I’m postponing this episode until I’ve seen the latest Batman movie, but yesterday I did watch Batman Begins in preparation.

In my memory the movie was amazing when it first came out, but I’m afraid it hasn’t aged very well, especially given it’s superior sequel. The performances are almost universally awkward, Cain and Oldman excepted.

The script obligatory, the plot perfunctory; Batman Begins just feels silly now.

I definitely agree that as soon as I saw Hardy’s face, even for the 2 seconds it’s on-screen, I thought “Wow, I really wish they hadn’t hidden his face for the rest of the movie.”

I thought Bane could’ve been a really effective villain, if they’d done two things. One, make him not a henchman, which was just awful. And two, play up his evilness. I mean, the guy was basically just fucking with Gotham for five months, like a cat toying with its prey. He knew damn well that bomb was going off and when, but the movie didn’t really do much with that angle.

I was kind of hoping to hear more about the number of coincidences and leaps in logic this movie required. How did Batman get back to Gotham? When did he find time to fix the autopilot, and why? Why did Wayne go broke? Couldn’t he have just said “Hey, remember that siege of Wall Street? Yeah, those guys did it. Definitely fraud. Give me my money back, please”? How come Batman needs a knee brace to fix his bum leg but a guy in a prison can punch him in the back and fix his spine? How did so much of Gotham have exploding concrete in it? The Dark Knight had a few things that it just hoped you wouldn’t pay attention to as it sped on past them (boy it sure is pretty unlikely that Gordon could have gotten into that armored truck without anyone finding out), but unlike The Dark Knight Rises it’s good enough that I don’t care and actually has the momentum to glide past them. And it doesn’t have nearly as many.

huh, I kind of had the opposite reaction- I thought it was weak as a movie in its own right, but did a great job bringing the previous two movies together into a connected whole. The callbacks to the previous films were great, and Hardy did a great job acting with just his eyes and body.

The people complaining that Bane was “reduced to a sidekick” didn’t understand the movie properly, imo. Bane was still the person who came up with the plan to isolate and “liberate” Gotham, who had the brains, charisma, and intimidation skills necessary to bring such a large plan about. That he did it at the request of another person does not make him a subordinate in any way- their working relationship was more of a partnership than anything. I don’t know what’s going through the heads of people who call Bane a “sidekick”- do they think that cooperating with a female equals a loss of personal autonomy?

I struggled with what adjective to use there.

What I was trying to say was that much of what the characters say feels forced, expository, and unnatural, e.g. “Bruce Wayne will now recite these lines not because it develops the character but because it moves the plot along.”

Yeah, pretty much all of those questions were only cursorily addressed, if at all, usually with a one line throwaway. (Lots of free time, fraud investigation, cartilage, pouring concrete all over the city). Like they did a single pass over the script and just wall-papered all the holes.

The auto-pilot thing bothers me the most, because it’s emblematic of a bigger problem: this movie has the worse sense of time of any film I’ve seen in a long time. You have no idea how much time passes between scenes. 8 years, long enough for the power to get turned off, 5 months, suddenly it’s Winter, 18 hours. I never got a sense of when anything was supposed to be happening.

You are absolutely spot-on with your comment about the movie’s sense of the passage of time. That constantly drove me crazy. “We’ve got 23 days!” “Wait, no…we’ve got 11 hours!” How long has The Batwayne been in the pit? How long did it take to get him there? How long did it take him to make his way back? Who knows? Who cares? Look the river’s frozen and that guy has a weird mask!

There was a plot?

“Ladies playing topless volleyball, can you flounce your sweaty boobs in my face more quietly, please? I’m trying to figure out from the context what a ‘wet end’ is.”