To Rodriguez’s credit, it’s hard to resist the urge to go too far, to take away all the mystery, and in doing so, do more harm to the character than good. Todd Phillips’ Joker highlights the dangers in taking one of the most complicated and mysterious characters in all of fiction and overexplaining his origins and motivations to fans. Now I don’t but the “he’s A Joker, not THE Joker” crap no do I buy the “unreliable narrator” crap. There’s no reason to make a movie called Joker and not make it about the Clown Prince of Crime. With that out of the way, what we are left with is a fairly pathetic attempt to explain how a down-on-his-luck guy named Arthur Fleck could somehow be put on a path that would allow him to stand toe-to-toe with Batman. And this guy, this Fleck, based on the story we were given, there’s just no way he could ever do that. We know too much about him now to ever believe he could last more than 30 seconds in a fight with the Dark Knight much less concoct evil schemes that allow him to be two steps ahead of the World’s Greatest Detective. Because of this, Fleck’s story was one that ultimately was better off never being told. By taking away the mystery of what made the Joker into the Joker, the film did a disservice to the character.
Rodriguez, on the other hand, did just the opposite. He avoided the pitfall of telling us how Boba crawled from the depths of the Sarlaac Pit. He avoided telling us the long story that would, for all intents and purposes, serve as the origin story of the Boba Fett from The Empire Strikes Back. Instead, he kept those things shrouded in mystery, where they belong, because it’s the mystery of the man that has ALWAYS made him so great. With characters like these, there’s almost no way that one director’s vision of the origin story or the big missing pieces could ever live up to what fans have built up in their minds; it’s safer to leave them untold and find other ways to advance the character in the present, which is exactly what Rodriguez did.