I kind of like that he gives up Batman in the end; Batman is not healthy. He's not healthy for Bruce Wayne, and he's not really healthy for Gotham either.Originally Posted by Justin Fletcher
I'm not too keen on how it played out though, it really doesn't make sense for bruce to land where he does in terms of his arc. I wanted Nolan to address the fundamentally undemocratic nature of superheroes and have the people of Gotham rise and take back their city from these costumed freaks jerking it around -- The Joker, Bane and ultimately, Batman. They even hint at something in that direction with Bane's speech about giving control back to the people, and they could have paid that off by having the people actually *take* control by fighting Bane's reign, like they rejected the Joker's attempt to twist them to his nature. Instead, the people of Gotham aren't even really there.
I wanted something that transcended genre, but instead, I got a big goofy Bond film. Which I had quite a bit of fun with, but it's disposable in ways The Dark Knight wasn't.
I had the feeling that if Ledger had lived Nolan would've liked him to play at least some small role in the third movie.
My biggest problem with the 8 years is that people would've become very, very suspicious of Wayne for becoming such a recluse at the exact point in time that Batman disappears. But a line about throwing a coat over a boy's shoulders 30-some years earlier is what it takes to tip Gordon off.
Ultimately this was my biggest problem the whole time. The last day anyone sees Batman is the last day anyone sees Wayne, and the first day Wayne reappears in public, Batman comes back. Are all the people in Gotham (except Robin, of course) REALLY that stupid?
That said, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. I never expected it to be as good as The Dark Knight, but it'll take a few more viewings of each (I've probably only seen Dark Knight twice), and in close proximity, to really pick a favorite. I liked different things about each, but overall I was pleased with what the movie gave me.
There's plenty of criticism, a lot of which I agree with, so, things I LIKED:
- Selina Kyle, obviously. I thought Anne Hathaway nailed it, even more than I expected.
- The overall story, while fairly predictable, actually worked for me pretty well.
- While Michael Caine didn't get a ton of screentime, sadly, but when he did, I thought he brought some real impact to every scene. In my book, he was the heart of the movie.
- The ending, primarily for one reason: Bale is done, Nolan is done, but whoever winds up doing the next inevitable Batman movie COULD, if they so chose, keep running in that direction with Blake as the new Batman. I rather doubt they will, and I don't know if they could re-use setpieces and the like, but it was nice to leave that opening.
The movie had its share of flaws, but overall I felt like they delivered a little more than I was expecting, and was generally pleased.
EDITED TO ADD: One criticism I haven't seen anyone else mention: While leaping in the pit, it NEVER looked to me like that rope had enough slack (he even tested it on his first jump) to allow anyone to make it out. It shouldn't have been that hard for the world's greatest detective to figure out he needs to lose the rope. That was one of the most predictable moments to me.
Saw it this weekend, really didn't care for it. I felt like it was a big mess with a couple of good ideas tossed in that never really went anywhere. Also, as people have pointed out, it totally misses the point of several of the characters.
Bane / Talia's plan was like Riddler level over-complicated. They steal Wayne's fingerprints, so they can break into the stock exchange so they can make a bunch of terrible trades, so their stock price collapses, so they gain controlling interests, so they can get the fusion reactor, so they can turn it into a bomb, wait 5 months, and then set it off.
None of that makes sense, because you know what already exists? Nuclear weapons. It seems like an international mercenary with enough money to buy a (admittedly devalued) Wayne enterprises should be able to scrounge up an easier way to blow up Gotham City. Special stupid-movie mention for the reactor destabilizing in "about 5 months" to "exactly 11 minutes", complete with a timer on it.
And the isolating Gotham thing doesn't make any sense either. I feel like Tom did describing parts of Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. If you want to play "Fortress Manhattan", you need to have a point to it, usually to say something about the true nature of humanity without the rule of law. A sort of Hobbes v. Rousseau thing. Or something else, but it needs a reason. But this movie didn't have one. He cut them off, opened "mob rule", but only kind of, because he also instituted martial law? Apparently everybody just stayed inside for 5 months, except they ransacked some expensive apartments (also, this movie implied a lot of rape of wealthy Gothamite women, but that's another issue). We never see what effect it has on the populace, if any. We never see the populace period. It felt like Nolan wanted to tell some kind of class-struggle / French Revolution story, but it didn't fit, so he just crammed it in harder and left it there.
I didn't watch the trailers, so maybe this came up before, but I can't be the only person who thought Bane sounded like a bad Sean Connery impression, can I? That was really distracting.
I also thought that while Anne Hathaway did a reasonable job with what she was given, Catwoman was just tedious. They didn't do anything interesting with the character or her relationship to Batman, so why even bother? There was just no surprise anywhere. In fact, they even sanitized her a lot by making her have a heart of gold and a troubled past instead being an inscrutable see-saw of self-interest and affection. It's sad when your Catwoman / fancy dress dance scene is worse than the one in Batman Returns.
There's a lot of things that were missing or just never sufficiently explored. Why do people give a shit about Gordon's speech? So what if people lied, I assume they're happy the criminals are gone anyways. Why does Bane bother reading it, since we never see anybody's reaction to it except Robin's. How does Catwoman know how to find Bane? Why were the cops marching centurion style down the street at the end? To inspire a populace that, for all intents and purposes, doesn't appear to exist? Ditto the Batman chalk marks. And the stupid bloodless cop deaths at the end of that fight for a PG-13 rating. Also, if they wanted to play with the "old soldiers" theme with Gordon and Batman in a city that no longer needs them, they should have actually done something with it instead of mentioning it in passing and moving on.
When the title was announced, people complained that it referenced the 2nd movie, but not the 1st, making it seem weirdly like a sequel to The Dark Knight instead of a proper 3rd movie in an arc. The complaint had some validity, but it turned out backwards: a lot of this movie felt like a reprise of the 2nd one, a do-over with a new villain because the original plan required the Joker, and they had to scramble to re-design it. It felt like there were at least 2 movies in there that they welded together somewhat haphazardly.
A big part of the problem is that Batman stories are, at heart, personal stories about Batman. That's why all his villains are reflections of himself. When you try to endanger a whole city, it's really hard to make it work as a Batman story. You keep upping the scale until he's cruising around in an attack helicopter and bombing tanks, but it gets trapped in a weird place without the personal conflict of a good Batman film, but also without the grand spectacle of the Avengers. So you get a kind of half-assed spectacle.
I would've liked to see a movie about Bane opening Bane-land, and the people deciding between his vision of Gotham and Batman's. I would've like to see a movie about Talia and Catwoman, with Bruce being manipulated by both of them in various ways. I would've liked to see a movie about Batman struggling with retiring because what he needs and what the city needs are different. I did not like seeing a movie about Batman doing sit-ups then chasing down a timed atom bomb in an awesome new helicopter.
Yes. The secret of the DC universe is that yes, everybody really is that stupid. Batman (and Robin, when appropriate) are the world's greatest detectives not by being particularly smart, but by virtue of not being idiots. The same applies to Superman's glasses.
Yes. The first time we saw him jump, I sighed and said "take off the rope". Although, I'm not sure if the intention was that the rope was actually too short, or if was just supposed to be a confidence thing of when you're truly ready to escape, you can. That's pretty well worn territory regardless.EDITED TO ADD: One criticism I haven't seen anyone else mention: While leaping in the pit, it NEVER looked to me like that rope had enough slack (he even tested it on his first jump) to allow anyone to make it out. It shouldn't have been that hard for the world's greatest detective to figure out he needs to lose the rope. That was one of the most predictable moments to me.
Similarly, it's pretty obvious that Bane wasn't the one who escapes, because the climbing child's face wasn't fucked up. Admittedly, I didn't realize that it would be Tate, but it wasn't hard to realize there was something amiss with that story.
I liked it more than most of you. Then again I think TDK is good but overrated.
It's not about blowing up Gotham by the easiest means possible. I thought they explained it well enough in the film-- the plan is borne partly out of a desire for revenge against Batman/Bruce Wayne, and partly out of a desire to complete her father's work.
From Ra's, they borrowed the concepts of fear as a weapon and Wayne Industries tech to deliver the final blow. They want to ruin Bruce, have him watch as the city he protects gives in to despair, and then see it ultimately destroyed by his own creation.
Yeah, I got that aspect of it, but it seemed under-explored, just like most everything else. For instance, what despair? We barely saw anybody in the city (yes, one kid stole an apple). Also, I didn't get the impression that Wayne was really beating himself up for letting them take his reactor. He was too busy doing sit-ups.
Also, the stock market thing made no sense. Really, the day that armed terrorists take over the stock exchange and "execute a program", you don't freeze or roll back all trades that occurred that day? I know they said there would be fraud investigations, but still, that seems pretty incompetent.
Also, I like that Wayne Manor is apparently billed for electricity on a daily basis.
Well said, and I completely agree. Especially this:
GORDON: Which one are you going after?
BATMAN: (grumbles) Rachel!
GORDON: OK! All available units, let's go save Dent regardless of where you are currently positioned. No need to try to save Rachel if you're in the area since Batman will be there in just a bit.
You saw Foley (or whatever his name is) give up on helping the force when Gordon comes to his door looking for support. You saw Gotham shuttered with people living in squalor and afraid to go outside.
I agree but swap Sean Connery for Deckard Cain from Diablo (which is a pretty blatant Sean Connery imitation)... it was like a imitation of an imitation! Slightly distracting but I still really enjoyed the movie.
Yeah, and I'm fairly certain we're supposed to believe that there's JUST ENOUGH rope to do it, but when he tested it for slack, there didn't look to be much there. Which doesn't make any sense, since it was hooked to him from the bottom of the climb. I guess someone is adjusting the slack as he goes? Kinda make sense I guess.
I dunno, that whole sequence just bugged me, especially due to the obviousness of the kid not wearing a rope during the flashback, etc.
This never occurred to me one way or another, because I didn't know what happened to cause Bane to need the mask. Was that explained at some point I didn't remember? I knew he said it would be very painful if they took it off, and I remember them saying that it helped me manage the pain and stuff, but I don't remember the conversation where they talked about what it actually DID.
I dunno, there was a lot of dumb stuff, but I really enjoyed the movie and admittedly want to see it again. Prolly buy the boxed set when it comes out. This is just one of those movies that's a little disappointing because of the potential it had.
It's one of the stories Bruce's cell buddies told him. I don't remember if they gave a reason, but the other inmates carved up Bane's face, which the drug-addled doctor failed to treat correctly.
Or something.
I didn't like that the prison was described as some hellish every man for himself environment, but when Batman gets there, everybody just sits around and cheers him on to escape. There was nothing brutal at all about that place.
Those prison scenes bored the hell out of me. It's a shame the movie spent so much time on it.
I think the whole movie would have been a lot better without so many of the punches pulled. The premise of a major city being conquered/imprisoned by a terrorist and thrown into anarchy is interesting enough. But we never really got a good sense of how terrifying it should have been for the citizens of Gotham. I enjoyed the movie mostly for its acting and cinematography, but I was left pretty disappointed by the writing. I would have liked a darker and more focused portrayal of this story.
We saw a bunch of at-risk teens living in a gymnasium, and a middle-class neighborhood deserted but otherwise untouched. And some people looting some fancy apartments. The Foley thing would have worked if I gave a shit about Foley. But I barely knew who he was. It would have worked if it had been somebody with history, who never gave up, like Gordon, or, say, Montoya, if we'd already been building a relationship with her for a while.
I'm not saying that I don't understand what they were going for, but they failed in actually establishing a mood. I'm thinking of stuff like Robocop and Escape from NY, and <better example I can't think of>. What little we saw of the city didn't feel oppressed, or desperate, it just felt deserted.
A lot of this comes down to there being too many competing movies. If the film was just "Batman in Bane-land", they could've done things like shown how bad it was for the common people. But instead that time was spent on board meeting shenanigans, Catwoman, and Howard Hughes jokes.
In other words, what delirium said:
Last edited by CLWheeljack; 07-23-2012 at 11:28 AM.
Ah. Okay, totally missed that I guess. Sheesh, that's a sloppy inconsistency for sure.
Nonetheless, there were clear moments where Nolan tried to show Gotham's despair and change under Bane. I'd also point to the turn on the military guy and the cop shooting at Robin and blowing up the bridge as good examples in the film of how much things deteriorated under Bane.
As far as mood, I'd agree, but I'd also say that Batman Begins had similar weaknesses. Scarecrow was just established as a demented psychiatrist with no real motive or origin. For all the time we spent with Ra's al Ghul, his desire for justice was only established by him stating so and his access to his vast resources were never explained.
Characters need to change to be interesting, and the better comic tales tend to focus on origin stories because we see the character evolve. It's why "Heart of Ice" and "Two-Face" in Batman: TAS are the best of those characters' episodes. We got to see Harvey Dent corrupted and turned by the Joker, and it gave TDK a great story. BB showed us how Batman came to be, even if it skipped over its villains' backgrounds. We really didn't get that in DKR until near the very end, and then it was skimmed over well beyond the point where we might have cared, where it might have colored the characters' actions to make them interesting.
I agree with most of your post, but I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Which military guy? It seemed to me that the 3 special forces guys were killed by Bane's thugs because Tate / Talia tipped them off.
And the cop shooting at Robin is a very strange example, because he was really just following his orders to the letter. If anything, he chose the more life-valuing route of blowing the bridge instead of murdering Robin. If he'd really thought life was hopeless, he would have been willing to kill him outright. There's no reason for him to believe that the bomb would go off: nobody outside of Bane and Batman's inner circles knew the bomb was deteriorating.
The closest it came, I guess, is the punks trying to kill the kid for the apple, but Catwoman was almost comic relief in this movie, so it didn't work in that scene for me.
Inconsistency seems harsh; more like foreshadowing the fact that it wasn't Bane that escaped. I feel like the storyteller in the prison was very careful to refer to some "characters" in his tale as "the child" and others as "Bane" and to keep the facts relatively correct, just misleading.
We were told that Bane's face was horribly mauled by other inmates in the prison, necessitating the botched masking surgery. We were later showing a very young child escaping from the prison with the aid of the child's watchful protector who was then. . . mauled by the inmates. The child was unscathed and unmasked.
It's not like Nolan forgot that Bane was supposed to have a fucked up face upon leaving the prison and messed the scene up. He knew well before the audience did (except the good guessers) that Bane wasn't the one escaping that day. If you were paying attention, that might have been the moment that cemented the true course of events for you.
Or, like me, you totally didn't notice it and were very surprised when Talia revealed herself. Whatevs.
This movie was a disappointment only because it wasted a great opportunity to put a Mouse Rat (formerly Scarecrow Boat) song on the soundtrack. Everyone whining about other stuff is boring.
That's probably fair. For a few minutes as I thought about the several times we saw that scene as new details emerged, if it wouldn't have been neat to film it as Bruce would've pictured it. First time, young male child. Second, male child with proector and disfigured face. Third, female child. Incorporating the rope in there on some but not others. That might've just been more confusing though, and eventually decided he did it right as-is.
I was pleased that Talia appeared in the movie, although her being the mastermind behind it all in the end really weaked Bane as a character, after spending 2.5 hours building him up (and still not doing enough of that.)
I just don't understand how anyone can be satisfied with this slow, ponderous, overlong, ineptly written, erratically shot, unconvincingly acted, uninspired follow-up to the finest comic book movie ever made because it wasn't a comic book movie, but an intricately told story about law and chaos. And I'm even enough of a Batman fan to have appreciated the Talia al Ghul reveal!
Also, from one of my favorite Kelly Wand synopses in a while: "Gotham wins 6-0!"
-Tom
Yeah, I thought they were doing something like that as well. Also, because the caretaker says "legend says..." a couple times when talking about the escape, so I figured we were seeing an inaccurate, but idealized version of the story.
Also, it isn't really a legend. The medic dude was there, as undoubtedly were some others.
One thing I liked about Bane: I liked the interpretation of him in this world. In comic Batman, you fuck up Bane's venom and he either gets weak, or it overloads and he goes berserk. Here, we got a similar thing: Batman fucks up Bane's mask, and that brings the pain back, so Bane goes a little berserk from the pain. That was a clever way to nod at the comics but keep it more grounded, the way Nolan has always done. There were a lot of little things like that that were clever, and I wish the whole movie had lived up to it.
The one guarding the bridge. Remember he approached Bane's thugs telling him that Bane didn't have enough people to block the bridge, but then the thug said that the military guy did, effectively enlisting the US military into Bane's revolution. Next time we see him, he looks completely lost and broken.
Which he understood as effectively killing Robin and all of the kids by the bus. Don't forget that his orders came from Bane, which was to prevent anyone from escaping the island. He may not yet be ready to get his own hands dirty taking a life directly under Bane's rule, but he had no trouble initiating an event which would accomplish the same.
Don't forget that the citizens were being air dropped food and supplies as well, which I'd say would be yet another sign of Gotham's despair, that a once thriving city would be reduced to third world status, even with civilization just across the bridge. These scenes were enough for me to feel that Gotham and its people were in bad shape, enough for me to enjoy that plot point even if I wasn't particularly invested in it.
I LOL'd at that too. The whole synopsis had me in stitches, actually...and I enjoyed the movie well enough in the moment.
One of my friends made the comment that the movie was better when EXPERIENCED than analyzed, and I'll go along with that.
While I understand this movie's shortcomings as a sequel to Dark Knight, I'm curious if Tom et. al. would've hated it quite so badly if Dark Knight hadn't come along just before it to raise expectations.
Personally for me, it actually delivered better than I was expecting, but I was pretty cynical about Dark Knight's sequel.
Oh, I expected it to be disappointing. But I didn't expect it to be so bad. These were the same people who wrote, directed, and shot Dark Knight. And while the absence of Heath Ledger is keenly felt, there were things about Dark Knight Rises that were awful regardless of a missing actor.
The script, for instance. The Nolans and Goyer did such an amazing job with the Dark Knight script. How did they not see or not care about the ample problems with this script?
The production design. Every single thing that looked cool in Dark Knight Rises looked cool because it already looked cool in Dark Knight. The new stuff -- the Bat UFO, wintertime Gotham, the design of Bane and Catwoman, the prison well -- was all so rote, obvious, and/or half-assed.
The performances. Christian Bale is just doing Christian Bale, and although I like that a lot, it's not enough. He had nothing to play off here. Anne Hathaway just seemed nonplussed the entire time. Tom Hardy, a tremendous actor, was ensconced behind that ridiculous breathing plate, which left him nothing to do but grip his lapel in a leaderly fashion. Gary Oldman was in bed the whole time. Michael Caine was just a doddering, weeping old man instead of the former ruthless soldier we met in Dark Knight. At least you could see Joseph Gordon-Levitt trying mightily to breathe some sort of life into his part, but he was stuck doing ridiculous "I knew you from your orphan expression!" scenes.
The pacing. This is what really killed it for me. Dark Knight is full of intercut scenes that work beautifully to keep the action snappy, which is remarkable given how talky that movie is. Dark Knight Rises tries the same thing and it comes across as disjointed and stuttering. It destroys any sense of coherence in the plot, which is already incoherent enough. Remember how Dark Knight wove together scenes of the Joker talking his way out of the cell, Harvey Dent and Rachel talking to each other in their final moments, Commissioner Gordon and Batman racing to save them, and the police discovering the cell phone bomb sewn into the prisoner's stomach? All four of those things happened simultaneously, intercut without compromising the impact and focus of any single thread. Dark Knight Rises constantly attempts this sort of thing, but the plot simply isn't focused or powerful enough to sustain it.
-Tom
I will OPENLY admit the shortcomings of the script. Some hit me during the viewing, some occurred to me more later upon reflection.
I will heartily disagree with you about the performances of Anne Hathaway and Michael Caine. I thought Michael Caine gave some POWERFUL scenes; choosing to shatter Bruce's carefully-woven facade of Rachel, inciting the hatred of someone he's loved his entire life, in an effort to save the boy's life -- I thought that scene was awesomely done. A man who has devoted his whole life to the Wayne family sees that the only chance left to save what's left of it is to walk away...that didn't strike me as weepy and doddering at all, but conflicted and broken. I thought those scenes were GREAT. And while Anne Hathaway might not have been far and away amazing, I thought she was quite competent at being "talky," while also carrying the "actiony" bits more than I expected. And everyone else I thought was at least competent.
I'll acknowledge most of your points though. I thought the stuff that worked (I liked the overall plot well enough, I loved the way they wrapped things up, I LOVED the music) worked well enough that I didn't have much trouble overlooking some of the weaker points to enjoy the movie as a whole.
I loved the movie, but I'm totally in the bag for Batman and Nolan, so there's no hope of objectivity. I do feel bad for anyone trying to follow this who hasn't seen BB or TDK, though.
One funny thing -- I had avoided spoilers all weekend, as we went to see it this afternoon, but I did see Tom's mention of the podcast trio being horribly disappointed, and that made me some sort of sad/panicked until the show. Obviously we don't agree, but I hope you take my reaction as a compliment to how much I think of y'alls work!
Always a helpful approach to any movie. Because then it's good and you're relieved, or it's bad and you weren't taken off guard!
-Tom
Maybe you should start a post-wallet threat for movies, so all the late comers can have lowered expectations.
Edit: I guess "best worst" and "worst thing you'll see all week" kinda cover that though. Just need it to be current.
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