Joker Review: 9 Ups & 3 Downs

3. The Origin Doesn't Compromise The Mythology

You look at this movie and you look at Ron Howard's Solo movie and it's incredible to think that the same concerns were levelled at both about demystification and unnecessarily filling in gaps that never needed to be filled.

Lots and lots of people said we never needed a Joker origin, despite the fact that we've seen that very thing explored without issues in the comics more than once, and some people may even have chosen not to see it for that reason. I get it, to a certain extent it probably feels like a betrayal of Heath Ledger's legacy, because what he brought to the Joker was an intoxicating sense of mystery, but it turns out we can have both.

Thanks to the ingenious narrative devices employed - not least the idea of an unreliable narrator - and the obvious insistence on keeping SOME things hidden, Joker offers AN origin without trying to be definitive and it's loose enough with its Batman lore that it's entirely possible to not accept it as canon.

But even more impressively, it tells the story so well that lots of people are going to actually WANT this to be his real origin.