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And they did it in a pretty fun way. Joker origin stories aren't NECESSARILY trash, but they have every right to be. That said, they took advantage of an interactive medium in a way a film necessarily can't. If you haven't played it, I'll leave a little room for a basic synopsis:
SPOILER
Bruce Wayne meets The Joker, going by the name "John", during the first season through a somewhat convoluted but fairly original plot in which Vicki Vale and Penguin run a smear campaign against the secretly criminal Wayne family, execute a corporate takeover of Wayne Enterprises and inject him with an agrro drug that results in him being committed to Arkham Asylum. John takes a liking to Bruce and helps him escape.
In the second season, most of the plot revolves around trying to figure out the motivation behind a terrorist attack orchestrated by The Riddler, who dies pretty early on in the story. Bruce is approached by John, released on good behavior, to join a group called The Pact, a connected group of individuals connected to Arkham Asylum who are presented as trying to make sense of a fractured society. Bruce becomes a mole within the organization for GCPD (and Batman) and attempts to remain undercover in his civilian persona while thwarting villains like Bane and Mr. Freeze as Batman.
If you're unfamiliar with the Telltale formula, they are essentially Choose Your Own Adventure novels and much of the season revolves around Bruce advising John and his group about the vigilante actions they take throughout the story. In the final episode, when John reveals himself as The Joker and Bruce as The Batman, and the player discovers that John was the mastermind behind The Riddler's plan, much of the choices you've made in conversations with him at bars, during stakeouts, plotting missions and so on determines whether Joker begrudgingly respects Batman or outright loathes him. To that end, when Joker is eventually returned to Arkham in the post credits sequence he's either visited by Bruce as a quasi-friend or seen plotting his revenge.
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All that to say I'm pretty sure this movie will be average at best, but if a video game can find its way to a good Joker origin story, maybe Hollywood can too?
~~~~~~~~~ "This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517 Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz
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