You know, if somehow – somehow, we don’t know how – you haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet, then we have two things to say to you: don’t go any further, for here be spoilers. And what the hell are you doing? Go see it! Now!
Have they gone? Good.
Right, for those of you who have seen it, there appears to have been some kind of debate over the fate of Harvey Dent at the end of the movie, with some mischievous fanboys refusing to accept that the Gotham DA is dead. All this despite the following:
• We see his corpse. It’s not moving. Or breathing. So it's a corpse.
• We see his funeral. Funerals tend to be held when people are dead.
• The Dark Knight script, which is now online if you know where to look, states, quite categorically, that Dent is dead. Finished. Kaput. He’s shuffled off the mortal coil. He’s run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible. He is an ex-Two-Face.
But still the conspiracy theories keep coming… about how Dent’s ‘death’ is a smokescreen. How he’ll come back in the third Batman film and wreak merry havoc. But that’s not going to happen. Officially. Sez who? Sez Aaron Eckhart, the guy who played Dent, that’s who. And if anyone should know, it’s him.
“He is dead as a door nail,” Eckhart told Coming Soon, while unwittingly contining our Monty Python’s Dead Parrot Sketch theme. “I asked Chris [Nolan] that question and he goes, "You're dead" before I could even get the question out of my mouth. "Hey Chris, am I?" "You're dead!" Alright, cool.”
So that settles it. Two-Face is now strictly in the past tense. Which is ballsy, but then again, Nolan did kill off Ra’s Al Ghul in Batman Begins, so he clearly cares not a jot for keeping bad guys alive.
But all this continues to beg the question: if – and when – he returns to the Batfold, who will be the bad guy, or guys? Yes, it probably will be The Riddler and Catwoman, but our respect for Nolan, which is already pretty damn high, would rocket further if he could find a way to bring back Arnie as Mr. Freeze.
Now that would be awesome. Bat-awesome.
To read more from Eckhart on the Dark Knight experience, click here.