So I made the mistake of seeing Joker 2 last weekend, and honestly? It felt like watching one of my students turn in a sequel to their dystopian fiction project that completely missed the point of the original. You know that feeling when a kid writes something brilliant and raw, then tries to recreate it but just… can’t? That’s this movie in a nutshell.
I’ve been using the first Joker film in my classes for a couple years now – not the whole thing, obviously, but clips and discussions about how it functions as social commentary. My students get it immediately. They see Arthur Fleck’s isolation, the way society fails him, how economic inequality breeds violence. It’s dystopian fiction without the future setting, and teenagers understand that viscerally because they’re living through their own version of systemic breakdown.
But this sequel? It’s like Todd Phillips took all the sharp edges that made the original work and filed them down until nothing was left but empty gestures.
The thing that really bugs me is how Joker 2 treats Arthur’s story as if it needed continuation. One of the first lessons I teach about dystopian literature is that the most powerful stories often end at moments of revelation or transformation – think about The Giver or even The Hunger Games. The first Joker ended with Arthur fully becoming the symbol of societal rage. That’s a complete arc. Dragging him back for another two hours feels like… well, like when my students try to stretch a perfectly good short story into a novel because they think longer equals better.
Phoenix is still doing incredible work – the man could probably make reading a phone book feel emotionally devastating – but even he can’t save what amounts to a really expensive art project masquerading as social commentary. There’s this scene where Arthur starts dancing again, and instead of feeling meaningful like the stairway sequence from the original, it just feels… performed. Like the difference between a student writing from genuine emotion versus trying to recreate something that worked before.
I keep thinking about this when I’m planning lessons on dystopian tropes. The original Joker subverted a lot of them – the unreliable narrator, the villain origin story, the class warfare narrative. But the sequel just wallows in them. Arthur’s still the “broken man becomes symbol” character, Gotham’s still the “society on the brink” setting, and the rich people are still cartoonishly evil. It’s like watching someone trace over their own artwork instead of creating something new.
My students would tear this apart in discussion. They’re brutal when it comes to spotting lazy writing, probably because they’re forced to read so much of it. Just last month, during our unit on contemporary dystopian fiction, this kid Marcus called out a YA novel for doing exactly what Joker 2 does – repeating themes without expanding them. “It’s like they forgot why the first book worked,” he said, and damn if that isn’t perfect for describing this sequel.
The visual style tries so hard to recreate the original’s gritty atmosphere, but it feels forced now. All those sickly yellow-green color schemes and claustrophobic close-ups that felt organic before now seem like a director desperately trying to prove he’s making “serious cinema.” It reminds me of when students discover a writing technique that gets them praise and then overuse it in every subsequent assignment.
What really gets me is how the film completely abandons any genuine social commentary. The first movie, for all its flaws, was trying to say something about mental healthcare, economic inequality, media manipulation. Heavy-handed? Sure. But it was engaging with real issues that my students recognize in their own world. This sequel just gestures at those themes without actually examining them. It’s riot footage without analysis, wealth disparity without critique, mental illness as aesthetic choice rather than social failure.
I showed my AP Literature class a clip from the original last spring – the talk show scene – and we spent an entire period dissecting how it functions as social critique. The students connected it to everything from school shooter manifestos to social media radicalization. They understood how Arthur’s transformation reflected broader cultural anxieties about isolation, masculinity, violence as communication.
But trying to find that same depth in the sequel? Good luck. It’s all surface, all style, all… performance without purpose. Like a student trying to write dystopian fiction who includes all the genre elements – oppressive government, class division, violent uprising – but forgets to actually say anything meaningful about why those elements matter.
The supporting characters feel like afterthoughts, introduced just to give Arthur people to react to rather than meaningful relationships that might actually develop his character. It’s screenwriting 101 stuff – every character should have their own motivations and arcs. Instead, they’re just there to witness Arthur’s continued unraveling, which we already saw plenty of in the first film.
And the dancing. Oh my god, the dancing. Look, I get that movement can be storytelling – I’ve used interpretive dance exercises in creative writing classes to help students think about character expression. But when every emotional moment gets translated into choreographed movement, it stops being meaningful communication and starts feeling like pretentious filler.
The worst part is how this reflects broader problems with Hollywood’s approach to dystopian content. They see something that resonates culturally, that speaks to real anxieties and social problems, and immediately think “how do we make this a franchise?” The original Joker worked partly because it felt dangerous, unpredictable, willing to make audiences uncomfortable. This sequel feels safe, manufactured, focus-grouped into bland provocativeness.
My students are constantly dealing with sequels that disappoint – they’ve lived through the decline of once-great franchises, watched beloved stories get stretched beyond recognition for profit. They understand the difference between continuation that adds meaning and continuation that just wants to capitalize on success. Joker 2 is definitely the latter.
It’s especially frustrating because dystopian stories should be evolving, responding to new social fears, offering fresh warnings about where we’re heading. Instead, we get retreads of old anxieties without any new insight. Climate change, digital surveillance, democratic backsliding – there’s so much material for contemporary dystopian storytelling, but Hollywood keeps returning to the same well.
If I were grading this as a student assignment, it would get points for technical execution – Phoenix’s performance, the cinematography, the production values. But for content, originality, and thematic development? This is a C-minus effort from a student who clearly has the ability to do better work.
The real tragedy is that there are probably dozens of genuinely innovative dystopian scripts sitting unproduced while studios greenlight pointless sequels like this. My creative writing students come up with more original social commentary in their semester projects than this movie manages in two hours.
Save your money and just rewatch the original. At least that one remembered why dystopian stories matter in the first place.
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