London to Hong Kong in an Airbus A380

Off to Hong Kong, a city of such importance it merits bold formatting. Do you remember Michael Palin's Around the World in Eighty Days? It's a classic TV show from 1989 where Palin circumnavigated the globe, in homage to the Jules Verne novel, but to make things real spicy-like he wasn't allowed to fly, because it would have been boring if he had.

Palin visited Hong Kong about three-quarters of the way through the series. He took the Orient Express from London to Austria, then boats and planes through Egypt, dhow to Bombay, train to Madras, freighter to Singapore, and then cargo ship to Hong Kong, which was at the time part of the British Empire. It took him forty-two days to get there. He had a suit made up and had drinks with some British businessmen, who were worried about the impending handover. Then he popped off to China.

Thirty years later I also visited Hong Kong, but it only took me twelve hours, because I flew. Back in 1988 - Eighty Days was recorded a year before it was broadcast - British Airways and Cathay Pacific flew direct from London to Hong Kong, but they had to avoid the Soviet Union, so flight times were slightly longer than today, 13-14 hours instead of 12. How much did it cost to fly direct from London to Hong Kong in 1989? Lots, I imagine.

I've never had a long-haul flight before, so I thought I'd write about the trip. I took the cheapest option I could find, British Airways' World Traveller, which is a fancy way of saying basic economy without using the words "basic" or "economy". It cost £450, and I booked months in advance. My attitude is that unless the plane is special or there's something unique about the flight, airline travel is a means to an end, and every penny spent on it is a penny I can't spend on Pocky sticks and elephant rides when I get to my destination. I can put up with twelve hours of unpleasantness if Hong Kong is at the end of it. Hong Kong, you're worth it.

NB This post isn't sponsored by British Airways, or the government of China, or anybody else.

The flight departed at 18:40 and arrived exactly twelve hours later, at 13:40 local time.

British Airways currently flies three types of ultra-long-haul aircraft, with a fourth just starting to enter service. The 747-400 has the range for Hong Kong, but BA doesn't fly it on that route any more. The airline does however use the Boeing 777 twinjet and the four-engined double-decker Airbus A380. I have no idea how they choose which aircraft for the route; there was no opportunity to pick a plane during booking.

I would have preferred a 747, just so that I could fly on a 747, but British Airways is winding down the 747 fleet. They'll all be gone by 2024, so I ended up with an A380. The new, twin-engined Airbus A350 is gradually being introduced, but so far BA only flies it on Middle Eastern or transatlantic routes. That's a long way, but it's not Hong Kong.

My chariot awaits. An Airbus A380, with some Boeing 747s in the background.

The Airbus A380 is a familiar sight in the skies above London. Emirates of Dubai has a big fleet, seemingly dedicated to flying footballers and the cast of Geordie Shore from Heathrow to Dubai and back again. If you stand anywhere in London and look up you'll see an A380 eventually.

The A380 has been dogged with controversy since development began in the superbad 1990s. The dot.com "end of history" peace dividend technologically utopian 1990s. The general trend in aviation has been away from four-engined aircraft to twinjets, because the extra range and power of four engines doesn't compensate for the added weight and complexity, and furthermore modern engines are more powerful and reliable, so aircraft such as the Boeing 777 and Airbus A350 can travel almost as far with only two.

On the other hand the A380's huge capacity has allowed airliners to replace two Boeing 747s with one A380, which is the main reason British Airways doesn't use the 747 on the London-to-Hong-Kong route; the A380 allowed BA to cut the number of flights on that route without cutting the number of passengers it flew.

Back in the early 2000s the A380 was widely expected to revolutionise air travel. The BBC in particular had a massive crush on it, because it was a huge European mega-project with billions of Euros of government subsidies. That kind of thing makes the BBC's heart flutter. The A380 could move anything from 500 to 800 people half-way across the globe at a lower seat-per-mile cost than the 747. The theory was that airlines could make money either by filling the A380 with cut-price economy passengers, or by expanding the business class section while still carrying a useful economy load. In the mid-2000s Heathrow spent a fortune upgrading Terminals 3 and 5 to cope with the A380, and the aircraft's great size was one of the many reasons for the delays to Berlin Brandenberg Airport.

Unfortunately for Airbus the timing was all wrong. The A380 entered service a few years late, in 2007, shortly before a major global recession that saw fuel prices skyrocket. It was more efficient than the 747 but less efficient than smaller twinjets, so takeup was modest and the project has apparently lost Airbus a fortune. The Boeing 747 and 777 have second lives as short-haul people-carriers, but the A380 is too big for smaller airports, so that option isn't open to it. The 747 and 777 are also popular cargo aircraft, but the A380 is passenger-only, and converting it to carry freight would be more trouble than it's worth. Production has slowed to a trickle and will apparently cease in 2021.

In theory the A380's big rival was the Boeing 747, but in practice the Boeing 777 (foreground) has been the A380's real arch-nemesis. Despite being a twinjet it can carry almost as many passengers just as far as a four-engined jumbo jet. It also hurt the market for Boeing's own 747, but in the words of Steve Jobs, "if you don't cannibalise yourself, someone else will".

The irony is that the A380 is by all accounts a great aircraft, with an excellent accident record - no crashes, no deaths - but it will forevermore be remembered as a flop. It's a bit like the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar or Vickers VC-10 in that respect. A technical marvel that came too late and was too awkward for the world in which it found itself.

As far as I can tell BA's classes for long-haul are world traveller, which gets you a seat and two meals, then world traveller plus, which gets you a larger seat, then business class, also called club world, which gets you a lie-flat seat arranged in a yin-yang shape with your neighbour, and finally first, which has nicer lie-flat seats and thicker dividers. The latter two classes do not, apparently, have dress codes, so you don't have to wear a tie. I didn't wear a tie. Prices from London to Hong Kong return are roughly £450 - £700 - £1300 - £10,000+ in that order. How badly do you want to go to Hong Kong? How quickly? How comfortably?

Budget long-haul is a lot like life itself; it is an endurance test, but unlike life there is a reward at the end of it, whereas with life you struggle until you drop. There is no reward. I have to say that any pain I felt was not the fault of British Airways, and the suffering came more from the person in front of me abruptly reclining their seat, which again was not the fault of British Airways.

Also, the armrests didn't go all the way up into the seatback. That is the fault of British Airways. And there was limited space for my feet, but read on dear reader, read on. I didn't have a window seat, so there was no view. The A380 has a gullwing-style design whereby the wings tilt upwards - it's a little bit like the WW2 F4 Corsair - so if you have a window seat in economy class your view will be of the wing.

A F4 Corsair, with its distinctive inverted gull wing. The F4's wing was designed to extend the reach of the landing gear, so that the huge propellor wouldn't hit the deck. The A380's wing is also designed to keep the landing gear short, as well as reducing the aircraft's width while still having a large wing.

Those two things in green are my legs. There are many like them, but these are mine. The one on the left is for fighting; the one on the right is for fun. Neither of them have a major malfunction. God loves my legs because they provide him with fresh souls.

They're so horny! They love you long time. Everybody says that R Lee Ermey improvised his dialogue but the fact is that most of it was taken directly from the source novel, The Short-Timers. I'm digressing here. If you're used to typical Easyjet / Ryanair low-cost short-haul flights, BA's A380 World Traveller seats are about an inch bigger in all directions, technically 17.5in / 31in width/pitch vs 17 / 30 (Ryanair) or 18 / 28 (Easyjet). I could just about stretch out without jamming my knees into the seat in front of me.

There was a decent up-and-down adjustable headrest albeit that I brought along an inflatable pillow. Everybody else in the cabin brought along a pillow as well, in fact lots of my fellow passengers donned the pillow in the departure lounge and kept it on for the whole flight, perhaps because it's comforting. When you put on the pillow you disconnect yourself from the other people in the airport. You are no longer aimlessly walking around, you are going on a plane. You are an astronaut carrying your portable air supply to the launch gantry. BA provided me with a second pillow and a blanket, which I stuffed into the locker because they were unnecessary.

BA arranges the World Traveller class in a three-four-three configuration. As far as I could tell every other row - e.g. the second, four, sixth, eighth, and tenth rows - had a computer box on the floor that took up some legroom. Did I mention that the armrests didn't go up? The aisle armrests were fixed, the internal armrests went up to about 45 degrees. On the return flight some of the internal seats in the four-seat section were empty - Hong Kong is seductive - so in theory passengers in the middle could stretch onto two seats, but the armrests would make it difficult. Perhaps it's supposed to stop homeless people from wandering into the aircraft and sitting there. I don't know.

Online airline reviews tend to concentrate on business-class travel because advertisers want to target business-class passengers. There aren't many reviews of long-haul economy because economy passengers don't have any money. Hence all the reviews that have shots of empty seats, because the reviewer was allowed to get on the plane first, with an SLR, and tour around the cabin taking photos. I was in no mood to fish out my camera so I used my mobile phone.

The A380 has two decks; I flew on the lower deck; the top deck was blocked off with what looked like a baby stair gate, so I couldn't tour the aircraft. Curtains divided the classes, but I can confirm that the business class toilets were exactly the same as the economy toilets.

There was ample room in the overhead bins. Thankfully the flight had none of the low-cost malarkey where people spend ages moving their bags back and forth so that they fit. BA's World Traveller lets you take a backpack or wheely suitcase plus a smaller bag. I put my backpack in the bin and my small bag into the footrest in front of me.

Let's have a look at the in-flight entertainment unit:

The touchscreen was laggy but functional. The remote popped out on a vacuum-cleaner-style retractable cable. The buttons made an irritating click-click-clicky noise. The overhead light button is on the IFU remote, I assume because the light itself is too high to reach from a sitting position. Of note the A380 doesn't have individual air vents. The best thing about the IFU was the moving map:

That's the Lufthansa logo, isn't it? Earlier in the year I saw the IMAX version of Apollo 11. It was cut down from the ordinary cinema release, so I was curious to see what had changed. Next to the screen was a combined USB port plus what appeared to be a headphone jack. The USB port charged my phone and iPad, with a bit of wiggling, but the headphone jack was too small for a standard 3.5mm plug.

A bit of Googling suggests that I was completely off-base, and that the headphone jack was actually in the armrest, which makes sense (there was something there) but it's a shame the seat didn't make this more obvious. Glancing around the cabin, everybody else seemed to be using their own mobile phones and tablets instead of the IFU. Was there a way to cast the screen of your device to the IFU, so you could relax in your seat and watch a film? Not that I could see, and the IFU felt a bit too slow and old-fashioned for that kind of thing.

British Airways has come in for some stick for cutting meals from short-haul flights, but they still serve meals in long haul. I had two meals each way, a main meal and then a breakfast. After boarding and settling down there were drinks:

I asked for a gin and tonic but there were juices and water etc as well. I have no idea why. The steward asked me if I wanted wine in addition to the gin and tonic, which puzzled me. Why would I say no? I have never said no to wine. Has anyone? Even if you don't drink it, you can put it in your bag and barter it for ammunition or food later on. Wine isn't just a drink, it's an investment.

On the way back I was asked if I wanted two bottles of wine, which again puzzled me. Why would I say no? I have never said no to a second bottle of wine. Why would I? What would I gain? I don't understand why they didn't just give me all the wine. I don't understand.

There were two choices of main meal. Chicken pasta or something else. Lasagne, I think. Was it beef? That's it, "chicken or beef". I chose chicken.

There was a little pot of salad, a couple of crackers, a tiny bread roll, some cheese, and a pot of mousse. It wasn't bad. The main meal looked pretty nasty but after stirring it up it was presentable; typical microwave food. I didn't have a problem with it. The rest of the meal was essentially "food mass" designed to fill me up.

Neither meal felt particularly substantial, but that was fine by me. Whenever I spend time on a plane I think about the toilet arrangements of the Apollo astronauts. They had to hold a plastic bag against their bottoms and poo into it. I have never pooed on a plane before and I don't plan to, ever, so light meals are fine by me. I just wanted to share that with you.

There is another world I can never possess, without transforming myself so completely that I am no longer me. BA's website gives passengers the option to upgrade the meal for £16 or so. Some of my fellow passengers ordered a special vegetarian meal, which was served just before the other meals, perhaps to warn the rest of us that there were vegetarians in our midst. If we crashed in the Andes and food ran out the vegetarians would do well to flee from the plane, as far away as possible, because in a world of hungry meat-eaters the vegetarians would be hunted for their flesh, their tender flesh. Those thoughts and many more ran through my mind as I flew to Hong Kong.

After the meal I watched Deadpool on my iPad. It's okay. The film is carried by Ryan Reynolds' charisma. He's so dreamy. I've only ever seen him in Blade Runner 2049, where he was wooden and looked slightly different, but then again he was playing a robot so perhaps the woodenness was intentional. It's odd how Reynolds appeared in so many bad films during the pre-Deadpool part of his career, and yet he continued to find work, as if fate was keeping his career afloat until it was time for Deadpool to happen. Deadpool has, like, only three scenes! There's a fight on a motorway, then a long flashback to Deadpool's origin, then a final battle. It's a surprisingly slight film. It was made on a low budget, and instead of skimping on the effects they just made the movie shorter.

As a passenger experience the A380 is essentially transparent. I can remember a tiny bit of turbulence, and then only because it was so rare. Takeoff from Hong Kong sounded rattly and mechanical; the gear was noisy; landing at Heathrow was a firm smack; beyond that the only indication I was on an aeroplane at thirty thousand feet was the noise of the engines whirring away in the background. The cruising altitude on the moving map seemed unusually low, but apparently the A380 climbs gradually as the fuel burns off, so the aircraft must have reached its apogee when I was asleep.

After watching Deadpool I still had nine more hours to go. I tried to get some sleep and to my credit actually managed a bit. Good job, me.

One thing. After settling down to sleep I started to feel strange. Cold sweat, panic attack, heavy breathing. I took off my hat and did some deep breaths and things settled down, but whenever I tried to nod off it felt as if I had to breathe harder than normal. My hunch is that it was an altitude thing.

Airliners in flight are pressurised to different altitudes, the lower the better; the ultimate goal would be a sea-level atmosphere, but that would require an incredibly tough skin, so airline manufacturers have to compromise. Low-cost short-haul airliners are pressurised to the equivalent of 8,000 feet, about the same as Machu Picchu in the Andes, but it's generally unnoticeable because the flights are very short. The A380 is pressurised to around 7,000 feet or so - figures vary - which isn't especially high, but my guess is that after four hours my body started to notice. It passed after an hour and wasn't an issue on the way back, so perhaps it was a one-off thing.

In the event I returned to full consciousness at about 11:00 Hong Kong time, and shortly afterwards the crew began serving breakfast. This wasn't as good as the main meal.

Again there were two options, an "English breakfast" and another one, an omelette I think. At that point in the flight I would have eaten anything. The main meal had a sausage, scrambled eggs, bacon, a tomato, mushrooms, all of which were tasteless and watery. The accessory packet had orange juice, a pot of fruit, and a muffin, which were okay.

I have to say that I don't eat English breakfasts at home in England. They're an affectation. A long time ago the working man ate greasy crap for breakfast because he needed tonnes of calories, but in the twenty-first century actual working men don't have time for a sit-down breakfast, they have a microwave burger or a sausage roll or something. The only people who eat English breakfasts are middle-class media types, who have a crushing sense of physical and moral inferiority and like to affect an air of working-class toughness. Fake Cockney accents, close-cropped hair, you know the type.

It's rubbish. English breakfasts are horrible. If I was designing BA's meals I would give up on the idea - it's futile, you can't microwave an English breakfast - and serve a sausage, a hash brown, some beans, a hard-boiled egg, or a Cornish pastie, or an approximation of a McMuffin, the list is endless. Porridge with masses of jam and a pot of Nutella. Anything.

After a few more hours the aeroplane landed and then I went to Hong Kong.

Boarding and deboarding, deplaning, getting on and off a large long-haul airliner is a lot easier than the same process with an A320 or 737. There's more space in the aisle, less fussing around with the overhead bins, it's generally slicker.

Tips for Hong Kong? When I was there the exchange rate was almost exactly $100HKD to £10. I suggest you get $400HKD from an ATM in the airport - not $500, more on this later - then head over to the MTR desk and buy an Octopus card, and ask them to put all of the money onto the card. You will use the card for almost everything. As a tourist you can't use your credit card to add money to the Octopus. Instead you have to withdraw cash from an ATM, then shove the cash into an Octopus machine, which seems like a waste of time, but that's how things are.

Here's what my Octopus looks like:

It's like the MAM cards from Halo Jones. Little shops use it. Big shops use it. The buses and trams use it. The MTR uses it. Ferries use it. Etc.

There are apparently two different types - an "on loan Octopus" that you're supposed to hand back at the end of your trip, and a "sold Octopus" that you keep - but the price difference is negligible and functionally they're the same. My second tip is that when you withdraw money from a cashpoint for general use, withdraw $400 at a time, not $500. That way you don't get a single $500 note. The MTR add-value machines don't accept $500 notes and no-one likes them because they're too big.

Once you have an Octopus card pop onto the Airport Express MTR into Hong Kong. To save money you could instead take the S1 bus to Tung Chung, then the MTR to Hong Kong, but you might want to wait until you're familiarised with Hong Kong before you try out this elite travel hack.

One advantage of the MTR + bus option is that it's more flexible - on account of the recent protests the Airport Express is sometimes restricted to a one-stop service between the airport and Hong Kong MTR*, missing out the intermediate stops.

* Confusingly there is an MTR station called Hong Kong.

Mong Kok station was inaccessible for the first couple of days.

There will come a time when China will decide to eliminate, or massively play down, the English signage. Austin Road and the King George V Memorial Park will be given Chinese names and Hong Kong will gradually be absorbed into Shenzhen, and the world will be slightly more the same.

The Way Back
After going to Hong Kong I came back. I felt a bit stupid having a meal before going to the airport, because Hong Kong airport has a bunch of really good restaurants that are much the same price as the mainland. I tried out some soup from the Moon Thai Express. It had Thai green curry for something like $80HKD, but I had the soup because I had just eaten:

Hong Kong Airport is very large. This is the departure gate area, which really does stretch off to the vanishing point, and behind me there's a mass of restaurants, and behind that is the landside hall, which is split into an entrance area and a large foyer in front of the security system:

The front half of the landside hall.

This time my flight left at 23:10, arriving at 04:50 UK time, which wasn't too bad because it connected up with the earliest National Express coach from Heathrow to Woking, which left at 06:00. I can now say that I have seen Woking train station at 06:30 in the morning. Woking is a commuter town that exists because there are lots of trains into London very early in the morning. There is no other reason for Woking. I miss Hong Kong.

The return flight was the same deal. Get on the plane, take off, drink, then meal. I chose beef this time. It wasn't as good as the chicken.

The beef was globby and chewy and the vegetables were a waste of time. Apparently the conditions on board an aeroplane are inconducive to fried foods and anything crispy or oily, but I would have given anything for a Rustler's burger or something. Anything would have been better than an imitation of a bad Sunday meal.

At this point I settled down and watched Deadpool 2 on my iPad, thus bringing myself up to speed with the Deadpool franchise. It's a better film than the first, obviously more expensive, with the kind of swagger that comes from being the second part of a surprisingly successful franchise. It has a theme tune sung by Celine Dion that could easily have been a parody, but works perfectly well as a legitimate epic movie theme. It's the second film I have seen in a few days with Zazie Beetz - she was Arthur Fleck's neighbour in Joker - and she's one of the best things in it. She plays Domino, whose superpower is that she's lucky. Things explode around her but she emerges unscathed. She is the opposite of the soldiers in XCOM. She is even more competent than Deadpool himself and nonchalant with it. Is there enough of the character for a spin-off film?

Sleeping was harder on the way back because my feet hurt, because I had spent a week and two days walking around Hong Kong in hiking boots. It seemed a good idea at the time - I planned to do a lot of hiking - but Hong Kong's terrain isn't difficult enough to justify big boots and the humidity is such that my feet got sweaty, at which point they started to rub against the boots.

Also, the cabin felt cold, because I was used to a temperature of 30c. I did eventually manage to get to sleep, helped by the fact I had an aisle seat, which meant that I didn't have to interact with anybody before going to the toilet. I hate having to interact with people before going to the toilet. I'm a grown man, not a child.

The second breakfast was no better than the first:

No sausage this time. Instead, potato things, plus a strip of bacon. And more fruit and a muffin. The stewards were more liberal with the drink this time. I liked that. I took one of the bottles of wine home as a souvenir:

Despite being a year past its best before date of 2018 the wine tasted fine. I'm not a wine snob. On the left is the first volume of Old Hong Kong Photos and the Tales They Tell, which I picked up in Bleak House Books while visiting the site of what used to be Kowloon's walled city. It's published by the chap who runs Gwulo.com, which has masses of photos of old Hong Kong.

My plan was to revisit Hong Kong and pick up volume two at some point, but COVID got in the way, and then Bleak House Books decided that it was too risky to run a bookshop in Hong Kong. Luckily the shop reopened in New York, and perhaps one day I might pop along and buy the second volume. I will walk through the door, buy the book, and leave, and the staff will never know that our lives intersected.

After debarking, leaving, deboarding, deplaning, getting off the plane I blithely walked through the Nothing to Declare aisle and slipped into the darkness of pre-dawn Heathrow. A long time ago Hong Kong was a top destination for British people who wanted cheap video recorders, cameras, watches etc, but the internet is a great leveller, and when I want cheap rubbish I buy it from eBay. The only gadget that piqued my interest was a tiny little mini PC laptop. GDP Pocket? Topjoy Falcon? I didn't catch the name so I couldn't research it.

Still, that was how I got to Hong Kong and back. To paraphrase Dwight Eisenhower, my mission was fulfilled at 04:50, local time, October 17th, 2019.

Joker: Echoes of Ideas Reverberate from Blunt Tools

Off to the cinema to see the disappointingly bland Joker, a film that sets up a fight between The Joker and a little person but then pulls its punches and has The Joker let the little person go, which is a shame because I really wanted to see The Joker fight a little person. Who would win? The Joker is a criminal mastermind but the little person is a hard target. Who would win?

Because I'm a globetrotting man of the world I saw the film at the AMC Pacific Place in Hong Kong, because this week I'm in Hong Kong, and I wondered what it was like to see a film in Hong Kong, and Joker was on, and that's why. The other films were Gemini Man, which looks terrible, Maleficent 2: Mistress of Evil, which has masses of posters in Hong Kong's MTR underground railway network but doesn't actually open until today, something about a shark, something about climbing.

Joker is a Cat IIB film, one step down from the no-holds-barred Cat III of Sex and Zen and Naked Killer infamy. Cat I is "suitable for all ages", Cat IIa is "not suitable for children", Cat IIb is "not suitable for young persons or children", and Cat III is "persons aged 18 or above only", e.g. visible pubic hair and graphic violence. Unlike Japan the Hong Kong censors don't have a problem with pubic hair.

And neither do I! I don't have a problem with pubic hair. I mean, it's embarrassing when you find pubic hairs on plates and tables etc, but I've never found it offensive in the same way that bogies or pant stains are offensive. Pubic hair isn't dirty, it's just embarrassing. That is what I think of pubic hair. For the record Joker does not have any pubic hair, e.g. the film does not have any pubic hair. The character probably does, or at least the version of The Joker in Joker probably does, because he's not the kind of person who shaves.

There was one trailer, for Terminator: Dark Fate, plus an advert for a recording of a live performance of All About Eve starring the lovely Gillian Anderson. The AMC's showing of Joker had Cantonese subtitles, which is fine if you imagine that the characters are hallucinating in Cantonese.

What is the AMC Pacific Place? It's a branch of the AMC cinema chain inside the Pacific Place shopping mall just outside Admiralty MTR in downtown Hong Kong island, sandwiched between the Peak Tram to the west and Wan Chai to the East. As with a lot of places in Hong Kong the air conditioning was on an overkill setting, but this suited the film fine. It was a midday screening and the theatre was about half-full.

Hong Kong is a little bit disappointing for cinemas. It has lots, but they're almost entirely mid-large multiplex types on account of the real estate prices and overcrowding. There's no room for quirky little cinemas along the lines of the Curzon Soho or The Gate in Notting Hill. The nearest equivalent is perhaps the Hong Kong Film Archive, but instead of showing John Woo marathons it has a much more conservative, highbrow programme that majors in vintage opera adaptations and black and white dramas from the 1950s.

The view left from the entrance, towards the Bank of China tower.

Joker is a bit like those superhero comics where Superman fights Muhammed Ali, or Superman fights Jackie Chan, or Batman fights Jackie Chan, or Superman fights Mike Tyson, or Superman fights Batman, etc, and for it to work Superman has to be stripped of his powers by aliens because otherwise he would win easily, and because he doesn't really dislike Jackie Chan or Batman or Mike Tyson etc the pair of them agree to stage the fight, and then they punch out the aliens who are holding them captive and escape. It's just a big tease. You want to see Superman fighting Muhammed Ali, but he never does. It's a cop-out.

Joker cops out as well, but it doesn't even cop out properly. The Joker doesn't fight the little person or team up with him or anything. The little person's character has a name, by the way, but I didn't catch it. Gary? Was it Gary? The Joker doesn't team up with the little person, he just lets him go. It was a tremendous disappointment.

What is Joker? It tells the story of how top comic book villain The Joker became The Joker. In real life The Joker is a highly-strung, mentally-ill man called Arthur Fleck, who works as a clown, but he's a terrible clown so he gets fired. Fleck is a nobody, a bum, a fuck-up, although he dreams of a career as a stand-up comedian and has visions of being on television and being a somebody and being respected and being hugged by Robert De Niro, who is a talk show host.

In theory I should identify with Arthur Fleck. He wants to be loved and respected by Robert De Niro, and isn't that what we all want? To be loved and respected by Robert De Niro. It's what I want, and we're not so different, you and I.

But imagine if Robert De Niro pretended to respect you but secretly despised you. Imagine if Robert De Niro mocked you on live television. You'd get mad, wouldn't you? You'd get angry. You'd want to make Robert De Niro shut up. And I mean although Fleck doesn't become The Joker until the end of the film, he's a wiry guy, so you'd expect him to beat the little person easily, but the little person looks pretty fit, and he's had a hard life, because the film is set in the very early 1980s, when it was still just about acceptable to call little people midgets or dwarves.

He's had a hard life, but so has Arthur Fleck, because he's an adoptee. Furthermore he was raised by a single mother, so it's no wonder he turned out bad. The odds were stacked against him from the start.

The thing about Joker is that it's thin. It's inconsequential. It has the form of a shocking, uncompromising character drama, but it pulls its punches. It's never truly offensive, unlike for example the preceding paragraph. It's essentially a watered-down mixture of Taxi Driver and Network, with a bit of Peter Sellers' Being There, but those films were much better. Much better. They weren't just stories, they had themes. They were about something. They were made in a decade when Hollywood films tried to be about something, tried to say something about the human condition. And because those films were made in the 1970s they could be offensive, dirty in an old-school way.

They still have elements that are shocking today. Remember when Travis Bickle starts ranting about junkies, punks, buggers, queens, and how sometimes he has to wash come off the back seat? The film doesn't punish him for calling people buggers and queens. The other characters in the film are disconcerted by his intensity, but the film just observes him.

Remember when Martin Scorsese (playing a taxi passenger) says that he's going to ram a .44 Magnum up a woman's front bottom and blow it to shreds? It wasn't clear if he was drunk, or if he meant it, but the film doesn't reprimand him. Taxi Driver observes its characters without passing judgement. Furthermore they're interesting characters, in a distinctive environment, and the script is good, and the storyline is interesting. It's not much to ask.

Joker is essentially two different films at once. There's a melodrama about how Arthur Fleck discovers his past, but that feels like a first draft of another film. He is led to believe that he is related to wealthy businessman and political candidate Thomas Wayne. Without wishing to spoil the plot, it's hard to tell if he is, because parts of Joker take place inside Fleck's head. They're waking dreams that he has. He imagines that he's dating a lady who lives down the hall, but it's obviously a fantasy. The film eventually feels the need to make Fleck's delusional state obvious, but it's not necessary; I'm not especially intelligent but I got the gist of it straightaway. Fleck obviously doesn't get any pussy.

The cinema is behind that black building off to the right.

Remember how Travis Bickle was simultaneously sympathetic and also deeply unappealing? A self-righteous twelve-year-old boy stuck in a young man's body, with a child's view of the world? Joker has many problems, but one of the most important is that Fleck is mentally ill. Not like Hannibal Lector - he's not an evil genius - and not like Howard Beale from Network, who was going through a mental breakdown but was lucid and coherent. Instead Fleck is barely functional. Throughout the film he rarely manages to string together more than two sentences.

He is more sinned against than sinning, but he isn't sympathetic, because his life doesn't seem to be all that bad, but at the same time he's not especially unappealing either. He doesn't torture cats or carve smiles into people's faces. He just lives at home with his mother. He's a little bit like Chance from Being There, but whereas that film was carefully constructed to illustrate a theme, Joker just dumps a half-formed character into a pastiche of the mean New York of the 1970s and 1980s. At times Joker feels like one of those BBC Plays for Today, in the sense that if you took away a couple of violent scenes it would be a drama about a mentally ill man failing to cope with the loss of his medication. Have you seen Scum? It's a British television movie from the early 1980s, directed by Alan Clark, infamous for its brutality and graphic violence. It was sensationalist but it got under my skin, whereas Joker has some nice cinematography but in a few weeks I'm not going to remember it, and I have no desire to ever watch it again.

Up the page I mentioned Being There. It's a classic film that tends to be overlooked nowadays. I have the impression it's thought of as a one-joke film with a blank slate for a main character, and furthermore the film's theme - that "what's inside doesn't matter" - was explored in more vivid fashion later in the 1980s by Bret Easton Ellis. Being There is about a mentally ill man played by Peter Sellers who works as a gardener in a grand house in a big city. I can't remember if it's Washington or New York. He's a empty vessel; he grew up watching television and has no internal life. He just has catchphrases, but in his favour he dresses well and is a white anglo-saxon man in an environment where political power is held by other anglo-saxon men. There's a famous series of photographs of Adolf Hitler preparing for one of his speeches. He swings his fists and punches the air for emphasis, because he knew that it didn't matter what you said, so long as you said it convincingly. In Being There Sellers' character manages to fool his audience accidentally, without trying; the audience sees a well-dressed, well-spoken man, and fools itself. By saying as little as possible and looking intelligent Sellers' character goes a long way.

I have a sense that Joker aspired to this kind of thing. Arthur Fleck practices his stage manner with video tapes of a chat show playing in the background, and is shown to be capable of imitating the superficial polish of an experienced chat show guest. The idea of The Joker as an imitation of a supervillain is fascinating, and a different and much better film could have done something with it, but Joker does very little with the idea. It's essentially a throwaway explanation for a key plot point, and as with the abortive fight against the little person it disappointed me. Joker seems to want to avoid dealing with anything or expressing a coherent opinion. Arthur Fleck is neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic; perhaps because the film-makers didn't want to portray a murdering sociopath as a hero he does nothing that anyone would want to copy, but conversely as the main character he doesn't do anything particularly bad - he mostly has things happen to him, or he reacts to imminent danger - and although his behaviour is occasionally cringe-worthy he doesn't come across as vile or unappealing. The people he kills are either unsympathetic or non-entities.

I mean, yes, technically Fleck stabs a man in the neck for no reason at all, but it comes out of nowhere and may or may not have been a dream sequence. It doesn't resonate emotionally, which is a general criticism I have of the film. Besides, haven't we all wanted to stab someone in the neck? I've spent twelve hours of my life on a flight from Heathrow to Hong Kong, I'm not going to criticise anyone for behaviour that might seem extreme in a different context. It's all about context. Society is contextual.

Two different films at once. Three different films. There's the melodrama, but that's rubbish. Even if Arthur Fleck is the illegitimate son of Thomas Wayne, so what? It doesn't go anyway, it's just a detail. There's a variation of the poor-vs-rich theme running through Dark Knight Rises, but if anything Joker gives the idea less thought than the earlier film. In Dark Knight Rises it's obvious that the villainous Bane doesn't give a shit about the poor, he's just a fascist using them for his own personal aggrandisement, but Joker doesn't even have that depth. The film has come in for a certain amount of criticism for suggesting that the upper classes should not have a monopoly on the use of force, but all of that happens in the background. One of Fleck's crimes triggers off a wave of anti-yuppie sentiment, but it didn't resonate emotionally because it happens offscreen. Fleck himself lives in a bubble and appeals to be unaware of the riots and demonstrations going on in the background (furthermore the film doesn't show them until the very end, so they don't feel real).

Three films. Joker is in theory also a standard comic book film. It's an origin story of The Joker, who is the most famous adversary of masked vigilante Batman. In the Batman stories - whether in films or cartoons or comics or whatever - The Joker masterminds a series a brilliant crimes, and then Batman catches him and puts him in Arkham Asylum, but he escapes and the cycle continues. Depending on the writer and the decade and the publication The Joker is either a fundamentally harmless bank robber who uses motorised teeth as a distraction and knocks people out with smile gas, or alternatively he's a depraved child murderer who mutilates his victims, or he exists between those two poles. The key thing is that he's competent. He's not superhuman, or even particularly strong, so he has to be smart. He's ruthless and good with a knife, and he has a devilish charisma that inspires people to follow him.

Arthur Fleck on the other hand isn't competent, or charismatic. He's not even on the lucky-idiot level of someone like Ted Bundy. He makes no attempt to cover up his early killings, and the only murder he pre-plans is ludicrous and leaves him with no escape route. Again, yet again, a film about a Bundy-like serial killer who slips through the cracks accidentally might have worked - it was essentially how American Psycho's Patrick Bateman got away with his crimes - albeit that it's hard to imagine a man in clown makeup avoiding police attention for very long, so perhaps I shouldn't criticise the film in that respect. I mention how the Joker's final crime is ridiculous. The film generally takes place in the same gritty world as The Wire or Goodfellas or one of those gangster films, but towards the end Joker's air of verisimilitude breaks down. I don't want to spoil things, but the ease with which Fleck delivers the punchline of his final joke stretches credibility. As a villain Fleck comes across as completely inept. Again, again there is one point in the film where Fleck seems to do something clever - he hides in a train full of people wearing clown masks - but it's over in a flash and it's just an accident.

Perhaps the idea is that Arthur Fleck doesn't become a criminal mastermind until he has spent several years after the events of Joker inside Arkham Asylum, learning his trade, but the film doesn't show that he's capable of learning from experience or that he has any hidden talents, so if that's the idea it's far too ephemeral. Of note the film seems to take place in a version of the Batman universe, but the timeline is such that it's unlikely this Joker would ever co-exist with Batman. Fleck appears to be in his late forties, but Bruce Wayne is a little boy; perhaps the idea is that The Joker eventually becomes a white collar criminal mastermind rather than a direct physical threat to Batman.

Ultimately the problem with Joker is that the film didn't engage me. Arthur Fleck is a pathetic figure who doesn't have a coherent philosophy. As a crook he would be useless, and yet the film implies that this is just the beginning of his story. The mass movement he inspires takes place offscreen. The melodrama involving his parentage is a dead end. A late revelation that Fleck is partially responsible for a key element of the Batman mythos made me think "so what". Given his mental problems it's hard to blame him for his actions, and the film's nod to social satire is clumsy. Fleck goes off the rails when his medications are cut by the government, but he's already a deranged lunatic at the beginning of the film so yet again Joker goes out of its way to avoid saying anything.

On a purely visceral, Death Wish level a couple of the kills are pretty good. Fleck stabs a guy in the neck and then smashes his head against a wall leaving blood everywhere. It's fantastic, but it's not enough to redeem the rest of the film. There are three laughs, two of which are guilty laughs, plus a couple of good shots. Ultimately the film feels like a great big nothing, a lot of pretend angst masking a boring story. It's a revival of the kind of New-York-Welcome-to-Fear-City films that came out in the 1970s, but this New York doesn't even appear particularly sordid (and bear in mind that I've just spent a week in Kowloon, which has more poverty than New York in the 1970s but a far smaller crime rate).

Despite being a film for grown-ups Joker is surprisingly prudish in the modern style. There's almost no swearing; no nudity; no perversion; the people who are mean to the little person are shown to be assholes; the yuppies that Fleck kills don't do anything particularly bad. There are no prostitutes and Fleck doesn't go to a strip club. He doesn't sadistically torture anyone or strip the flesh off their face or anything.

Couldn't they at least have made him a clown butcher? Butcher by day, clown by night, or vice-versa? I would pay to see that film. Butcher Clown, the script writes itself. Shoot it on the shittest 35mm off-cuts available, mono soundtrack, dub it to videotape, then dub that tape to a second tape so that all the neon blues and reds go fuzzy, then get voiceover people to loop the dialogue, have it released to VHS on a label you've never heard of, bingo. Couldn't they at least have had one scene where Fleck holds a person at gunpoint, wearing clown makeup, while shouting "DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING CLOWN TO YOU? IS THIS A JOKE?", only it's so brutal that you dare not laugh? This is another one of those films where I spent the second half wondering if I could have written a better script myself.

Would Joker have been better if it had been made in the 1970s, when you could use the N-word and say the F-for-homosexual word and have a white hero threaten to blow a black man's head clean off and it was supposed to be awesome? When you could have main characters who were unappealing assholes, but they weren't punished for it? It would essentially be Dirty Harry, but told from the point of view of the Scorpio killer, and there would be no Dirty Harry. Imagine if the film had been made in the 1970s with Jack Nicholson - sweary Jack Nicholson of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Last Detail and The Shining. Or Dennis Hopper. Or Dustin Hoffman. Or Gene Hackman. Alas the moment has passed.

Anything else? The film also has an overt reference to Bob Monkhouse. Arthur Fleck tries his hand at stand up comedy. It doesn't go well but to his credit he manages two decent jokes. The second one is a Bob Monkhouse joke. I realise the joke is old as the hills, but some comedians become so associated with certain jokes that they own the joke, and Bob Monkhouse owns that joke. Wherever you are, Bob, I thought of you.

Oh yes, the performances. Joe-a-quim Phoenix is Arthur Fleck. He has a bunch of mannerisms and isn't afraid to be embarrassing, but as mentioned earlier I felt nothing for the character so his performance was wasted. He's like Forrest Gump without the charisma, a nobody. A mostly passive moron whose revenge against the people who wronged him feels arbitrary and unsatisfying. I wanted to cheer him on as he stabbed and tortured fat businessmen and policemen and pimps and yuppies and the media and so on, but the film doesn't want anything to do with that sort of thing in case it inspires copycats.

None of the other actors stood out. Robert De Niro has an extended cameo as a talk show host, but throughout the film he puts on a performance as a talk show host, so it's hard to evaluate his actual performance. Does that make sense? We never see the character that De Niro plays when he's off screen so he's just a broad parody of a talk show host. At one point an interview he conducts goes off the rails. A different film might have had something to say about the contrast between the squeaky-clean, reassuring world of light entertainment and the actual world of brutal violence and sudden death. An obvious theme, and perhaps to its credit the film skirts around it; De Niro's character obviously senses that he has a scoop on live television, but instead of panicking he tries to dig out the story. It's one of the few parts of Joker that feels genuinely smart - Johnny Carson or Michael Parkinson would have done the same thing, in the same situation - but also frustrating because it's just one smart element amongst a sea of blandness. Echoes of ideas. That's what Joker feels like. Imitations of ideas. Echoes of ideas. Sound divorced from the original movement.

Technical stuff? The music is pretty good. Literal. Wonky cellos and strings as if to suggest that Arthur Fleck is unhinged. The cinematography is standard mid-2010s digital, with everything shot at f/1.4 and the colours are pastel and there's lens flare. It uses "the film look", which ironically doesn't look like film, so on a visual level it has very little in common with Dog Day Afternoon or Serpico or Wolfen or The Warriors etc. It uses a modern trick whereby some scenes start off with camera rock steady, and then it cuts to the exact same shot but suddenly its hand-held and wobbly. There's probably a name for it. Selective stabilisation. Stabilisation ramping. I don't know. Ask David Mullen on Cinematographers.net, he probably knows. Someone is bound to point out in the comments that it was actually shot with film, in which case my argument is that the film has been scanned into Adobe Premiere or whatever (I think the film's credits name the editing software) and tinkered with.

Ordinarily I review films on opening night, without seeing any trailers or reading any other reviews; I haven't seen any trailers or read any other reviews of Joker because the only writer I rate is myself, but I am aware that the film has been a surprising commercial success. My hunch is that word of mouth will hurt it, but perhaps in future the fact that a relatively low-key character drama made a fortune will inspire Hollywood to spend money on better films than Joker. We can all but dream.