Nishant Sharma

Put on a happy face cause the clown is here... and he is here to stay. Within the grimy, rainy streets of Gotham City that shines its night lights upon bags of filth covered from ghostly white steams. A nearby taxi, riding through faceless crowds shouldered by the horror-filled echoes rousing within the walls of Arkham, they roam. Souls who are neither alive nor dead, they roam. They roam these streets seeking the identity that would mold and carve them out of the walls of a society that sees copies instead of individuals. That sees consumers, helpless rats that need a cure. Written by Todd Phillips & Scott Silver, Directed by Todd Phillips, JOKER tells the story of one of those roaming souls. Featuring a career-best performance by Joaquin Phoenix, Arthur Fleck finds himself in the bottom of the barrel of Gotham’s underbelly. Arthur who has gone through parental, economical, psychological trauma, is simply a man who wants to smile. A haunted soul that would later become The Joker, unraveling his philosophy throughout the streets of Gotham, spreading chaos and destruction extracted from a generation of oppressed individuals. And this time, there is no costume donning hero to save the city. Phillips with the aid of his production design team and his cinematographer builds a living, breathing Gotham that reaks misery through its sewers and fumes, allowing Phoenix to fully let go of himself as he evolves into the clown prince of crime. The score by Hildur Guðnadóttir is heavily inspired by Hans Zimmer’s masterful Joker theme from The Dark Knight and though it can be a bit overpowering at times, the score capitulated the grandeur majesty that Phoenix brought as Joker. The genre of comic book movies evolves one more time. If Raimi’s hopeful, colorful and vibrant Spider-Man 2 showed the genre’ power to incapsulate heroism within its canvas, and if Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy showed that the genre was ready to tackle themes that rose beyond the flashy battles and caped thrills, if Snyder’s Watchmen showed the deconstruction of the indecency and the real humanity of a costumed hero surrounded by a cynical world, if Mangold’s Logan deconstructed a nearly two-decade-old icon to deliver an emotional gut-punch, If Sony’s Spider-Verse showed how a radical change of its medium can evolve the genre, then Todd Phillips’s JOKER, is another piece of proof that the genre is at its most interesting when it embraces its versatile canvas to tell a personal story.