clearly wanted to position the sequence as a provocative social and thought experiment, but honestly, it comes off pretty shallow.

In comically unsubtle fashion, it outlines all the major viewpoints - those who feel the criminals "had their chance", those who want to vote on pulling the trigger, and those who won't even entertain the idea - before settling on a weirdly patronising "criminals are people too" resolution.

Nolan wants people to believe that the criminals would blow up the civilians without hesitation, so of course, he does the opposite: the regular folk deliberate about pushing the button, but one of the giant, hulking criminals throws the detonator away, while smugly glaring at those who even gave it a second thought.

The scene's written and drawn-out as though Nolan's making some sort of grand statement on humanity, but really the morality here seems incredibly basic. Wouldn't it have been so much more interesting if the civilians pushed the detonator, only for The Joker to have tricked them, resulting in the civilians blowing up their own boat instead?

Rather than that, Nolan served up a pop-sociology lesson that was pushing it in 2008, and after dozens of viewings and a decade of time, it feels like one of the movie's most flat and underwritten pieces of commentary.