The one thing that really bothered me was that in what should have been a great law-and-order movie where Batman fights the bad guys (the gangsters), the really bad guys are "law-and-order taken to such an extreme they're bad" guys.

Even in an anti-crime movie, Hollywood just has to remind everyone that the REAL threat is from the Right, even if that requires a ridiculous premise.

Yep. That and why would the real law-and-order types choose to fight crime and protect the innocent by inciting it and killing the innocent. Even going for an "overzealous right-wing worldview run amok" this is simply too counterintuitive to be believable.

      Ah, I agreed when I first saw the movie, but . . .

      As I said at my blog, Batman is a Republican, and the League of Shadows are al-Qaeda.  They're just in a PC disguise so that the blue state audience, and maybe even the moviemakers, won't have to admit who and what their subject matter is.

THE SAUDS MUST BE DESTROYED!

Saw the flick over the past weekend and thought it sufficiently devoid of "politics" that references to contemporaty right/left issues smack of over-imaginative/paranoid musings. Like "Revenge of the Sith," politics here is seriously overblown.

The big question this movie season: Will the aliens in War of the Worlds be wearing GOP elephant buttons?

The League of Shadows in the movie really is a pretty close secularish analogue to al Qaeda - or maybe the Taliban more precisely. A lot of the appeal of these guys to the "man in the street" is that they *are* a sort of "law and order conservative." The rampant corruption governments of the Middle East is one of the things they harp on. And "traditional law and order," which tends to equate to lots of beheadings, toppling walls on top of homosexuals, etc., in that culture.

But I don't think the movie is especially trying to lambaste conservatives, unless you're the type that naturally sees "Republicans = Taliban" equations in his head, in which case you're pretty much beyond help anyhow.

FWIW, Ra's in the comics is an Arab (of 600+ years old), but has never been shown to be especially *Islamic*. He has the megalomaniac's religion, that of serving himself, paired with a sort of nihilistic, never especially convincing "ecology" based ideology. (Basically, "Save the planet by killing 99% of humanity, with just *my* humans remaining.")

I agree. I don't think that it's overtly going for a political angle either. I do think that what you mention - "secular Al Quaeda" - is an oxymoron, and thus kills the motivation for their strategy, given how ridiculously extreme it is.

And yes, it's a bit silly that we're parsing a movie this finely, but the fact that it went from smart to expedient and dumb was a letdown.

Redhand,

No, but the War of the Worlds aliens will be pushing school vouchers and tax cuts.

The horror. My God, the horror.

I think the motivation's good enough from a slightly "heightened realism" Bond-villain type perspective, but yeah, it's more than a bit oxymoronic in real-world terms.

On "War of the Worlds," I'm wondering whether the aliens will turn out to be the evil alien psychiatrists of the Scientologist mythos. That tag line "They're already here" actually got me thinking along those lines (IIRC, all the bad stuff that Scientology "clears" from your mind is the result of possession by evil aliens.)

My point was just that we never see movie villains who say "I'm going to take over the world so I can feed the poor and give everyone jobs."

I think the old Twilight Episode "To Serve Man" pretty much does that, TallDave. But that's about the only one.