What would you do if you were a civilian on that ferry, with a detonator to destroy the other ferry full of prisoners? Would you feel that since they were prisoners, they had less of a right to live? Would you be the one to press that button, and know that with that one action, hundreds of people died, and it was by your hand.
Would you sit there waiting, knowing full well that you could be dead any moment. Or would you do the morally right thing like the prisoner did. By doing so, showed that he had more moral courage than all the people in the two ferries combined. In tossing that detonator out of the window, he condemned himself to almost certain death, but somehow that was tempered with the relief of not having to take innocent lives.
I think that this film raised a lot of very interesting questions. When Harvey Dent mentioned that you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain, I think I understood what he was talking about. He is an interesting character, because with the death of his girlfriend Rachel he gives up trying to be upright, and he leaves everything, including his morality, to the one thing he thinks fair, which is random chance. He is interesting, because he is actually a lot like us. He is the person who tries as much as possible to live a good life, until shit happens and pushes him over the edge. He is scary, because any one of us could become him.
This film also showed us that even for villains, they are seldom one dimensional caricatures, but rather, very complex people with their own motivations, histories and personal shadows, shadows that cloud their reason and values, so that they become lost into this madness that they cannot emerge from. And even for the heroes, like Batman, is he doing this because he truly believes Gotham can be saved, or is he doing it because of a personal agenda, to avenge the death of his parents by taking it out on the criminals who took their lives?
I think that people have this misconception that life is supposed to be fair, but sometimes it just isn't. And sometimes, people cannot deal with that. I'm pretty sure the Joker had his childhood of abuse forced upon him, and as a result, he takes out his personal pain on people because he has lost all empathy, relishing in the pain he causes them because of the pain that someone else caused him. Dent also certainly couldn't handle the death of his girlfriend, so much that he chose to kill the people that he deemed responsible for it.
If you were to come face to face with the worst experiences of your life, would you have the courage to realize that in being a part of it, you were partly responsible for how it turned out too? If something really unfair were to happen to you, would you still have the sense to do the morally right thing, even if it meant that you could lose everything, and that it would be grossly unfair? And last of all, would you have the empathy to see that despite all that a villain has done to you, he was really someone who was once good, but has since fallen and lost himself? Would you realize that he does all this, because he is really suffering inside?
Maybe when I do, the nightmares will finally stop.