15 Crazy Facts You Just Have To Accept To Enjoy The Dark Knight Trilogy

3. The Boat Dilemma Is Extremely Patronising (The Dark Knight)

One of the few irritating set-pieces in The Dark Knight is the whole boat dilemma, in which a boatload full of prisoners (and prison officers, too) and a boatload full of civilians are each given a remote which is apparently able to blow the other boat sky-high. Discussions begin on each boat, but it's extremely difficult to buy that both boats wouldn't simply scramble as fast as possible to blow the other boat up: after all, in a "them or me" situation, 99% of people would let others die to save their own skin, and in a self-preservation sense, why not? Instead, Nolan has a curiously sugar-coated view of humanity, made all the more patronising by the fact that the voice of "reason" is a gigantic, thuggish-looking criminal, who throws the remote out of the window before giving one of the prison officers a hilariously condescending look. The sickly optimism cutting throughout the scene just rings incredibly false, because in honesty, assuming that The Joker was telling the truth (and he hadn't rigged up each remote to their own respective boat), who wouldn't instantly press the detonator to save themselves, especially when the other boat is probably thinking the exact same thing?