For me, hands down the most chilling part of this film was the five year old seated next to me. Not my own, mind you, I have the good sense not to bring a child --a toddler almost-- to see Ronald McDonald's evil twin unleash two and a half hours of carnage and gore on a city very like my own. She was, to her credit, reasonably well-behaved, perhaps terrified into silence (luckily for me, as her mother would have been too busy text messaging her entire phone list to intervene). While I appreciate the 9-11 subtext of the film, by far the more pressing questions going through my head pertained to the legal grounds for child abuse and neglect. The film carries a PG-13 rating, and for an older preteen or teenager, it provides the right kind of fodder for dinner table discussion of terrorist psychology. But make no mistake, this film features the most chilling madman since Hannibal Lecter, and to bring a child younger than a precocious eight or nine to this film is wildly inappropriate and, to my mind, an act of cruelty. This is NOT your kid's Batman.

Ordinarily, I am outraged and depressed by the sight of parents bringing small children to horror movies and violent thrillers, but its not like Warners has gone out of its way to let the world know that this "Batman" is the one in which the comic book movie becomes fully, violently "adult."

Versus the clean-machine antics of "Superman," "Batman" has always been a darker tale, but punches were pulled in the Burton "Batmans" and especially the cheesy Schumacher Batmans. Clearly there was always a hope that kids would make for blockbuster audiences.

"The Dark Knight" removes practically all such childish restraints, with one caveat: all shots of the Joker (or Two-Face, or any other crook) about to do something horrible to a victim cut away just at the moment of ultraviolence, leaving people imagining the carnage on the other side of the shot. Still, the implications alone are violent enough.

"Adult comix" movies like "Sin City" are as gory as they want to be, but truly the shift in approach to the "kids comics" undertaken by "The Dark Knight" give one pause.

As an adult moviegoer, I loved "The Dark Knight's" sense of the Joker as a true psychotic, and Two-Face as a human monster. But it does seem unfair to pit it against the earlier versions which were clearly not ALLOWED to go there.

One more thing: all of the Burton and Schmacher Batmans required a host of star actors to play VILLAINS, which meant that they usually had to kill people. It was fairly easy to see Nicholson as the Joker and Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face do it. But Jim Carrey and Danny DeVito (Riddler, Penguin) as murderers didn't play too well, as I recall.

The grand irony was Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze. Arnold had violently killled hundreds as the hero in his movies, but took on the villainy of Mr. Freeze with a certain restraint. "The Terminator" of the first movie no more, Arnold evidently had his "Batman" movie reworked so that his villain killed few people, and reverted to heroism at film's end. It was a matter of screen persona: Arnie was a good guy, now. Even when playing a villain.

But that's all over, now. I trust that Heath Ledger's sadistic Joker will be the gateway to a Penguin and a Riddler to give us nightmares...