Ask anyone in their twenties for their definitive ‘best-ever’ superhero film, and chances are that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight will come out on top. Dark, brooding, confidently directed, and with multiple prestigious awards backing it up, the film has a stellar reputation for good reasons.
That said, even Nolan’s ‘masterpieces’ can be imperfect, as some fans highlighted earlier this week. The scene under question? Around an hour and forty minutes into the flick, Heath Ledger’s Joker makes his way to a hospital, hoping to find the recently-disfigured Harvey Dent:
After surviving a tragic explosion that ruined his visage, Harvey Dent wakes up to find a nearby nurse – only realizing that it’s the Joker once he removes his facemask, reacting violently and thrashing about in his hospital bed.
While we may have missed this detail in previous watches, it’s clear that the ‘nurse’ is the Joker right from the first look we get at him – clearly wearing the iconic face makeup that the character is famous for. This caused several Twitter users to burst out laughing, once @kirawontmiss tweeted about the film’s error:
Some even compared the scene to Disney’s Phineas and Ferb character, Perry the Platypus – who routinely gets misrecognized simply because of a missing fedora hat:
To be fair though, the series has a huge number of plot holes and small errors – although because of the generally great pacing and plot, they tend to go unnoticed. Some Twitter users brought these up as well:
A few fans gave Dent’s actor Aaron Eckhart some leeway, explaining away the mistimed reaction as an effect of painkillers:
Just for the record, Dent canonically refuses to take painkillers – this is his edgy villain-reveal arc, after all.
To be fair, the mistake was first noticed by The Late Show writer Asher Perlman – who tweeted about it in 2015, 7 years after the film was released.
He followed this up on 9 January saying: “Every time this clip goes viral, I think back to this tweet from 2015 and can’t help but wonder if I’d be a millionaire by now if mine had better quality video.”
(Image Sources: Warner Bros. Entertainment)
