***SPOILER***
This highly anticipated film has been polarizing, and as unpopular as this might sound, I find it damn near perfect. To understand its flaw, though, one must consider what Batman taught Flash in The Flash (2023): ‘At some point, you probably saw a movie that told you if you went back and changed the past, you’d create a branched timeline, right? Well, time doesn’t work like that… When you go back and change the past, you create a fulcrum. You put yourself on a whole ‘nother strand of spaghetti. New future. New past. It’s retro-causal; the echoes go both ways… If someone’s foolish enough to mess with time, what they eventually end up with is… the multiverse. Some strands run almost parallel with inevitable intersections; others diverge wildly.’
Why bring this up? It’s the ‘inevitable intersections’ piece. There are immutable events in the multiverse and the Joker is, in my view, a fixed point — he will always exist in one form or another. There’s no universe where he doesn’t. Todd Phillips’ bold take is to put Arthur Fleck through the twisted, transformative turmoil that should make him the Joker. But here, in this universe, he doesn’t quite become him. He remains Arthur, teetering on the edge but never tipping over.
This may well have been the only way to deliver the film’s final act: Arthur’s demise. In truth, the film’s only fault lies in its title. By naming it Joker, the film sets expectations it never intends to fulfill. Strip away that name, and what we have is an original, haunting creation.
