Christopher Nolan wasn’t a hundred percent sure that he wanted to return to the Batman well, as he was worried that he’d lose interest. He also was struggling to come up with third films in series that were well regarded. (Just on the superhero end of things, you’ve got Superman III, Batman Forever, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Spider-Man 3 as cautionary tales.) But once he and his Bat-collaborators David S. Goyer and Jonathan Nolan hit on the notion of using the “Knightfall” and “No Man’s Land” storylines from the comics for inspiration for, in essence, the end of Batman’s career, he found the story he wanted to tell.
The studio was pushing for the Riddler to be the villain in the third installment, but Nolan wanted someone with a more physical presence. He focused on Bane, the antagonist in the “Knightfall” storyline from the early 1990s in which Bane broke Batman’s back, leading to first Jean-Paul Valley and then Dick Grayson wearing the cape and cowl before Bruce Wayne takes the bat-mantle back.
In addition, keeping the theme of focusing on Gotham City as a “character” in its own right in the films, Nolan took some inspiration from the chaos of the 1999 “No Man’s Land” storyline that had a major earthquake devastate Gotham.
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Vengeful
The characters and actors who survived the last two movies all came back: Christian Bale as Batman, Michael Caine as Alfred, Morgan Freeman as Fox, Gary Oldman as Gordon (now in his familiar post as police commissioner), Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow, and Nestor Carbonell as Gotham’s mayor, plus Liam Neeson returns as a hallucination of Ra’s al-Ghul. There are also lots of new characters, most notably Anne Hathaway as the latest iteration of Catwoman and Tom Hardy as Bane. Since Bane was originally written as Latin American (from the fictional nation of Santa Prisca, located in the Caribbean), with a costume based on luchadors (Mexican wrestlers), casting a white British dude was a bit odd, though at least this version kept Bane’s intellect from the comics. (In Batman & Robin he was reduced to a mindless monster rather than the genius of the comics.) In addition, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays an idealistic GPD cop and Marion Cotillard plays a Wayne exec with a secret. William Devane appears as the president of the United States, a job that he has fictionally had several other times (The Missiles of October, Stargate SG-1, 24). Also of note to genre fans are brief appearances by Torchwood’s Burn Gorman and Stargate SG-1‘s Christopher Judge. Where Chicago was used for Gotham City in the first two movies (with Dark Knight in particular making use of the city’s underground roadways), New York City in general and Manhattan in particular substitute for Gotham in this one, as the plot requires Gotham to be an island.
Nolan was actually able to tell a complete story with these three movies, and while there could be ways to continue the saga of this iteration of Batman following the trilogy (especially with Gordon-Levitt’s character having the given name of “Robin”), it truly did come to an ending. There has never been any talk of a sequel, and the next live-action appearance of Batman on screen will be a different interpretation of the character played by Ben Affleck in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad, and Justice League, which we’ll be tackling down the line on this rewatch.
“Deshi basara!“
The Dark Knight Rises
Written by David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Produced by Charles Roven and Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan
Original release date: July 20, 2012
The CIA captures an asset, a nuclear scientist named Dr. Pavel. A masked mercenary named Bane also wishes to capture him, and he is able to infiltrate the plane by pretending to be one of his own employees, “captured” by the CIA. His people crash the plane, leaving behind one of his own mercenaries as a corpse to make it look good, and take Pavel themselves.
In Gotham City, it’s been eight years since Harvey Dent’s death. In his honor, the Dent Act was passed—its exact terms are left vague, though apparently it doesn’t allow parole for mobsters, which is spectacularly un-Constitutional. Either way, the Dent Act has left Gotham’s organized crime in a shambles, er, somehow. Batman, who has indeed been blamed for Dent’s murder, has not been seen in eight years, and in that same period, Bruce Wayne has become a recluse. Even though he’s hosting a gala in Dent’s honor—one in which Gordon comes within a hairsbreadth of giving a speech that reveals the truth, but puts it in his pocket at the last second—Wayne doesn’t show his face.
One of the hired maids breaks into Wayne’s safe and steals his mother’s pearls. However, Wayne quickly determines that her real goal was to lift Wayne’s fingerprints. The thief—Selina Kyle—leaves the party with a horny congressperson, and sells the fingerprints to an employee of John Daggett, a member of the board of Wayne Enterprises, who is in bed with Bane. Daggett’s people try to kill her in lieu of paying, but she tricked them into using the congressperson’s cell phone—said congressperson is missing, and the cops are looking for him, and they trace the phone pretty quickly, enabling Kyle to get away.
In the ensuing melee, Gordon is captured and brought to Bane. Gordon manages to escape after being shot, and he’s found by Officer John Blake. Blake is an orphan who met Wayne in the orphanage sponsored by the Wayne Foundation—and he also recognized that Wayne was really Batman when he met him back then. With Gordon in the hospital and the threat of Bane—a threat that Gordon’s second-in-command, Captain Foley, refuses to take seriously—Blake goes to Wayne and urges him to become Batman again, as he’s the only one that can stop Bane. After a visit to his doctor, and also to Fox for some new toys, Wayne decides to get back in the cowl. He also attends a gala that Kyle has crashed—he has a tracker on his mother’s pearls—and confronts her. She says a storm is coming that’s going to destroy Wayne and people like him; Kyle herself plans to adapt.
Bane attacks the stock exchange, which is a cover to use Wayne’s fingerprints to make a stock transaction that will bankrupt Wayne and cripple Wayne Enterprises. Batman tries to stop Bane, and Foley is more interested in capturing Batman than Bane. Batman manages to get away, as does Bane, having made the transaction that torpedoes Wayne.
Alfred resigns, having grown frustrated with Wayne’s inability to move on from being Batman. Before he goes, he reveals that Dawes had chosen Dent over him before she was killed by the Joker, and also that he had a weird ritual during Wayne’s years away. Every year, Alfred would vacation to Florence and sit in a café. He would imagine that he’d see Wayne sitting at another table in the café with a woman, maybe some kids. They’d exchange looks, nod, and not speak a word to each other. Alfred knew that Wayne would only find misery in Gotham, the city that took his parents from him, and his one wish for his charge is for him to find happiness.
Alfred’s resignation leaves Wayne a bit of a mess, especially once he loses all his money. He’s able to keep Wayne Manor, but he doesn’t even have a set of keys. One of his allies on the Wayne Enterprises board is Miranda Tate, who becomes his lover. She has championed a fusion reactor, which Wayne had mothballed because a Russian scientist—Dr. Pavel—revealed that it could be turned into a bomb.
Batman convinces Kyle to take him to Bane, but instead Kyle allows Bane to capture Batman. They fight, but Batman is out of shape after being out of the game for eight years, and Bane is at the peak of his strength. Bane breaks Batman’s spine and sends him off to the same prison that he was born in as a child. Bane now owns the prison—it was bequeathed to him by Ra’s al-Ghul, though Ra’s later tossed Bane out of the League of Shadows. With Ra’s dead, Bane plans to finish his plan to destroy Gotham. He won’t kill Batman—he’ll torment him by letting him watch Bane destroy his precious city while suffering in the same prison that Bane himself suffered in.
While he recovers in the prison, Wayne learns of another prisoner, the child of Ra’s al-Ghul, who is the only person to escape. In truth, anyone can escape if they can climb a tunnel to the surface. Ra’s’s child is the only one who did it, protected by a friend in the prison. Wayne assumes that Bane is the child in question.
Meanwhile, Bane kills Daggett, having used his construction firm to mix explosives with concrete in various places around the city. Bane destroys every bridge to Gotham, and also blocks every tunnel. He destroys the football stadium during a Gotham Rogues game, killing dozens, including the mayor. Thousands of cops are searching the subway tunnels for Bane and his people, and the explosions leave them all trapped down there. Bane has also taken possession of the fusion reactor, makes Pavel change it into a bomb, and then kills Pavel publicly, after making it clear that Pavel is the only one who can disarm it. Bane has given the detonator for the bomb to a citizen of Gotham, he won’t say who. With the tunnels blocked and most of the bridges destroyed, the only road access in or out of Gotham is one bridge Bane left in one piece. It’s for supply convoys. If anyone tries to leave the city, Bane will detonate the bomb. If anyone tries to use the intact bridge for anything but food, he’ll detonate the bomb. In addition, Bane lets all the prisoners out of Blackgate Prison.
Gordon, Blake, and Foley are among the few cops who weren’t trapped underground. For the next three months, they mount a resistance, trying to find the bomb and figure out a way to stop it. Wayne Enterprises’ board of directors, including Fox and Tate, are in hiding, with access to the reactor. If the bomb is plugged into the reactor, they can control it. A special forces team sneaks in with a food convoy, but Bane learns of them and kills them.
The Scarecrow is running a kangaroo court, sentencing people who have committed offenses in Bane’s new order. The accused has a choice in sentence: death or exile. Exile involves walking across the frozen river and hope you don’t fall through the ice. Nobody has succeeded in making it across, and when Gordon is captured and chooses death, Crane declares the sentence to be death by exile, so they still have to cross the ice.
Wayne manages to escape the prison and return to Gotham. (It’s not clear where the prison is, nor how Wayne gets back into Gotham when it’s so completely closed off from the world.) He meets up with Kyle, who apologizes for turning him over to Bane. He accepts her apology and thinks there’s more to her than she gives herself credit for, even though there’s no evidence to support this notion.
There’s also a ticking clock. The bomb will go off after a certain point whether or not anyone detonates it. Batman saves Gordon from death by exile, gives him a doodad that will block the signal from the detonator, and also helps Blake free the trapped cops. Blake is charged with getting the kids from the orphanage out of the city. Unfortunately, the cops guarding the bridge are under orders to keep anyone from crossing the bridge, so even though Blake insists that the bomb’s gonna go off no matter what, and the kids, at least, should be saved, the cop on the other side blows the bridge, cutting Gotham off even more.
The GPD fights Bane’s forces, while Batman confronts Bane directly, comporting himself much better in this fight. At one point, he damages Bane’s mask, which reduces the bad guy’s effectiveness something fierce. Batman demands to know who has the detonator—
—and it turns out to be Tate, who stabs Batman with a knife. Her real name is Talia al-Ghul, Ra’s al-Ghul’s daughter. She’s the one who escaped the prison and Bane was the friend who helped her. This entire masterplan is hers, not Bane’s, and her goal is to finish her father’s work. She’s pissed at her father for leaving her in that prison, but Batman killed Ra’s and kept her from being able to confront him about it, so she decides instead to do what he couldn’t and destroy Gotham. However, Gordon is able to block the detonator’s signal. Kyle saves Batman by killing Bane—even though she had said she would be leaving Gotham behind—and the pair of them are able to keep Talia from getting her hands on the bomb. However, with her dying breath, Talia is able to flood the reactor chamber, so they can no longer place it there to depower the bomb. Instead, Batman takes the bomb and flies it out into the bay far away from the city to detonate out over the ocean.
Both Wayne and Batman are declared as being among the (many) dead. Alfred is sad that he wasn’t there for Wayne. Wayne bequeaths the mansion to the orphans, what’s left of his estate to Alfred, and the batcave to Blake, who quits the GPD. (We also find out his real first name is Robin. Gawrsh.) Alfred uses his newfound inheritance to travel to Florence, where he sits in a café and sees Wayne and Kyle sharing a meal. They nod at each other.
“You have my permission to die”
I had issues with Batman Begins, but overall thought it was a good movie, if not as great as its hype. I thought The Dark Knight was one of the best comic-book movies ever made.
This, though, is a goddamn mess. Nothing in this movie makes anything like sense, starting with the Dent Act—or, as it would be more aptly named, “the plot device.” The terms of this act are not at all clear, nor how, exactly, a law will allow it to be easier to lock up criminals—at least not unless it’s spectacularly un-Constitutional. I find myself wondering how many innocent people were locked up without a chance of parole under this nebulous law.
The impression at the end of The Dark Knight was that Batman would take the fall for Dent’s death, and also for his criminal acts—but not that he would stop fighting crime. And yeah, okay, this mythical, magical Dent Act may have cut down on crime in Gotham, but it can’t possibly have gone completely away—humanity doesn’t work like that, plus laws take a while to become effective. Instead, we jump the timeline eight years and find out that Wayne has retired Batman, but also retired from humanity, allowing his body to go to seed and hiding from the world, and that he’s done so since immediately after Dent’s death.
This makes about as much sense as Superman disappearing for five years to see if Krypton didn’t really explode—to wit, none. Gotham was still a mess at the end of the last movie, with a lot of work to be done. Sure, Batman would have to cooperate less with the GPD thanks to his taking the rap for Two-Face’s crimes, but why would that translate to him hanging up the cowl?
Eight years is, at once, a ridiculously long time and not nearly long enough. For a retired Wayne to be plausible, you need to move forward longer, à la Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns or the animated series Batman Beyond. Eight years is enough to make me believe in an older, crankier Batman, like the one Ben Affleck will play in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, but not one who’s given up.
Christian Bale does, at least, give his most convincing performance in the trilogy. His Wayne is already broken mentally and physically long before Bane shatters his back. Kyle’s theft of his mother’s pearls at least gets his brain back into it, but years of punishment followed by years of indolence has done a number on him physically. He’s good enough to hold his own against Bane’s thugs and against the GPD, but not in a one-on-one with someone as brutal, as talented, as fearless as Bane. It takes the crucible of Bane’s prison—which has already formed Bane and Talia into fearsome foes—to bring him back to truly being Batman.
Which he then only does for five minutes. The whole movie is predicated on the notion that anybody can be Batman, that Batman is the symbol and anyone can wear the cowl. This flies in the face of eight decades of stories, but whatever. Replacing Wayne as Batman has had mixed results—Jean-Paul Valley in the post-“Knightfall” stories was an offensive disaster, but having Dick Grayson in the role actually worked, not to mention Terry McGinnis in Batman Beyond—but the notion is still a specious one.
All so he can go off and retire with Kyle, but that relationship also doesn’t work. Oh, Anne Hathaway is magnificent in the role. She’s a worthy successor to Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, and Michelle Pfeiffer, and nicely washes out the bitter taste of Halle Berry. She brings charm and verve and humor and brilliance to the role. She’s beautifully chameleonic, effortlessly talented at her chosen task, and yet she also has an undercurrent of desperation, of the knowledge that it could all be taken away from her at any moment. (Her bitter declaration that rich people don’t even get to be poor like normal folks, following Wayne’s revelation that he’s been allowed to keep the family mansion despite being broke, is brilliantly delivered.)
But Bale himself has zero chemistry with Hathaway. (In that, at least, it’s consistent, as he didn’t have any chemistry with Katie Holmes or Maggie Gyllenhaal in the prior films, nor does he have any with Marion Cotillard’s Talia in this one.) On top of that, the script keeps insisting upon Batman seeing something more noble in Kyle, even though there’s no onscreen evidence to support it. Neither is Kyle returning from opening up the tunnel to save Batman’s life from Bane, as Hathaway has done too good a job of portraying her as a self-directed thief and the script has done too poor a job of convincing us that she’s got any heroic impulses.
Ultimately, Batman wants to see the best in Catwoman because that’s how the characters have been written in the comics for eighty years. But the movie doesn’t do the work to make us believe that. We have the same problem with Talia, in fact. The daughter of Ra’s al-Ghul in both the comics and the film, the comic book version is in love with Batman (and he with her), but she is loyal to her father as well. That conflict has made life difficult for Talia. Here, Talia has no affection for Batman, but is conflicted toward her father—so naturally, she fulfills his plan because, um, reasons? I guess?
Both Talia and Bane seem to be continuing Ra’s’ work in destroying Gotham—but why? Ra’s wanted to destroy Gotham because it was beyond saving, and then Batman first stopped him and then actually went ahead and saved it. We spent the whole first part of the movie proving that Ra’s was wrong, and then Bane takes steps to destroy Gotham anyhow.
Bane proves problematic on several levels, starting with the casting. In the comics, Bane was a genius, a tormented soul, a super-strong madman. He was also Latino, his costume inspired by luchadors. On film, he’s been done twice—the first kept his Latino heritage, but made him into a mute monster, Poison Ivy’s mindless henchman; the second casts a British actor in the role. Sigh. Hardy, at least, does a very fine job with the character’s physicality—which is good, as the mask covers most of his face, leaving him without the use of facial expressions. Body language and voice is all he’s got, and the latter is ruined by the filtered voice from his mask which ranges from incomprehensible to otherworldly—seriously, every time Bane talked, it felt like he was being beamed in from a completely different, barely related movie. When he first spoke up on the CIA plane, I didn’t buy that he was in the same space-time continuum as Aiden Gillen’s agent, and that remove remained throughout the movie.
Bane’s takeover of Gotham is also utter, complete, total nonsense. First of all, his entire plan hinges on the GPD sending most of their forces into the tunnels. When the tunnels blow and the cops are trapped, supposedly something like 90% of the cops are trapped down there.
This could not possibly happen. Police forces in large cities work twenty-four hours a day, which means that every single precinct/district/whatever functions on three eight-hour shifts per day. Sure, maybe you pull a few people in off another shift when there’s a crisis, but ultimately, the most number of people who would be patrolling the subway tunnels looking for Bane would be most of one shift, maybe a few more—but even in the worst-case scenario, 60% of the cops would still be above ground.
But even if I buy that Bane somehow trapped 90% of the cops underground, you expect me to believe that they just sat there for three months? That nobody among this huge collection of cops figured out a way to blow through the rubble to get out? Keep in mind that all of them were armed, so they had gunpowder out the wazoo, and nobody had the wherewithal to MacGyver something?
For that matter, that entire time Bane had Gotham under his thumb, nobody was able to figure out a way to deactivate the bomb? Nobody at Wayne Enterprises with some technical know-how? Nobody at a government think-tank or at the CIA (who must have had some notion of Pavel’s work, not to mention a whole file on him) was able to figure out a way to deactivate the bomb? Nobody in or out of Gotham was able to figure out a way to block the detonator signal, at least? The only response the world outside Gotham was able to arse together was sending in three people from Army Special Forces?
One of the major themes, and best parts, of Dark Knight was that even in the face of Joker’s nihilism, the people of Gotham were still good people, still heroic people, still willing to fight in the face of adversity. That’s out the window one movie later, as everyone just sits around waiting for something to happen. (Well, except Gordon. Gary Oldman continues his excellent work in these movies, as Gordon has never stopped being a cop, never stops thinking ahead, and he expertly leads the resistance within Gotham, with help from Blake and the few cops remaining, as well as Fox.)
And then Batman returns, er, somehow. Wayne was taken to Bane’s prison—which is implied to be in another country—and he got out by climbing with nothing but the ragged clothes on his back. So how did he get home? He doesn’t have any money (that’s a plot point and everything), he doesn’t have a passport, and Gotham is completely closed off: the tunnels are blocked, all the bridges but one have a big-ass hole in them, and the water surrounding the island is frozen. So how’d he get back?
Finally, in the end, Batman removes the bomb from the equation and detonates it over the ocean, letting everyone think he died in the attack, so he can go off to Europe and have a chemistry-free relationship with Selina Kyle, presumably paid for by her thievery, since he’s still broke (and legally dead). Screw Gotham, screw his parents, screw his family legacy, screw the people who have suffered due to Bane’s takeover, screw everything.
Some hero.
Next week, we turn our attention to something a bit more mystical, as we look at Ghost Rider starring Nicolas Cage.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is a guest at ConnectiCon XVI this weekend in Hartford, Connecticut. He’ll be at the Bard’s Tower booth for most of the weekend, alongside fellow scribes Jason Fry, Dan Wells, Brian Lee Durfee, Dave Butler, and Kuta Marler. He’ll also be doing a couple of panels: check out his schedule here.
I only saw this once, but I remember the part where Wayne and ‘Tate’ fall into bed, with zero chemistry or even reason to do so, and figuring that the characters had just read the script and knew that was what they were supposed to do now. That was also about when I figured she had to be Talia, because what other purpose is she serving in this story?
Watching this movie felt like getting punched in the face for three hours. My main takeaway was that I wanted to see Hathaway’s Catwoman in some other movie–but this was shortly before everyone decided they hated Anne Hathaway for some reason.
You didn’t even mention the part where one of the things that is implied to turn the populace to Bane’s side (and thus let this mess try to be a French Revolution allegory on top of everything else) was Bane revealing (based on his retrieval of Gordon’s speech, the one he didn’t give) that Dent, not Batman, was the villain at the end of The Dark Knight.
Of course, everybody is going to believe the masked man with a bomb who holds up a piece of paper and says “your Police Commissioner wrote this!”
Right.
Something of a let down, yes, but not that bad IMO…Was lengthy with some drawn out pacing issues, and I found Hathaway meh as Selina Kyle (never referred to onscreen as Catwoman from what I recall)…Supposedly Nolan dropped the Lucha costuming for Bane because he felt it too cartoonish, don’t know his excuse for making Bane an Anglo though…And it was probably Nolan’s realistic approach that resulted in his rejecting Riddler (as well as Penguin, with Phillip Seymour Hoffman rumored for the part
I always assumed that Wayne had a bunch of secret accounts and phony identities from his years wandering and that’s how he’s funding himself after leaving and how he gets back from the prison.
And I do say as the entire “I’m going to throw the Hero into an inescapable prison and then leave the room” plot goes, Banes was better then most.
The part I always blinked at is that the giant multi billion dollar trade made that took down Wayne enterprises was done from a trading floor that was currently occupied by terrorists by a person that has a reputation of never leaving his house. How did no one declare all trades made that day invalid?
hey. hey. hey, hey, hey, hey…
Superman 3 should NOT be on your list of cautionary third movies.
1. It had Richard Pryor in it
2. the villian was a computer! a super computer! built by richard pryor!
3. It inspired the sub-plot of Office Space
Oh god Keith, you’re really doing Ghost Rider? At least tell me you’re not doing part 2…if so, you might as well do them both in one article. Please?
These days, for most superhero movies I skip the theatrical release and wait for home video; and then, I don’t bother watching closely for plot (or delivery or character chemistry) — I skim at 150% or 200% speed (thank you, VLC) and take screencaps for my ongoing “how iconic characters and props have been represented over time” personal project.
Even so, I could tell the plot of this movie had plausibility holes like some kind of very implausible lacked-a-beta-reader thing. How…? Why…? Why not…? For some movies, the nitpicking doesn’t start until after you’ve digested the whole thing, but this one tears like a wet paper bag at a grocery check-out lane being filled with miscellany by an inattentive clerk.
How did no one declare all trades made that day invalid?
That would be really, really difficult to do, not least because the majority of them would have been entirely legitimate.
But, yes – it was a great film for the first half and then it was a mess.
The Dent Act dramatically reducing crime isn’t that impractical. Off the top of my head: maybe it involved more funding for GCPD and the courts? Maybe it legalised some classes of drug, which gets rid of a whole set of crimes just like that? Maybe there were some procedural delays to criminal prosecutions and it got rid of them?
Bane, according to wiki, is not Latino; his father was Edmund Dorrance, a white British mercenary. (There’s no informatoin about his mother.) So having him played by a white British actor isn’t too strange.
Agreed with this review, though I do chuckle at the fact that the last act is a pretty clear homage to the “some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb” sequence from Batman ’66. The bomb is a giant black cartoon sphere and everything!
@6/7 In one article would mean watching both in one week. Why do you hate Keith?
Austin @6 and @7
Ghostrider was screamingly funny in its absurdity! Looking forward to KRAD’s review.
I don’t think I have ever seen such a critically acclaimed movie have such a devout minority of people who will go to the grave making such a big deal out of it’s minor flaws. Of course opinions abound but the negative reviews for this movie really have a hard time separating this movie from the Dark Knight sequel blueprint they had spent years conjuring in their heads.
To everyone complaining about Bruce retiring from being Batman at the end, I recommend you watch the Dark Knight again specifically the scene where Harvey Dent explicitly says “The Batman doesn’t want to do what hes doing for the rest of his life how could he? He’s looking for someone to take up his mantle” It was never Bruces intent to spend the rest of his life prowling the streets roughing up street crime, The first two movies established Bruces desire to make Batman a symbol to shake Gotham out of apathy and the movie ends with him succeeding. Bruce was perfectly willing to give up being Batman and pass the responsibilities of protecting it on to Harvey Dent and he wouldn’t be able to stop all street crime if that scenario actually happened. Batman taking the blame for Two-Faces crimes needed to amount to something beyond an excuse to make him a wanted vigilante again and a cleaner Gotham was that reward.
There’s also a lot of eye-rolling nitpicks here. Bane’s defining characteristic should not be that hes latino, Bruce once travelled the wrold without a penny to his name in Batman Begins, All the people really did in TDK was not blow each other up, They still needed Batman to save them and the situation in Rises is completely different. Fox already had the means to block the signal from the bomb. The League of Shadows was responsible for the state Gotham was in at the beginning of Batman Begins so this idea that they shouldn’t want to destroy Gotham because there’s no more organized crime is completely ridiculous. The Gotham police being sent into the sewers is out there certainly but is it really anymore nonsensical than Batman kidnapping a chinese national and the government of that Nation not making any demands to get him back or no one suffering fear attacks in Batman Begins from boiling water even though Cranes men had been polluting Gothams water supply for weeks. Honestly, the double standard that people have for this movie is just so stupid. A secret-ninja organization that caused the London fire and sacked Rome is perfectly fine but a law that enacts harsher penalties on Organized Crime is unbelievable? Give me a break.
Final thoughts, I can safely say I did not care for this review at all, my good sir.
As I promised last week, today I’m going to speak on why I think this is the worst Batman movie.
Batman Forever and Batman & Robin are worse movies, overall, but even those somehow get the core of Batman’s character better. You can do a Batman who kills like Tim Burton’s; the early Golden Age Batman, the very first of them all, proved that. You can do a campy Batman dealing with comedy; Adam West’s series proved that (Schumacher’s movies failed not because they were comedies, but because they were BAD comedies). But all those Batmen at least got something right; Batman is not a quitter. Batman is the kind of obsessed guy who will keep on with his crusade even right after the Joker has killed Robin (granted, in Dawn of Justice he retires after that, but that at least was a bigger blow than the ones he was dealt in The Dark Knight. I’m not saying losing his romantic interest and his D.A. buddy he barely got to know were not harsh blows, but it’s still below losing a dear son figure, right after another left him in bitter terms and another protégé was crippled).
But okay, let’s ignore Batman disappearing right after TDK kills all the meaning of the sacrifice at that movie’s end (‘I’ll be hunted and despised by the same people I’m protecting’ loses all impact when it’s immediately followed by a ‘But I’ll hole up in my house not protecting them, so they can’t hunt me anyway’). Let’s follow this movie’s cue on how Batmanning has ruined Bruce’s body, although he was seemingly fine by the end of TDK and did no more Batmanning afterwards (if anything, shouldn’t he have been affected by becoming an inactive shut-in?), not to mention if you’re going to think logically no human being should be able to duplicate Batman’s feats to start with. It’s that the movie doesn’t even follow its own train of logic; Bruce’s body is a mess, but he recovers from a broken spine even more conveniently than the comics version, which literally needed a Plot Device physician with healing powers to do so. Bruce’s body has been left a mess, after years of carefully training it to be in top human shape, so he naturally goes and leaves his post to a guy with just normal police training, presumably so he’ll be a vegetable after two years on the job and a run-in with a sharpshooter named Deadshot or someone like that. Does Bruce hate Blake by the end, or what?
The movie tries to be realistic but also goes through major leaps of logic one after another. No Man’s Land was a dumb idea on its own in the comics with literally decades of previous urban disaster, from dozens of supervillains to an Apocalypse plague to a massive earthquake, to make the whole country throw the towel on it; rushing the situation on with a ‘suicide terrorist group’ (all those guys were so loyal to Ra’s ideals they all would just throw the whole of the dying organization in one last final hurrah away instead of attempting to rebuild it for its original goals? Really? Not even the most fanatic real terrorist groups are that self destructive for so little actual payoff) and its badly staged gambit somehow managed to be even dumber (it only lacked a cameo of Superman staying right out of Gotham twiddling his fingers together, and I’m sure the studio didn’t force that in just because Nolan wanted no other heroes in this setting). And then everything ends with Bruce magically escaping a nuclear explosion (which even at that distance should have turned Gotham into Cancer City) um, somehow? I’m with those who claim the final Bruce scene was just Alfred’s hallucination, even if as far as the filmmakers’ intentions goes I think it’s as likely as those ‘Pokemon is Ash’s dying dream’ rumor nonsense.
The worst part of it all, however, is the movie tries to deconstruct Batman so hard, only to then get cold feet and say ‘But we also need Batman/Batman is awesome because…’ It doesn’t compromise one way or another like every other Batman movie does. Affleck’s Batman might have been misguided, but there’s still a point on how he’s ultimately a necessary force, especially by the Justice League movie, when he has accepted his own limits while still trying his best to remain active and compliment others’ efforts. He only needed to rediscover himself. By the time Nolan’s Batman rediscovers himself, instead… he just fucks off again to once more leave things to other people. TDKR Batman just flies in the face of all the prior two movies had been trying to say and set up, then tries to pick itself back up only to collapse under the weight of its own nonsense.
Tate is a bland waste of Cotillard’s talent, and Fox is utterly superfluous this time around (he peaked in the TDK, after which he should have just retired), but Gordon, Alfred, Bane and Catwoman barely savage something from the movie. I like especially that Catwoman gets something very few modern adaptations of Catwoman do; the ‘dammit, Selina’ feeling. The tendency across most media is to overall play her as a white hat too much, but ultimately I think it’s better to always be reminded she’s at her core an agreeable enough but very selfish person, through that kind of ‘dammit, Selina!’ moments. She doesn’t have to be Julie Newmar suggesting to push Robin off a cliff, but still.
Anyway, other than that, this movie is a real mess.
For some reason, I’ve always thought that there was a deleted scene that shows Bane’s prison was actually located just outside of Gotham.
The way Bruce Wayne is (theoretically) bankrupted in this movie illustrates the degree to which most people buy into the Scrooge McDuck fallacy of uber-wealth. The problem is this: you literally can’t bankrupt a true multi-billionaire with a single transaction, because nobody who’s genuinely that rich (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, that league, to which Bruce Wayne clearly belongs) has anything like that large a chunk of their assets parked in any one place. They’re diversified — some is in the stock market, sure, but some is also in real estate and some in other financial instruments and some in hard assets (gold, gems), with just enough in liquid form (i.e. currency) to maintain one’s lifestyle. Also, the super-rich own things — basketball teams, fleets of cars, custom yachts, golf courses, etc. — which require inordinate amounts of paperwork before ownership thereof can be properly transferred. And all of it is, or would be, scattered over at least dozens (if not hundreds) of accounts in a great many different financial institutions, precisely because that’s how you avoid being wiped out in the event of some part of the economy going south — or someone among your financial advisory team trying to embezzle from you.
That in itself blew my suspension of disbelief entirely out of the theater, never to return; similarly, it makes no sense that Bruce/Bats here has fully background-checked Selina Kyle while utterly failing to do the same for “Miranda Tate”. A rational viewer might reasonably conclude that the hardware presented to Talia as the bomb-control device must therefore be wholly phony, dummied up for the occasion by Batman and Lucius Fox, though Bats has to treat it as the real thing long enough to keep Talia from realizing she’s been suckered. The script as executed, however, attempts to sucker viewers right along with Talia, which is supremely bad form.
The attempt at homage to “some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb” therefore backfires alarmingly, by making the Adam West series and feature film look orders of magnitude smarter by comparison.
“A secret-ninja organization that caused the London fire and sacked Rome is perfectly fine but a law that enacts harsher penalties on Organized Crime is unbelievable?”
Those were different times, where it was much easier to completely wreck a major capital of a civilized country. And the problem was not this nebulous law was ‘harsher’ but, as Keith pointed out, it was harsher in an Anti Constitutional way. Not to mention laws on themselves change nothing… people’s willingness to follow on them on all levels does. Design the world’s best set of legislations, and as long as people still ignores them, you’re still getting nowhere. And sure, you can argue Dent’s martyrdom moved everyone to be that much better to that degree (sure, let’s go with that), but then… that steady faith that has managed so much shatters altogether after a guy in a goofy mask with an even goofier voice walks in and says Dent was a scam? Again, the movie tries to have it both ways and ends up just shooting itself with its own messages.
I guess had this series gone on, next movie would have people taking the Batman statue down right after Blake messed up dealing with the Riddler, or something.
“the scene where Harvey Dent explicitly says “The Batman doesn’t want to do what hes doing for the rest of his life how could he? He’s looking for someone to take up his mantle””
Oh, the temptation should always be there. It’s been there in pretty much all Batman media. Mask of the Phantasm is all about Batman contemplating he really doesn’t want to keep this mission going. It’s not about Bruce wanting it or not, though, it’s about him NEEDING it (pretty much same deal as with Peter Parker, whose Spider-Manning only makes his life further miserable but he just can’t let it go, while being Superman actually makes Clark Kent happier and gives him a bright, fulfilling purpose, something Snyder didn’t really get at all). Under the best conditions, Batman MAY let it go at last, but only when he’s pretty much exhausted all other options and found a fitting replacement (like Terry, the guy he literally spent a full series preparing for the role). ‘Pale random Gotham cop who just somehow figured my secret and whom I haven’t even known for a full year’ kind of doesn’t fit that bill, though.
The English language scarce has words that do justice to how much I loathed this movie. I hated it so much that I’ve refused to see anything that Nolan has done since. This is a record. It usually takes a string of wretched movies before I’ll write off a director. And I adored The Prestige, although in retrospect that probably had more to do with the great Christopher Priest novel that it was based on. I thought that Batman Begins was OK. I liked it better than you did, for all of its flaws (the miscasting of Ra’s al-Ghul for a start). The Dark Knight would have been pretty blah without Heath Ledger. But TDKR was just utterly ghastly, devoid of any redeeming qualities whatsoever.
I agree with the general consensus here. After a flawed first film and a nearly perfect second film, the third film has the worst flaws and fumbles the dismount. It does have a number of things going for it, most of all Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman. She’s fantastic in the role, and it’s remarkable how much her costume is an homage/updating of the Batman ’66 costume rather than any of her various comics costumes (though it also draws a bit on the Darwyn Cooke “goggles” design that’s been her standard look for the past decade or two). I really wish she’d gotten a spinoff, since she’s better than most of the other stuff in this movie. I wouldn’t say it was awful, but there’s a lot that doesn’t hold together under scrutiny.
For instance: Several people have commented on the logic flaws in the stock market sequence, but there’s also the way it somehow transitions from broad daylight to pitch darkness in under 8 minutes. And on top of all the other logic problems of the cops being trapped underground for months, they’re all still clean-shaven at the end! Also, we saw Matthew Modine order the cops out of the sewers a whole minute before the bombs went off, so shouldn’t more of them have gotten out?
But a problem occurred to me that I haven’t heard anyone else point out. Namely, the idea that Bruce developed this revolutionary fusion reactor technology, the key to clean energy and saving the world from environmental disaster, and he just sat on it and refused to put it to use because… because he was afraid someone would use the technology to make nuclear bombs.
Now, never mind the physical absurdity of turning a fusion reactor into a fusion bomb. In real life, fusion bombs need fission bombs as triggers, so the only way to make a fusion reactor explode is to drop an atom bomb on it, in which case it’s pretty much going to explode anyway. But this is fiction, and it’s supposed to be a whole new kind of fusion power, and only one guy in the world has ever figured out how to turn it into a bomb so clearly it’s not easy to do. That’s enough of a fudge that I can suspend disbelief for the sake of the story.
No, my problem is with Bruce’s moral reasoning. I can understand someone not wanting people to build nuclear bombs. I think just about everyone not of the supervillain persuasion can agree that those are bad things. But, see, here’s the thing… we’ve already got nuclear bombs. There are already more than enough of them in existence to destroy all life on Earth multiple times over. So, really, how would things have gotten any worse if Bruce had distributed the reactor technology? He deprived the world of something very beneficial and positive in order to avoid the creation of a threat that was already created nearly 70 years earlier! I’m sorry, but that seems like an indefensible moral calculus. Okay, maybe the danger was of the reactors falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue nations, but there’s already that same danger with nuclear arsenals and weapons-grade materials. Bruce was desperately holding the barn door closed, but the cattle were long gone. He should have released the reactor tech — and made the world’s governments fully aware of the potential dangers of its abuse so they could be safeguarded against. There was no good reason for him not to do that.
Also, if Bruce and Lucius Fox were so concerned about preventing dangerous technologies like the reactor and the various weapons and military vehicles in Fox’s secret warehouse, then why did they keep them? Why not dismantle them or not build them at all? Didn’t it occur to them that if you don’t want the bad guys to get their hands on this stuff, then maybe it’s not wise to stockpile it all in one handy location?
I rewatched this not too long ago and yeah, it has some pretty major issues. But the plane heist scene at the beginning was an amazing piece of stunt work.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, but I just don’t think Nolan understands Batman or comic books any more than Snyder did later. This is still The Watchmen version of Batman, without the self awareness of The Watchmen.
My big problem with the movie is that Bane is less of a fitting character for a rich vs the poor revolution, I mean that’s more Anarky. They really should’ve had some else do the voice of Bane instead of Tom Hardy
@22/templarsteel: Interesting that you mention Anarky, because it just occurred to me while reading the Dark Knight column that Nolan’s anarchist/nihilist Joker corresponds somewhat to Anarky — although I’m only familiar with that character from the Beware the Batman animated series, so the comics’ version may have been different.
@18 – Hyperbole much? I don’t know how anyone can walk out of a Nolan movie and not be impressed by his technical prowess. He makes gorgeous, well-acted, well-shot movies. I haven’t seen a bad Nolan movie yet.
Yeah, so after declaring the first film one of my fave films, and my utter disdain of the second film, this one just left me feeling apathetic. I enjoyed it more than the Dark Knight as a movie, but the plot holes were enough to drop a mountain top through.
I particularly didn’t care for the way that the plot resolved Bruce Wanes arc, then rinsed and repeated in the pit. (By the way, you can cure a broken back with a harness and harsh punishment. Just goes to show that other people just didn’t try hard enough).
But John Bunnell hit it on the head for me. That scene just punched me in the brain in the theater. “The stock market does not work that way! Their publicly traded! You can’t plug something in….” You get the idea. It was kind of lost after that. But had some good performances over all. And Batman just showing up at the end made sense to me. He’s Batman.
A lot of the plot holes in this movie are both massive and nit-picky. But what always gets me about this movie, and in hindsight the Nolan series in general, is how absolutely terrible a detective this Batman is. He has to be led to Bane. He sleeps with Tate who has an audience visible scar in the shape of the League of Shadows logo and is surprised when she turns out to be a baddie.
Not that he was much of a detective in the other two films either. His methods amounted to either having a computer do analysis, punching people until someone talked, or gimmick some money for Gordon for actual detectives to follow up on.
World’s Greatest Detective my foot. No wonder Nolan didn’t want to use Riddler. This Batman’s solution would be to check Google for the solutions to any clues.
@14/OverMaster
“Batman is not a quitter”.
That’s a really shallow and petty reason to declare this the worst Batman movie ever. The reason Bruce stopped going out as Batman after TDK is spelled out in this movie and it has nothing to do with either Rachel or Harvey ‘Batman wasn’t needed anymore, We won”. Taking the comics into account, Bruce has quit the mantle of Batman countless times over the course of his career and he’s said in other comics that the day he can hang up his cape and stay home is the day he’s working towards. Obviously the comics will never allow him to permanently retire but this is a film series, a medium that’s known for putting a finite spin on things from the comics all the time. Bruce never intended to be Batman for the rest of his life in this film series, I’m sorry but that is the cold hard truth. To him being Batman was a means to an end which was to inspire the people of Gotham (the ones in positions of power) to take back their city. This Batman had a set mission and an endgame and to quote Nolan himself “For the mission to succeed, It has to end”. Batman didn’t quit, he succeeded. He didn’t retire when Gotham needed him like in the Dark Knight Returns. he came back in the beginning of Rises as soon as he became aware of Bane and at the end, He provided Gotham with a new symbol, something that can arguably do more good than remaining as a permanent fixture to harass street crime while also rewarding Alfred’s faith that he could move on with his life. To say that Bruce retiring as Batman goes against the character more than him outright murdering people is ridiculous just like saying Batman Forever, a movie where Bruce is willing to quit because he wants to get laid by Nicole Kidman is somehow more faithful to the character.
“Batman disappearing right after TDK kills all the meaning of the sacrifice at that movie’s end “
Only in the sense of not really. Bruce doesn’t take the blame for Harvey’s Crimes because he all of a sudden wants to be a wanted vigilante again or because he’s excited at the idea of being chased by the cops. It’s to ensure that Harvey’s reputation and the work he put in weakening the mobs hold on Gotham remains intact. Batman taking the blame needed to have an impact on Gotham beyond ensuring the police are gonna put catching him above the actual criminals and the improved Gotham city is just that.
“TDKR Batman just flies in the face of all the prior two movies had been trying to say and set up”,
Translation: It didn’t align with my personal expectations of where the story was going.
“That’s a really shallow and petty reason to declare this the worst Batman movie ever.”
Good thing, then, it was only one of several reasons I listed above, most of which you haven’t bothered to refute.
“The reason Bruce stopped going out as Batman after TDK is spelled out in this movie and it has nothing to do with either Rachel or Harvey ‘Batman wasn’t needed anymore, We won”. “
Except by the end of TDK, where Batman quits, nothing’s been really won for good. The Joker’s been arrested, and many crime families are wrecked, but the city’s still majorly reeling from a quick chain of very powerful blows and there’s still much to do. This movie’s issue with that is trying to handwave that with ‘magical legal act suddenly shows up and makes everything better, yay’.
“He didn’t retire when Gotham needed him like in the Dark Knight Returns.”
Again, Dark Knight Returns had a much bigger pile of factors leading into Bruce’s retirement. Other than his age, the government had literally piled up on superheroes and even that didn’t suffice to make Batman retire, it took the last straw of Joker killing Jason Todd, his son figure (and someone who was a a child Batman had brought into his crusade, unlike Rachel and Dent, who already were adults going in on their own with full knowledge and responsibility over the risks).
Bruce was hell a lot more justified on throwing the towel up there.
“He provided Gotham with a new symbol, something that can arguably do more good than remaining as a permanent fixture to harass street crime while also rewarding Alfred’s faith that he could move on with his life.”
He literally left someone without the rigorous Wayne training, the Wayne fortune, the loyal butler with medical training or the tech mage Morgan Freeman to his own devices with only a dusty cave of equipment that literally hadn’t been used in years, to keep up with that symbol’s survival. He’s literally throwing Blake to the lions. And for God knows who long he left his best friend and father figure to believe him dead when he could have given him a quick and discreet ‘yo man, I’m still alive, I’m just splitting away’ until they happened to run into each other in a restaurant. Leave the old man to agonize for days if not weeks over your condition, Brucie, way to go.
“Translation: It didn’t align with my personal expectations of where the story was going.”
Translation to the translation: I took personal offense with someone else picking up on the issues with a movie I liked.
@17 OverMaster
“Design the world’s best set of legislations, and as long as people still ignores them, you’re still getting nowhere”.
I don’t see how this correlates to my point at all. The Dent Act is what allowed the police of Gotham city to crack down harder on the mob who were all pretty much crippled at the end of TDK. Who’s supposed to ignore it in this scenario, the mob? Maybe I should have reworded my previous statement a bit. I think it’s a double standard that the Ninja organization is unbelievable but getting rid of Organized crime isn’t.
“It’s not about Bruce wanting it or not, though, it’s about him NEEDING it”
This my come as something of a surprise to you but Bruce Wayne doesn’t actually like being Batman. He doesn’t derive any joy or fulfillment from it. He is Batman because he feels he has to be, because he wants to honor the memories of his parents and create a better world that won’t need a Batman anymore. He succeeds in this endeavor here and leaves the resources and bat cave to John Blake as a “just-in-case scenario”. The movies not suggesting Blakes gonna suit up as Batman and go out the very next day. He’s got a long way to go obviously but the city of Gotham’s been left in a place where it doesn’t need a Batman for the time being so he has plenty of time to prepare.
“I think it’s a double standard that the Ninja organization is unbelievable but getting rid of Organized crime isn’t.”
You are aware that, while nowhere as fantastic as they are in cinema and pop culture, both ninja and terrorist societies have existed in real life, while the survival of organized crime is a constant in pretty much all modern societies, aren’t you?
“This my come as something of a surprise to you but Bruce Wayne doesn’t actually like being Batman.”
I doubt it may be a surprise to me seeing how in the very same post you cherrypicked I just went on how Bruce often will lament and groan on his mission (again, the same way Spider-Man does) before deciding he still has to do it regardless. Of course Bruce doesn’t like being Batman. That’s the whole point. That’s why it is a heroic sacrifice for him.
“The movies not suggesting Blakes gonna suit up as Batman and go out the very next day. He’s got a long way to go obviously”
Okay, explain to me how he’s going to go that way in any sort of believable way when he starts much older than Bruce already, without Wayne’s fortune, without Wayne’s contacts, and without Bruce’s primal raw obsession to fuel him where most common men would just throw the towel up. I don’t doubt Blake is a good, able man on his own terms, but there’s no way he can become the kind of vigilante Bruce was by starting with so many cards already against him.
@28/OverMaster: “Except by the end of TDK, where Batman quits, nothing’s been really won for good. The Joker’s been arrested, and many crime families are wrecked, but the city’s still majorly reeling from a quick chain of very powerful blows and there’s still much to do.”
That’s true, but the intent of TDK was that Batman was no longer the one who needed to do it, because now Gotham had restored enough law and order, enough honest politicians and cops and motivated citizens, that it could solve those problems for itself through proper legal channels, rather than needing to rely on a vigilante to do it for them. The idea was that the city had healed to the point that it could take responsibility for itself, so that the extreme, stopgap solution of Batman was no longer needed.
The disappointing thing about TDKR is that it declares that resolution invalid because it was based on a lie, and shows it as something easy to tear down, reversing and negating the arc of Gotham’s redemption that drove the first two movies. The thing is, Gotham’s recovery wasn’t based on a lie, it was based on a symbol. Batman had been the symbol that gave them enough hope to pull themselves out of the cesspool of corruption and gang rule, and Harvey Dent was the symbol that let them restore law and order fully at last. They just needed to go on believing in what Harvey represented so that they’d hold onto those ideals in themselves. It wasn’t about the man himself. It was about the hope he stood for. If Gotham really had recovered and matured as a community the way TDK showed, it shouldn’t have fallen apart again so easily when the truth came out or when Bane started tearing things down again.
“Good thing, then, it was only one of several reasons I listed above, most of which you haven’t bothered to refute”.
That really seemed to be the major one and it really struck a chord with me. The rest of your reasons didn’t really interest me but I will say this. These movies are not realistic, they have never been that way. They are more grounded than usual comic book fare but they still require the same amount of “suspension of disbelief” that pretty much all of Nolan’s movies up to now have had so I find the complaints about Bane taking over the city to be pretty unbelievable especially since there was an entire comic book story line where an evil preacher did the exact same thing with an army of homeless people and no nuclear bomb.
You also lose points by bringing up Justice League, a movie more flawed than Rises could ever hope to be as a positive.
“Except by the end of TDK, where Batman quits, nothing’s been really won for good”.
With The Joker locked up and the mob basically crippled, What exactly does Batman have left to do? What is the work he needs to put in? Theirs nothing that suggests Batman stopped going out right after TDK, He could’ve easily kept a low profile in patrolling the city until the Dent Act was passed.
“Bruce was hell a lot more justified on throwing the towel up there”.
Gotham didn’t need him to be Batman anymore. That really should be the ultimate justification for any version of Bruce Wayne to hang up the cape and cowl. I don’t know how many times I have to say this before it sinks in, Rachel and Harvey had nothing to do with it. Their deaths are not the reason for Bruces retirement, Bruce never says they were the reason for his retirement and the movie never says this either but you know what it does say? I reiterate “The Batman wasn’t needed anymore, We Won”.
“He’s literally throwing Blake to the lions’
Good thing he’s not going out as Batman right away and has plenty of time to learn considering Gotham is in a state of peace now
“I took personal offense with someone else picking up on the issues with a movie I liked”.
Their you Issues with the movie, not actual objective flaws. Not beginning the movie with Batman fighting crime as a wanted fugitive is not a flaw. Ending the movie with Bruce retiring instead of the usual “I must be Batman for the rest of my life” is also not a flaw.
I like Rises more than most it seems. I suppose that’s because I like political movies much more than comic book movies, even when the themes are thuddingly obvious as they are here. All the elements of Revolution and corruption and an establishment destroying fascist holding everyone hostage with the “truth” in one hand and a detonator in the other, well, it at least adds up to an interesting mix. Especially looking at it now in 2018.
As for the man himself, Batman, I remember there being a discussion at the time of the movie’s release concerning whether or not he dies in the end and if Alfred is seeing what he wished he could see at the cafe. Maybe this was due to some hangover from Nolan’s then recent work in the reality-bending ambiguity of Inception. Or not. I don’t know. Just another reason I find this movie interesting. Not good but interesting.
Guys, let’s please keep the discussion civil. And just in general, just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t mean they didn’t get it, or they have an agenda, or they’re annoyed that their expectations weren’t met. It just means they disagree with you.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
There’s definitely a line between the complaint that “Nolan’s Batman isn’t my Batman” (which I think is true for a lot of the commenters here, myself included) and the complaints that The Dark Knight Rises is a poorly crafted film (about which we’re seeing sharp disagreement in the current round of comments).
Some of the criticisms definitely do touch on matters of craft. My (and others’) observations about the non-credibility of the bankruptcy ploy reflect sloppy script construction. KRAD points out the clean-shaven cops emerging from eight months in the tunnels — that’s a makeup and continuity issue (or, looked at another way, perhaps a budget issue) on the production side.
Some are trickier, such as tarbis’ observation at #26 that Nolan’s Batman is clearly not a skilled detective, citing (among other things) his failure to notice Talia’s guild mark. On one hand, that reads very much like a subjective “not my Batman” complaint. And yet, tarbis isn’t wrong that detective ability is a core component of Batman’s character, and that a Batman who’s flunked Clue-Spotting 101 really can’t be called a well-developed Batman. It’s not just that this aspect of the character is downplayed; it’s that this script overlooks that aspect of Batman almost completely, to the extent that the plot relies on himto be not just inexpert, but subpar as a sleuth.
Overall, my sense is that The Dark Knight Rises loses too many points for sloppy craftsmanship to gain them back for style, even if many of them are matters of arguably minor or nit-picky detail. The Dark Knight is a much closer call; Heath Ledger is most assuredly not my Joker — to the extent that I think Ledger and Nolan got the character critically wrong — but I am willing to acknowledge that the Joker he gives us is a compelling and very strongly performed character, and I can see where the Nolan/Ledger interpretation comes from. Unfortunately, there’s nothing approaching the Ledger performance onscreen to redeem The Dark Knight Rises, at least not for me.
I really liked this one when it came out, but the feeling has been fading steadily almost ever since. I still appreciate Nolan’s desire to make something sweeping and mythic – and to tell a “last Batman story” that doesn’t end with him dying for a change. But the essentially fabulistic nature of the film doesn’t paper over the copious gaps in narrative logic. And there just isn’t enough Batman in it: The story builds to his reemergence from retirement, then sidelines him again almost immediately.
On a philosophical level, I guess I was initially relieved that the movie wasn’t as much of an anti-Occupy broadside as the trailers and other advance promotion had indicated. (Remember 2012, when economic inequality was considered enough of a fringe preoccupation that neither major political party would embrace it?) Instead, what we got was basically a sermon about the responsibilities of the rich to society. And that’s fine, as far as it goes. But I was still troubled by the depiction of Gotham’s underclasses (and thus, the underclasses of America) as so lawless and resentful that they would loot the homes of the wealthy when given the merest chance – and at the behest of a manipulative despot spewing pseudo-socialism. Rush Limbaugh may have foolishly claimed that “Bane” was a swipe at Bain Capital, but if the Bernie Bros had been a thing just four years earlier, you couldn’t have blamed them for feeling personally ridiculed. Superimposing the French Revolution on modern-day America just doesn’t yield a seamless fit. (Yet.)
Put me down as somebody else who thinks Anne Hathaway’s performance is the best thing in the film. But that costume does her no favors. For a movie that’s so afraid of seeming cartoony that it refuses to even call the character Catwoman, this one somehow had no regrets about putting her in an outfit that made her look like Julie Newmar’s kid sister dressed up for a costume party. Ironically, the “goggles” look of the latter-day comics would have better fit Nolan’s more naturalistic vision.
36.
I thought the movie was going for more of a cautionary tale for the underclasses rather than a swipe against them. Fresh off the Occupy and Tea Party movements, it seemed to be saying: ‘Yes, you’re justified for feeling rage against the wealthy establishment. Now here’s what can happen when you channel that rage into something even worse. In desperate times, opportunists abound.’
Hmm, seems awfully familiar.
While I agree that the Dent Act doesn’t make much sense, you are incorrect to argue that it would be unconstitutional to deny mobsters parole. The United States Supreme Court held in the Greenholtz case that, “There is no constitutional or inherent right of a convicted person to be conditionally released before the expiration of a valid sentence.” See Greenholtz v. Inmates of Nebraska Penal and Correctional Complex, 442 U.S. 1, 7 (1979). And in that same case the Supreme Court also said that, “A state may, as Nebraska has, establish a parole system, but it has no duty to do so.” Id.
Thus whatever state Gotham is in could absolutely pass a law making defendants who are convicted of engaging in organized criminal activity not eligible for parole, and that law would be constitutional.
@37/Trevor:
Point taken. Although I don’t think of the Tea Party as being an expressly anti-wealth movement. Remember, back in 2012, the response of the entire American right wing (including the Tea Party) to Occupy was to lambaste them as a bunch of lazy asses who were just jealous of people who had attained the success they deserved. And anyway, responding to the concerns of the less fortunate by cautioning them against being played for suckers seems a rather condescending tack for a major motion picture studio to take.
39.
No, the Tea Party movement wasn’t expressly anti-wealth, but there was a few shared grievances between it and the Occupy movement. I recall quite a few think pieces written about it at the time. And you can still see those similarities—again, albeit a few—in Sanders and Trump.
bguy: fair point, though I’m not sure how denying parole would so thoroughly curtail crime. The vagueness of the Dent Act remains frustrating.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The fight scenes in this are really mediocre. For a Master Martial Artist, Bruce acts like a bruiser in the first Batman/Bane fight.
Granted he uses the Rope A Dope in his second Bane fight. But its nothing special.
It’s not good. It’s got some merits: well shot, well acted, Hathaway and Oldman are great, and let’s also add that Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow remains a treat even if he’s only in the film for five minutes.
My feeling is TDKR might have been two good movies, though. Squeezed into one, there’s just too much happening and it never breathes or comes together. And yet, that said, there’s no sense that everything in it could have been stretched out. It’s 1.5 movies in one, and suffers for it.
And it suffers for losing courage at the last moment. If you’re going to kill Batman, just kill him. I can rationalize the physics, mind you; but it’s glaring that everyone wanted it both ways. The sheer balls of just killing The Bat might have made up for some of the film’s defects, or at least obscured them.
Megaduck: That still doesn’t explain how he physically got into a city with only one way into it that was guarded by cops and military.
Austin: Nope. Ghost Rider next week, Spirit of Vengeance the week after.
spencer-malley: I don’t know if you noticed, but I didn’t care that much for Batman Begins, either.
Over-Master: Actually, Bruce’s body breaking down makes sense. If you’re in good shape and stay in shape, you can handle the punishment, but if you suddenly stop working out, stop staying in shape, and stop being physically fit, all the ailments suddenly get way worse. As an example given in the movie itself, when Bruce was active as Batman, the lack of cartilage in his knee was made up for by the muscles in the legs being particularly strong, but once he stopped working out regularly, the muscles atrophied, and the lack of cartilage was a bigger issue.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
felix77: to be fair, he was eight years out of practice……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“both ninja and terrorist societies have existed in real life, while the survival of organized crime is a constant in pretty much all modern societies, aren’t you?”
I’m well aware and I’m also well aware that none of TDK movies actually take place in the real world. The Dark Knight had the mob working together, putting all there faith into one random chinese banker and eventually turning to a clearly unstable maniac out of desperation. Kind of undercuts that if the mob is basically operating unscathed in the third movie.
“Of course Bruce doesn’t like being Batman. That’s the whole point. That’s why it is a heroic sacrifice for him.”
Therefore, It makes perfect sense for him to stop once he’s achieved the tangible goal he set for himself in the previous two movie (which BTW was not “beat up purse snatchers for fifty years while the city rots from the ground up”)
“I don’t doubt Blake is a good, able man on his own terms, but there’s no way he can become the kind of vigilante Bruce was by starting with so many cards already against him”
Of course He’s not gonna be the same vigilante Bruce is, That’s the point. He’s gonna find his own niche as a vigilante when the time comes. Also whats this BS about him being too old, He’s the exact same age Bruce was when he began his LOS training. Anyways it’s a moot point because what’s important is the symbol being carried on.
krad: On the notion of curtailing crime, The Dent Act ensured Gotham was without organized crime not regular crime. You also realize Bruce was ready and willing throughout The Dark Knight to give up being Batman and pass the responsibilities onto Harvey right? Lets say this scenario had played out, Harvey wouldn’t be able to stop all street crime in Gotham City and yet Bruce was nonetheless still willing.
As for the whole city thing, You know Batman snuck into a mob bank in broad daylight through a police barricade in The Dark Knight, Right? Why can’t he get back into gotham exactly?
Quoth spencer-malley: “Why can’t he get back into gotham exactly?”
Because the bridges were all blown up — except for one that was under heavy guard and observation by Bane and his people — and the tunnels were blocked, and the water was frozen. He might have snuck in on a food convoy, I guess, but they didn’t make that clear. And that doesn’t explain how he got to Gotham in the first place. The other things you list are things he did when he was in full command of the Wayne fortune and its resources. He had bupkuss when he climbed out of prison.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I don’t have strong feelings about this movie one way or the other. Which makes commenting about it kind of an odd choice, but given how many people clearly do have strong feelings, I thought it might be refreshing. I liked the first film fine, and the second one better, but I wasn’t ecstatic about it like a lot of people were. So the third being something of a let-down didn’t really affect me much. I can’t even remember if I saw it in the theater or at home.
Probably my lack of enthusiasm was that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was more established by 2012, and I prefer their lighter tone. I’ve always been more of a Marvel fan than a DC one, and in particular I thought the No Man’s Land and Knightfall storylines were kind of overdone and silly. But hey, horses for courses. I can definitely see why long-time Batman fans might have strong opinions one way or the other, especially with so many instances of Batman on film being not quite right.
krad: It doesn’t matter if he had no money or resources, He didn’t need either when he was traveling the world in Batman Begins (I know how you feel about that movie but that doesn’t negate my point) As for the city, The answer is honestly pretty simple, He snuck past Bane’s men. He’s a trained ninja, It’s what he does.
Yeah, I hated this movie when I saw it in the theater and I haven’t rewatched it since. I agree with everything Krad said in his review, especially the “goddamn mess” part, and what John C. Bunnell has said in the comments.
The prison being just outside Gotham is just as ridiculous as how Batman’s broken back is fixed while inside said prison. I can’t be the only one to think the prison was in the same region of Asia that Batman trained with Ras in back in Batman Begins. I mean, the landscape looks exactly the same does it not? Also, why would Bane or Talia be inside a prison just outside of Gotham? That just makes no fucking sense!
@@@@@ 24:
*cough* Interstellar *cough*
“that detective ability is a core component of Batman’s character”
I think that some fans tend to make it seem like it’s a bigger part of the character than it really is. Yes Batman is a detective but he’s not Sherlock Holmes, His stories usually tend to be more action-focused, He’s a man of many talents (Ninja, Detective, Chemist, Martial Artist) and not one should be emphasized over the other. Bale’s Batman did plenty of detective work over the course of the trilogy (gathering information on the mob, tracking their marked money, reconstructing the bullet, pulling up Selina Kyle’s entire background) and to say that part of his background was neglected because he didn’t have psychic powers is really silly. Heck even in the much beloved Mask of the Phantasm, he didn’t discover the title characters identity until the very end of the movie.
Batman is not invincible, skilled yes but if he’s consistently a step ahead of everyone and is never taken by surprise at any point than he’s not very interesting to watch or read.
Interesting to note your opinion Keith, as I was also of this mind upon first viewing. I watched this film at a friend’s house some years ago, and this was my first taste of Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Trilogy” (stupid way of watching, I know, but my friend gave me a brief summary of the previous films, which I have since watched and enjoyed many times.) I found the opening hour to be relatively intriguing, as a fresh take on the Batman mythos. Until the Stock Exchange sequence… sigh. Dirt bikes? A sudden shift from day to night with a snap of the fingers? A transaction made under duress/threat of death and clearly committed with criminal intent is allowed to stand? This is a key plot point in the movie? I was also perturbed by the lack of “Batman” in the movie. Blake and Foley had more screen time than the titular character! On the other hand, I never understood the hate towards Bane’s voice. I was always able to understand him, and I have no idea why. Upon rewatching the film, placed in the context of the trilogy, it is definitely the weakest instalment, but I have somewhat softened to it a little. After some of the absolute horses**t that has come out of DC (and some of Marvel’s) comic book movies, this is one of the more mediocre ones. Still too bloody long though. It’s Batman, not Lord of the Rings. This same issue plagued Batman v Superman, you know, and the 3 hour version is far superior to the theatrical cut. I look forward to your review of BvS, Watchmen and some of the weaker MCU instalments. Keep up the great work!
Something my then-wife pointed out that was kind of interesting: When Bruce makes it out of the pit, he throws down a rope for others to use. In Talia’s flashback, she does not.
(Of course, what a rope would be doing right there is, as krad would say, left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Not sure if anyone mentioned it or not, but the beginning of your review mentions that this movie used New York and Manhattan as the stand-ins for Gotham, but they did a lot of filming in Pittsburgh as well. In particular, the scene with the football stadium being destroyed was Heinz Field, and actual members of the Pittsburgh Steelers got to be on screen. I found this highly enjoyable as a Cleveland Browns fan, because I got to watch those ugly mustard yellow seats fall into a chasm on a big silver screen. =)
#52: Actually, Batman is often referred to in the DC universe as the “World’s Greatest Detective” (even more often as the “Darknight Detective”) and accounted as equal in ability to Sherlock Holmes. Note too that for most of his history one of his primary homes has been within the pages of…wait for it…Detective Comics.
In the specific case of TDKR, the trouble is one of consistency. As you and I both noted, Bats is smart enough to research Selina Kyle – a total stranger – thoroughly. But he clearly fails to do even the slightest bit of sleuthing into “Melinda Tate”, a person whose background is critically important to both Batman and Bruce Wayne…and that out-of-character behavior turns out to be essential to the plot.
In the general case, yes, making theoretically invincible characters interesting is tricky. But it’s not all that hard to do. The Adam West Batman is a skilled sleuth but highly predictable as a strategist. The animated “Timmverse” Batman can be challenged by other genius characters (particularly Lex Luthor in the Justice League series) or brought up short by conflicts with his allies (as when the League finds out he keeps kryptonite on hand in case Superman needs taking down).
In short, well-written scripts can maintain a character’s integrity while still offering credible conflicts. The Dark Knight Rises just isn’t a well-written script.
Wow. Okay. I really liked this movie although I can see the flaws that are pointed out here. It probably is a case of things happening because this is the part of the story where they should happen (like Bruce magically teleporting back into Gotham) but somehow it “feels” right even if it doesn’t make much logical sense. To be honest, my biggest problem on that regard is that Bruce should have died when he made that first failed attempt to climb out of the prison (did no-one making it remember how hanging works?): I actually thought the first guy that tried and failed was dead until Bruce did the same thing.
I can kind of buy Bruce withdrawing from the world because it is portrayed as delayed grief at Rachel’s death. Once the initial crisis of stopping the Joker and Two-Face was over, it would perhaps be easy to wallow in ennui, and build her up in his mind as this pure shining future that he’s never going to have (and prompting Alfred to very belatedly realise that he might have made a mistake in not telling Bruce that he lost that future long before Rachel was killed). I guess that’s why Selena interrupting his self-imposed exile is enough to rouse him a bit.
I also really liked Bane, who was an imposing villain and whose calm tone was a nice juxtaposition. I wasn’t bothered by the race issue, which only seems to bother some people if the actor’s white. (Or is it just that that’s the only time you can complain without being branded a racist?) I did not see the Talia twist coming until just before she said it, but at that point I was “Woah.”
And I pinched the “Robin” reveal for a Tomorrow People US story, although I might have misquoted it. Don’t remember Christopher Judge being in it at all though…
@56/John: “Note too that for most of his history one of his primary homes has been within the pages of…wait for it…Detective Comics.”
More like all of his history, isn’t it? After all, he debuted in Detective Comics #27 and didn’t get his own self-titled series until nearly a year later. Has there ever been a time when Batman, or at least a Batman-family character like Batwoman, wasn’t appearing in Detective Comics?
“The rest of your reasons didn’t really interest me”
Well, then we’re off to a flawed discussion in the first place. There can’t be a satisfying discussion if one of the parts just isn’t interested on the points the other part makes. Normally that’s a sign of just wanting to hear what one wanted to hear in the first place.
“These movies are not realistic, they have never been that way.”
No, but when you aim to be ‘more grounded’ as you put it yourself, there’s a breaking point at some point of the trip. The first two movies don’t quite get there, but this one does. It’s as simple as that, really, and worst of all, in a way that contradicts both itself as a movie and some of the points the previous movies had been trying to make, maybe because Nolan didn’t want to keep making these movies in the first place and so much had to be changed from the original plans.
“You also lose points by bringing up Justice League, a movie more flawed than Rises could ever hope to be as a positive.”
First of all, this isn’t a competition or a ‘I’m smarter and have better taste than you’ contest. There’s no ‘points’ to be earned, something that should be quite obvious when we’re dealing with a series of reviews that don’t even resort to ranking by points in the first place. Flawed as it is, Justice League still does a few things better with Batman’s character than this movie does. Just because one movie is technically overall better or worse than another, it doesn’t mean it automatically loses in all comparisons to said other movie. That’s a very black and white view.
“Good thing he’s not going out as Batman right away and has plenty of time to learn considering Gotham is in a state of peace now”
See my other points above.
“Their you Issues with the movie, not actual objective flaws.”
I wouldn’t be stating them as flaws if I didn’t believe they were objective flaws. I’m sure you feel the same way about yours, and so, while I discuss your points, I’m not trying to say they are all just in your head.
“For a movie that’s so afraid of seeming cartoony that it refuses to even call the character Catwoman”
They call her ‘The Cat’, though, which is the name the character used in her very first appearance. I don’t mind that too much. If we were really nitpicky as others would say, we’d already have pointed out the weird name changes of Roland to John Daggett, or Holly Robinson not being named Holly Robinson, or Bane not using Venom, which are overall minor details as long as the characters’ core essence is kept.
“Anyways it’s a moot point because what’s important is the symbol being carried on.”
No, definitely, the man carrying on the symbol matters too. If the man fails compared to the man before him, the symbol inevitably will deteriorate in its effectiveness. This movie even tries very hard to make a point on symbols losing power if the men fueling them aren’t or really weren’t up to the task.
“He didn’t need either when he was traveling the world in Batman Begins”
When he was traveling there was getting into Third World countries, often known for having far laxer immigration standards, wider unwatched borders, and more unchecked state corruption to take advantage from if you want to sneak in. Getting into the United States of America illegally isn’t quite that easy, and although it’s certainly not impossible, as any Trump supporter will happily tell us over and over, it’s still not the same thing. Just saying.
“As for the city, The answer is honestly pretty simple, He snuck past Bane’s men. He’s a trained ninja, It’s what he does.”
Ninja still can’t fly above blown up bridges last time I checked.
@58/cap-mjb:
“I did not see the Talia twist coming until just before she said it, but at that point I was ‘Woah.’”
Sounds like you were lucky enough to have missed that leaked photo from an early day of outdoor shooting that showed Cotillard in a distinctly Talia-like outfit. That got a lot of us wondering. Even Batman-on-film.com, which normally strove to stay in the good graces of Warner Brothers by tamping down potential spoilers, laid its bets that “Miranda Tate” was actually Talia. In fact, the whole thing was so out in the open and seemingly clumsy that I assumed it was a misdirect: Weeks before the movie opened, I was predicting the big reveal would be that TDKR’s “Selina Kyle” was a fake identity for Talia. Imagine my reaction when I finally saw the thing, and the twist was just what so many fanboys and -girls had been expecting all along.
That reveal struck me as a rare case of Nolan doing fanservice at the expense of the general audience. If you weren’t familiar with the comics, how would you feel to learn that an entire film trilogy had been leading to the grand revelation that Ra’s al Ghul had a daughter who was determined to carry on his work? Seems fairly anti-climactic to me.
And while I’m on the subject of Ra’s, can we really be sure that his appearance in TDKR is just a hallucination? Batman Begins was pretty crafty about leaving open the possibility that he might indeed be immortal. (Notice his reaction when Bruce says it’s just a cheap parlor trick: He merely nods slightly, as if to say, “As you wish.”) The supposed hallucination gives Bruce backstory he couldn’t have gotten anywhere else – backstory Talia later builds upon and clarifies. Pretty good guessing on the part of Bruce’s subconscious if that’s all it was.
Have to admit that I didn’t see the Talia thing coming either; but I don’t think I’d ever encountered the character before during the few years when I was reading Batman comics.
“Sure, Batman would have to cooperate less with the GPD thanks to his taking the rap for Two-Face’s crimes, but why would that translate to him hanging up the cowl?”
It was pretty clear in RISES that Bruce hung up the cowl because he physically couldn’t do it anymore. Remember, when we first see him in RISES, he’s frail and walking with a cane. My own interpretation is that he DIDN’T quit immediately after TDK, he tried to keep going for a little while, but the wear and tear, possibly from confrontations with the Gotham PD, eventually got to be too much for Bruce. The loss of Rachel is what sparked his loss of will to continue, but the physical toll is what finally made him retreat into seclusion.
@60/OverMaster:
“They call her ‘The Cat’, though, which is the name the character used in her very first appearance. I don’t mind that too much. If we were really nitpicky as others would say, we’d already have pointed out the weird name changes of Roland to John Daggett, or Holly Robinson not being named Holly Robinson, or Bane not using Venom, which are overall minor details as long as the characters’ core essence is kept.”
Well, she’s referred to as a “cat” burglar in one newspaper headline seen on a Batcave computer screen. Nobody in the movie refers to her as anything but Selina Kyle. And when Nolan was interviewed buy a journalist who mentioned Catwoman being in the film, Nolan quickly corrected him, “Selina Kyle.” That seemed going a little far to distance the character in the film from her progenitors in comics and other media. Factor in the lack of a single pet cat (an attribute of every other incarnation of Catwoman I can remember) and the silly split-the-difference gambit of having her “ears” be the points of her goggles when pushed back, and I’d say there’s more to legitimately kvetch about here than Daggett having a different first name.
@61/Stephen Schneider: I’ve possibly got worse as the years have gone on but I’m still not really enough of the in-crowd to hang around spoiler discussions analysing photos. And if I’d seen the photo, I don’t think I’d have known enough about Talia other than the fact she existed to think anything of it.
I don’t think it’s fair to say the entire film trilogy was leading up to the revelation that Ra’s al Ghul had a daughter. For a start, the middle film in the trilogy has nothing to do with the League of Shadows plotline. It’s simply the final twist of this particular movie. Despite knowing that Ra’s had a daughter in the comics, I followed the same false lead as Batman and assumed that Bane was the child we’d been told about. We already knew that Ra’s offspring was driving things, but that moment was a real lurch of “Oh, it’s her” for me.
@24 – “I don’t know how anyone can walk out of a Nolan movie and not be impressed by his technical prowess. He makes gorgeous, well-acted, well-shot movies. I haven’t seen a bad Nolan movie yet.” – Couldn’t agree more with you. Inception (another movie I couldn’t leave in the end and started from the beginning which nearly never happens but twice with Nolan) and Interstellar left me at awe about the higher grounds of motion picture that Nolan achieved.
Quote from Spielberg – “Spielberg, who later said in an interview with Variety, “Knowing and respecting that Chris [Nolan] is one of the world’s most imaginative filmmakers”…
While I can’t argue to much with certain posts here concerning how he got poor, 90% of police force, and so on, I agree though with @13 that it looks like you try to much to dish the movie. There are some questions about certain elements, and I agree that Bale had no chemistry with fem actors, though that’s not what is needed for Batman. Remember Keaton had zero chemistry with Kim Basinger, Keaton zero with Michelle Pfeifer… need I go on?
Let me quote a critic from Wiki – “This is the problem when you’re an exceptional, visionary filmmaker. When you give people something extraordinary, they expect it every time. Anything short of that feels like a letdown”
So I rather agree with @13 final thoughts, though Krad, you still rock with your reviews! Thanks a lot I’m still waiting every weak.
Is it less than Dark Knight? Yes. Is it less then above mentioned movies? Yes. Is it in general a great ride? A better one than Burton or Schumacher or whoever gave us? Hell Yes! (As if they don’t have some plotholes and letdowns…)
@26 – about your thoughts of Nolan not giving us the world’s greatest detective, I agree and it is hillarious – “World’s Greatest Detective my foot. No wonder Nolan didn’t want to use Riddler. This Batman’s solution would be to check Google for the solutions to any clues.”
@27 – Man, Spencer you’re great -“To say that Bruce retiring as Batman goes against the character more than him outright murdering people is ridiculous just like saying Batman Forever, a movie where Bruce is willing to quit because he wants to get laid by Nicole Kidman is somehow more faithful to the character.” Hillarious!!!
first critic – he’s no Latin… really? those re your problems with the movie? Cops not being shaven after 3 months? It looks like you’re grasping with all your might to look down upon this movie. So the way I see it, as you guys obviously don’t compare it to other comic book or batman flicks, you guys are just upset that it is not what you wanted as THE interpretation of the Bat world, so just because you like your Batman in whole to be different, doesn’t mean that as a movie it stinked. All of your critics, even the right ones (IMHO), are not proportional, making this review and followers not objective enough to review it well enough as you are too subjective about your personal preferences about the bat.
@66/Schwartz: “I agree that Bale had no chemistry with fem actors, though that’s not what is needed for Batman. Remember Keaton had zero chemistry with Kim Basinger, Keaton zero with Michelle Pfeifer… need I go on?”
“Is it in general a great ride? A better one than Burton or Schumacher or whoever gave us? Hell Yes!”
Don’t you see how you’re contradicting yourself here? First you say that it was unnecessary for the Nolan films to try to do better than past films, then you say that their improvement on past films is the very thing that makes them worthwhile.
I’m also in the ‘no strong feelings’ camp of this movie – I remember being frustrated with some of the things others have mentioned, such as 1)how does a single stock transaction bankrupt him (and it seems like there could be some better fraud proofing there given when it happened), 2)how does he get back to Gotham and 3)how does his back heal,exactly?
So while this doesn’t ruin the movie for me, it keeps it from being great. I don’t so much mind the idea that this incarnation of Batman eventually hangs up his cowl but as others have mentioned, it just seems to happen with no real explanation. What evidence does he have that Selina is good, deep down (and honestly, I find her excuse about how she has a record so she can never rise above that to be a bit self serving)? Why is the city, who in the previous movie had a moral triumph, so quick to turn on Dent and resort to pillaging and looting because some hostage taker in a mask said so (even if he’s technically right), even if there is something to be said about wealth inequality? Why believe the guy literally holding your city hostage and having set free violent criminals as if he actually gives a crap about the little person?
That said there are definitely some positives. I love Anne Hathaway’s Selina and how her character flits from helpless (an act on the character’s part) to elegant to lethal. I actually do like the portrayal of Bane here (and had no issues with the voice). I’ve always had a soft spot for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, so I like the Blake/Robin spin. I get some retroactive amusement at Ben Mendelssohn once again choking on his aspirations and having bad luck against a guy in a mask. I love Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow so I’m glad they brought him back for a cameo.
Although in full disclosure, we started watching it last night and after about an hour and a half I realized we hadn’t even gotten to the football stadium part so we paused it and went to bed. I felt similar fatigue with the Dark Knight as well. Of all three Nolan movies, I think Batman Begins is probably my favorite – it’s the one that seems to drag the least.
I haven’t re-watched this, but I remember that its politics were badly muddled. The kangaroo courts and executions of wealthy folks were likely meant to mirror the Occupy movement at the time. The production tried to film an actual march across a bridge and were denied permission. But it seemed to turn into the Reign of Terror from the French Revolution when depicted in the movie. This was in line with Frank Miller’s odious comments about Occupiers in Portland.
Considering that vigilantes are a right-wing phenomenon and our hero is a former billionaire, but still rich by ordinary standards, the political commentary here is beyond hopelessly confused. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was intended as a condemnation of leftist politics. Or a “solitary rich person can save us” message.
Side thought: since I’m currently watching the Torchwood season 1 marathon on Twitch, reminded me of the very last Torchwood series, the one set in the US. That was another instance of Brits attempting to comment on American politics (think it was anti-Tea Party rhetoric in that one) that was also far out of its depth. It was embarrassing.
“There can’t be a satisfying discussion if one of the parts just isn’t interested on the points the other part makes”.
You know what, Fair Enough. I should have worded differently. I felt my statement about Nolan’s world not being as strictly realistic as many have claimed to be covered the rest of your complaints quite nicely. Is a terrorist taking over the city of Gotham really that much more unbelievable than anything Joker or Ras did in the previous two films? Is Bruce getting a vertebrae realigned (his back wasn’t broken) more unbelievable than Harvey being able to function with half his face burned off? There seems to be a real double standard for a lot of these supposed criticisms. On a side-note, Bruce didn’t “magically escape” the nuclear explosion or whatever. It was a usual Nolan editing trick, It cuts from Bruce to the bomb countdown but there’s no evidence he was actually in the main body of the Bat when we cut back to the clock especially when we hear about the autopilot.
You also didn’t really go in depth with some of your points like how does the movie try and deconstruct Batman but get cold feet? It shows that it had a negative effect on Bruces body but it never at any point tries to say that being Batman was a bad idea. If anything The Dark Knight deconstructed and showed the negative consequences of being Batman a lot more than this movie did.
, “in a way that contradicts both itself as a movie and some of the points the previous movies had been trying to make”
And what exactly are these contradictions? The movie not beginning with Batman pointlessly being chased by the police is not a contradiction nor is Bruce desiring a life beyond being Batman. Bruce finding himself in Rises is about him overcoming his death wish which is exemplified by him living a peaceful life at the end, not about him being Batman forever. Being Batman is not a lifelong vocation to Bruce in this series, It is and always has been a means to an end. Him discovering the will to be Batman again to save his city one last time is not a contradiction. Hell, His entire mission statement going back to Begins was to inspire the people of Gotham to better their city on their own so the fact that he leaves them after having sacrificed his other persona to create an enduring symbol completes that statement
Again what are these so-called contradictions?.
“Justice League still does a few things better with Batman’s character than this movie does”.
By all means, Do tell.
“See my other points above”.
I’ve already covered them. Your point depends on Blake going out the exact same night as he gets the Batman gear and that’s in no way implied by the ending of the movie.
“No, definitely, the man carrying on the symbol matters too”.
Absolutely and the ending of the movie in no way implies or shows Blake as being incapable of carrying on the symbol of Batman, The important thing to consider is that his journey is just beginning, he’s not a fully formed hero yet.
“Ninja still can’t fly above blown up bridges last time I checked”.
They can still sneak into food trucks like the marines did.
. “But he clearly fails to do even the slightest bit of sleuthing into “Melinda Tate”, a person whose background is critically important to both Batman and Bruce Wayne…and that out-of-character behavior turns out to be essential to the plot”.
Why would he need to? Miranda Tate had been a member of the WE board for years leading up to TDKR and had approval from both Lucius and Alfred. You don’t actually think secret member of the LOS would show up in a background check do you?
(after reading @68+@69)…Ok… yes the political theme and the way he bankrupted was poorly handled. I never said those were the better parts of the movie. That was not well handled by Nolan. Now the way I see it (and that’s also answering to you CLB@67, as you quoted me but needlessly twisted my words, as I never said those things you mentioned I said) , comic book adaptations/superhero movies were mostly a huge dissapointment. We got used to low standards. There some exceptions (with some Spidey and maybe a X-men flick) but even them exceptions had some real letdowns. My bad with this review and negative comments as is my bad with the DK review and comments is that it is not proportional. Because you have to take into consideration that it is a comic book adaptation/superhero flick, and as such, take a deep breath, and try to run through all others, and then tell me if it isn’t still higher marked than most others (not all, I agree, not all). It is as if with the other movies you flip over the usual bad and just remark the real bad, but with this movie you take a microscope to find what’s wrong (cops not being shaved being an example)
CLB, about my so called contradiction, I’ll explain – I didn’t argue the actual remark about Bale’s zero chemistry. I agree, but as it is an example of the few bad things in this movie, while I compare it with all other Bat flicks, then I see it this way – all the good things in Nolan’s run are way beyond what the others showed us, while the bad things in his movie (with some I agree) are at least not lower than what we already saw in other director’s versions. So to sum it up in my opinion, with his achievements he let’s the others eat some dust, while with the negative sides of the movies (there always are also some negative sides you know) he at least didn’t get lower than his predecessors (which is what I meant with zero chemistry seen in former bat flicks, but still being a better ride then those because of the good parts).
Now, the way I see it, as Nolan wanted a beginning, a middle and an end (and from what I remember Krad, he did want to make a third, but with the Joker, but as the actor passed away his plans got screwed, and he thought of backing away – so he actually wanted a finale in the first place). To make an end to Bruce’s run as the bat is unlike comics maybe, but as mentioned above it is logical in movie franchise (even with the exceptions, it is a logical choice)
I think of it like that – after the strong emotional beginning in the 1st, making out Bruce’s motives, he wanted for Bruce a catharsis. For a catharsis it has to end, and for it to end that way Bruce needs to hang the mantle. Another catharsis is for him to end with a girl, as he lost his former unreturned love. But even logically – he was a great warrior, but age takes it’s toll, and he nearly got crippled by a younger, stronger thug. So this time he prevailed. But since crime fighting is mostly actual fighting, it would be inevitable, that as time progressed he would be less successful (showing again Nolan’s close to reality version of the bat, which I admire, if only as being original unlike Marvel). That’s also what Alfred told him in this movie. But as Bruce is no coward, as his spirit is strong as ever (as mentioned by Bane as he wondered which would break first, his body or spirit), but he had to realise after being broken, that with a fighting spirit alone you can’t win a fight if the body doesn’t back you up. Yes this time he made it barely, but though his courage, Bruce is no fool. And that’s why there was a need in the first place to make him retire. because the bat would never retire just because there is with time a greater possibilty for him to die. Of course. That’s why this wasn’t the main reason, just the last push to make it finale.
So his reason? And that answers to some remarks concerning how Gotham all of a sudden became crimeless, it isn’t that Gotham became crimeless after the second movie, it is that mobs don’t control any more the politics and police like in the first movie, and now it is up to the city to stay in balance, which is – yes there is crime, but we will from now on fight it. Bruce is no fool, he can never achieve more. There was always crime and will be, but he saw that the system which should take responsibility is rotten (as the mob boss showed him in the 1st movie), and he tried to shake it up enough for a normal city balance. (I mean come on he’s no god, he can’t take crime out forever.) And for all those sceptics about strict laws doing the job, just look at what Juliani did with New York in his run.
After being broken he saw in tv, that the system is being crippled and taken hostage, that the citizens lost hope in order, so he came back for the same reason he took the mantle, to return balance to the city. Once he did that he returned to the same conclussion, my job is finished, especially since I’m physically walking the way down.
Yes, it is badly done, that Nolan’s goal of catharsis for the bat, he didn’t deliver what concerns his love interest. There was no chemistry, and worse Catwoman didn’t show high values for Bruce to love. But… you see Kyle represents gotham’s citizen’s values as they were at this time – dissapointed in the influental citizens, and therefor taking things by force. But she turned. And she did try a clean start, that’s her motive to begin with. And unlike her friend (the young girl) she had more sympathy as she stopped seing things in black and white (rich people are bad and it is ok to steal from them). She became confused as she first saw Bruce as a rich spoilt man, but then she saw that he cares. So she changed for the good. No, she didn’t become this noble selfsacrificing person like Bruce, but that would be to cliche and unlike Nolan. Bruce maybe saw her as an example of Gotham. They can change for the better. And that’s what he always wanted for Gotham, so that’s enough for himself as a love interest (you know she did save his life in the end, and cared for him, and she’s pretty, so it isn’t such a weird conclusion for them to couple).
@69/Sunspear: “Considering that vigilantes are a right-wing phenomenon”
I’ve never understood that perception, considering that comic-book superheroes have a long history of symbolizing liberal and progressive causes. The early Superman comics were heavy on social activism, with Superman taking on war profiteers and corrupt politicians and terrible slum conditions and unsafe cars and basically being a radical social reformer (although his tactics were a rather crude wish-fulfillment fantasy of being able to bring about such changes through force and bullying). The post-WWII Superman radio series wore its liberalism on its sleeve and constantly had Superman battle racial and religious bigots, anti-immigrant movements, aspiring fascists, and the like. Marvel creators like Lee and Kirby tended to be progressive as well, making statements against racism and intolerance through the X-Men and pioneering diverse characters like Black Panther and Luke Cage (however clumsily). It’s true there have been some comics creators whose politics tended more to the right, like the Objectivist Steve Ditko, the born-again Al Hartley, and whatever Frank Miller has become these days, but the foundations of the superhero-comics genre are primarily in liberal values.
Maybe in real life, vigilantes tend to be more conservative, authoritarian types, but fictional superheroes have always been something more than mere vigilantes. For one thing, they’re often as much rescue workers as crimefighters, so what they do is about saving lives, not just beating up bad guys. For another thing, even when they’re portrayed as members of the rich elite, they’re generally the creation of working-class people who are imagining what they would do with unlimited resources and power, or arguing that such resources should be used for the good of all instead of merely for the accumulation of greater wealth.
@13:
“I don’t think I have ever seen such a critically acclaimed movie have such a devout minority of people who will go to the grave making such a big deal out of it’s minor flaws.”
I’m pretty sure The Last Jedi has this beat, now.
@35:
“that’s a makeup and continuity issue (or, looked at another way, perhaps a budget issue) on the production side.”
There’s no budget issue. A well planned and executed production (which Nolan no doubt runs), would have had the actors playing the police officers brow the beards out for a couple of weeks before production starts and augmented it with very inexpensive makeup, then shoot that scene first. There’s no additional expense to this. Not on the scale of a $150M blockbuster, at least.
It was just not thought through. They missed it.
@75/Anthony Pero: I don’t think I’d agree with that comparison. The objections to The Dark Knight Rises are about the basic structural and logic flaws in its storytelling. The objections to The Last Jedi are more philosophical — some people don’t like the way the film challenges and deconstructs their assumptions (although that’s exactly what I love about it). I don’t think I’ve heard people object to TLJ on the same plot-logic and structural grounds that underlie the criticisms of TDKR, and I don’t think I’ve heard people object to TDKR on the same ideological or “wreck my childhood” grounds that often underlie the criticisms of TLJ.
I know that review aggregator sites aren’t reliable, but I’m surprised to see that TDKR is rated so highly on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. I’d thought there was more of a consensus that it was a seriously flawed and disappointing conclusion to the trilogy. Certainly it has merits — it’s still better than most DC superhero movies, and much better than any DCEU movie other than Wonder Woman — but it’s still the weakest of the Nolan trilogy, which is an especially regrettable thing to say about the climax and the most ambitious installment of said trilogy.
@76. Just stop with that about TLJ, just because you like it does not mean you have to denigrate the people who don’t. That is just lazy crit; we all know there were some nutters who didn’t like it because of sexism and so on, but trying to lump everyone else in with them is just bad. It has a lot of structural problems as a movie, not least because it is three movies jammed together and it hops between those three movies at random, with virtually no real linking between the three movies. The three movies don’t even connect particularly well with their own scenes. The themes are a mess, and continuity is poor even by Star Wars standards. It was a hot mess.
Just to echo Keith’s comments from Friday (@34), the tone of this discussion still seems to be more combative than usual, so please keep our commenting guidelines in mind and try to keep things civil, and don’t take disagreements personally (or make them personal.)
@69 – I think you hit on the head what makes me a little uncomfortable about the movie (or at least unclear as to what the message is supposed to be). While I doubt I’m as far left as the majority of the readership here, I do think there’s a lot more we should be doing regarding worker’s rights, etc. However, this does not mean I’m in favor of things like looting/pillaging/raping (pretty sure one of the scenes during Bane’s monologue showed a woman getting dragged away for whatever knows what)/killing the rich in some kind of ‘now it’s everybody’s home!’ fantasy which has just traded one form of oppression (of the strong/armed) over the other. And so the idea that these are the two options just bugs me. Granted, I get that in some ways that’s the point – Bane is a terrorist and that’s how terrorists and radical groups operate. But at the same time it did seem like a bit of a cheap shot at the political stuff going on at the time.
@75/Anthony Pero -ha :)
@76/CLB – I don’t know about that. I have definitely seen complaints about the structure of the Canto Bight arc, Holdo/the mutiny, and the general way Hyperspace/space battle logistics are used for plotting and pacing. And I think those are valid complaints, even outside of how one might feel about their ‘childhood’. Yes, there’s a lot of super vocal nerdrage (and alt right BS) out there but that doesn’t mean there isn’t other criticism about the movie out there which focuses on these exact same things.
And even looking at the philosophical objections, some of the other criticisms I’ve seen are not so much what they did with Luke’s character, but how they did it – that so much of it (and the wider galactic conflict) was left to backstory, behind the scenes, and not that there wasn’t enough focus on what would have led to the change in a way viewers could believe it or be interested in it.
It’s not that people can’t handle something that challenges their assumptions, but if you’re going to do that, you have to do it in a way that makes sense and is a satisfying story and doesn’t come off as just being subversive for edginess’s sake.
FWIW I actually think TLJ is a better and more interesting movie than TFA but still think it had room for improvements, story wise. But I also dislike the story direction TFA chose to take the entire franchise and that, I admit, IS completely subjective and so I try to separate that from evaluating the way it was executed. It also depends on what (and I’m not even sure how I would answer this) you think the essence of Star Wars is. Is it a setting? A certain tone? A certain theme? etc… Probably something different for everybody :)
@79/Lisamarie: I don’t want to get into a debate about TLJ in a Batman thread. My point was simply that it didn’t seem to me that the two films were being criticized for the same reasons, so that likening one to the other seems like a questionable analogy.
And really, my main point was to dispute the characterization of TDKR’s flaws as “minor.” There are some really, really glaring flaws in this film, things that make no damn sense whatsoever and can be legitimately criticized as such. That doesn’t mean the film doesn’t have merits too — it certainly does — but those merits don’t erase the magnitude of the things about it that just don’t work, like the general nonsense of the stock market sequence or the clumsiness and logistical absurdity of the cops being trapped underground for months. Those are much more than “minor” flaws. The Dark Knight had minor flaws. The Dark Knight Rises has massive flaws that keep it from being great even though it’s good in a number of ways.
Yeah, I’m just saying that I think there are similar reasons people have criticized TLJ, although magnitude is possibly up for debate. For me at least, the ‘slow Hyperspace chase’ is at least as much of a glaring error in terms of logistics. But I also enjoy TLJ quite a bit more than TDKR so you may be right there. My gut feel is about the same as yours but I part of it might also depend on how much a person is willing to forgive in a movie. There are some movies I love that I know don’t hold up to any close scrutiny whatsoever :) It’s possible tone comes into it – I am probably willing to forgive a bit more in a Star Wars movie than I am in the Nolan Batman movies since (while they certainly have their share of over the top things) they seem to present themselves in a more ‘grounded’ way.
My husband and I were joking that maybe there were razors and mirrors in those food/water boxes that were being snuck to the cops underground ;)
One other thing that occurred to us as we were watching it – is the Batcave still under Wayne Manor? Does that mean that it’s right under the boys’ home? I guess Blake/Robin will have a steady stream of apprentices if needed!
Just to clarify what I wrote, I wasn’t comparing the quality of the criticism of this movie with the internet’s criticism of TLJ. I was saying that the disparity between the critical love and fans nitpicking the movie to death is far greater in TLJ than TDKR. I specifically quoted what I was responding to.
@82/Anthony: Well, it’s really what you were responding to that I had an issue with, so I guess I shouldn’t have directed my reply at your comment — sorry about that. I was questioning @13/spencer’s characterization of TDKR’s flaws as “minor,” the implication that the criticisms of TDKR were petty and exaggerated. I don’t think that’s the case at all.
I don’t think TLJ has any major structural issues; its ideas and its story are clearly told, even if what is happening is often ridiculous. For example, the bomber run and the slow-mo spaceship chase that people can leave and come back to are absurd–but they are absurdities that fit Star Wars, because Star Wars has always been about visual and dramatic logic rather than realism. Even if they do not fit the laws of physics, they make visual and dramatic sense. All of the core Star Wars movies are like this really–even the prequels make basic dramatic sense.
Nolan’s films face a problem that Star Wars doesn’t: they are more grounded in the ‘real world.’ Even the ridiculous stuff is cloaked in a way to make it seem like it is supposed to be plausible in our world. I remember all the hype about the real-world influences and inspirations for stuff like Batman’s cloak and the Batmobile; this appeal to realism is something they were actively striving for. So there is more friction when the larger real-world implications of Nolan’s take on organized crime, or the ability of police to survive underground, or Bane’s ability to run this anarchic city for months, rub up against reality. It sticks out more.
That might not be a problem if the movie was a bit more clear about what it was trying to say. It’s pretty muddled though. They were consciously reaching for both Occupy Wall Street and the French Revolution; I don’t think that Nolan was saying anything very coherent here. The Dark Knight climaxed with the Joker posing a moral conundrum to fearful ordinary citizens and criminals, and they passed his test without Batman’s interference. Put to the test in Bane’s anarchy though they fail; I guess because there is no Batman to inspire them to be good? What is the point here?
And the climactic image here is of Batman leading an army of police to beat the criminal underclass, like the worst parodies of the character. At a more personal level, I think what I can make out of what Nolan was trying to say about Occupy Wall Street was pretty dumb at the time, and has been proven pretty dumb in retrospect. I find what he has to say about Batman overall pretty authoritarian and distasteful.
“Ninja still can’t fly above blown up bridges last time I checked”
Yeah, I’m pretty sure Batman can’t fly. What’s he going to do, stretch out his cape and glide from building to building? Ridiculous :)
The awfulness of the second half could have been fixed if they’d stuck closer to No Man’s Land: the police haven’t been locked up underground by Bane, they’ve been withdrawn from Gotham (or at least from a bit of it, whatever the equivalent of Manhattan is) because after Bane’s various attacks the rich folks in the county want to cut their losses, cut their taxes, and leave the disaster area and the poors to rot, New Orleans style. Then you don’t have Batman on the side of the police; you have the police (or some of them) eventually sneaking back on to Gothhattan Island against orders, breaking the law to protect the public: effectively on Batman’s side.
And that explains why Gothhattan undergoes a revolution; because they have a legitimate grudge! They’ve been left to die!
@84/Colin R: “The Dark Knight climaxed with the Joker posing a moral conundrum to fearful ordinary citizens and criminals, and they passed his test without Batman’s interference. Put to the test in Bane’s anarchy though they fail; I guess because there is no Batman to inspire them to be good? What is the point here?”
You’ve hit it on the nose. The first two films are the story of the redemption of Gotham City (or just Gotham, I guess — the use of the “City” part seems to have fallen out of favor), but the third film cavalierly tears it all down and ignores the progress the city made in the first two films. Indeed, the whole storyline is basically going backward, rehashing the enemy and conflict of the first film.
Also, for a film released in 2012, having a Catholic priest looking after a group of small children was a bit insensitive. Especially when Blake tells them “stick with Father [whatever]! You’ll be safe!” I could hear everyone in the cinema thinking “er, actually, they’d probably be safer with Bane…”
I don’t trust priests any *more* than the average person simply on account of them being priests, but I don’t trust them (as a group) any less, either (nor do I think it is fair to say they are more likely to do harm) – given the sobering statistics out there about ‘passing the trash’ and cover ups even in secular schools. It’s awful, but as a society we just don’t have a great track record when it comes to this. Incrementally I think we’re getting better/more transparent about it though.
FWIW it took me several viewings to even realize the character was supposed to be a priest, since I didn’t hear him addressed as ‘Father’ the first time I watched it.
I guess there is a message I can cobble together out of our Batman trilogy–that Gotham needs a savior, but consumes its heroes.
Thomas Wayne attempts to save Gotham as an industrialist and philanthropist, but is killed by a common criminal. Money and good will alone don’t do the trick.
Bruce Wayne creates Batman as a response, to inspire fear in criminals. This fear causes escalation rather than solving the problem.
A fictional portrait of Harvey Dent is created to take Batman’s place–a beacon of justice that I guess, inspires people to be less criminal and the police to be less corrupt??
But both fictional heroes and men are vulnerable to time and exposure; Bane breaks Batman and casts down the idol of Harvey Dent.
Batman is forced to respond by basically turning himself into a myth rather than a person–anyone with need and will can take up the mantle of Batman. This is what ultimately saves Gotham.
This almost works; I think the weakness is that the gap between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t quite work. It’s a little difficult to believe that the only thing that can inspire Gotham to occasionally pull itself out of its criminal funks is the occasional surrender of Good Men like Thomas Wayne and Harvey Dent. If Batman was to blame for the escalation that led to the Joker, it’s also difficult to figure out why a line of Batmen would be a good thing. And besides the fact that it’s clunky, I also think it’s sort of a gross conception–it would mean the people of Gotham don’t really have any agency; only their saviors do.
@89
As long as they are wearing million dollar hi-tech armour and not hockey pads, yeah; I guess.
Haha, of course.
@74. CLC: “the foundations of the superhero-comics genre are primarily in liberal values”
@89. Colin R: “…it’s sort of a gross conception–it would mean the people of Gotham don’t really have any agency; only their saviors do.”
The crux of it is that comics borrowed/appropriated the Ubermensch/Overman fantasy created by Nietzsche. From a wiki: ” if God does not exist, thus objective morality and inherent value are not possible since there is no ultimate being that exists to create morality and value in the first place.” Superheroes and the many versions of gods and cosmic entities created by people like Lee and Kirby are these ultimate beings.
Two poor Jewish kids from Cleveland respond to injustice (in the case of one of them, a father being killed during a robbery) by creating a power fantasy figure who is bulletproof and flies by will alone. The use of will to power by so many characters in SF and comics last century is staggering. From John Carter teleporting to Mars to the Green Lanterns projecting energy thru force of will. One of the interesting themes in Adam Roberts’ recent history of SF traces this reliance on will.
These power fantasies have been used for social justice causes (unfortunately loaded phrase these days), but ultimately they are stories of savior figures, of moral paragons who are better than the rest of us. That’s the problem of this movie. It doesn’t convince us why Batman is an aspirational figure. It just assumes and asks us to assume that he is.
@76 “I’d thought there was more of a consensus that it was a seriously flawed and disappointing conclusion to the trilogy”.
It might seem that way because of an extremely vocal minority but it’s pretty far from the popular opinion. Ask any casual audience member and they’ll say it’s a worthy sequel to TDK or even a close second in the trilogy. I don’t mean to bring in a another Star Wars movie into this discussion but if Return of the Jedi can still be regarded as a worthy conclusion to that film series with it’s flaws so should Rises.
“other than Wonder Woman”
I don’t agree. The CGI-heavy finale of that movie is much more of a flaw than anything in Rises and Bane is a much better villain than Ludendorf, Dr Poison or Ares.
“The Dark Knight climaxed with the Joker posing a moral conundrum to fearful ordinary citizens and criminals, and they passed his test without Batman’s interference. Put to the test in Bane’s anarchy though they fail;
This comparison falls flat on it’s face because these situations are completely different in every conceivable way aside from the surface level. All the people did in the boat scenario was to not blow each other up, that’s it. They didn’t take down the Joker by doing this, They still needed Batman to save them from blown up in the end. Bane’s not interested in testing their morals, He’s leading a city-wide occupation of armed criminals to take over Gotham city. What exactly are the “ordinary citizens” supposed to do in this situation?
Really ill-conceived comparison here really.
@75 – I hated what they have done to Star Wars with ep VII and more so with Luke. It is so unoriginal to tell the same political story all over again with different names, it is an insult as a sequel. If they would insist making a new version of the original all over again I would be less dissapointed, but they not only threw away 30 years of EU, they threw away the war/political plot of the original trilogy to the dump, as they became again the rebellion/resistance against the empire/new order… Star Trek had a way of starting fresh without destroying the past, and in my opinion it worked wonderful in movie 2009. But what Disney has done? To destroy everything good in Skywalker to make Rey shine just the better is not neccessary and is….ugghhh – I don’t want to get upset over this. I prefer to move on and continue to stick to EU. So I agree with CLB that the comparison is in my opinion wrong. Yes some people are dissapointed in the addaptation itself, as they visioned it different. But as you can see in posts above, those are less the complaints here than with Disney’s SW.
The crime in Gotham taking a major nose dive after TDK always made sense to me.
Joker literally burns a mountain of organized crime bosses money and Batman gift wraps the man who was doing most of their money laundering for Gordon and the GCPD before dropping him off at the local precinct.
Mobsters with no Money to pay henchmen and no money to bribe police, politicians, judges etc.
And no money to buy drugs, guns etc. Are not very effective.
Add that to a Dent inspired police force taking the fight to them and the Dent Act making it easier to convict and keep in prison mob bosses who are being charged with financial crimes based on information gotten from everyone’s favorite money man.
Add to that debts to drug cartels and gun dealers coming due. And I can easily see the leaders of organized crime in Gotham falling over themselves to make deals to save their own skins.
And soon thereafter parole for organized crime becomes all but impossible.
There would still be crime in Gotham
But organized crime would be a thing of the past.
As for the rest of the film.
Watchable
But as many of the previous posters have pointed out lots of plot holes and some inconsistent characters make it the weakest of the trilogy.
By the way I’m taking it easier now in this thread, as in DK, at least there I felt overprotective to the Joker and the movie, but this, although in my opinion still better than the 1st, is not that close to DK. All actors were in my opinion great. Just great. I was really touched by Oldman in the last moments with the great score at the background, as he polished the batsignal and was searching the sky. The expression in his face alone was so…. I don’t have the words. I loved the “cheers” Bruce had with Alfred in the end, and that Bruce finaly, finaly listens to any advice given by Alfred concerning his private life. I also loved the expression on Blake’s face when he heard what’s to happen with Wayne Manor. Josheph is a great great Robin/Dark wing/Batman/whatever in potential. The first half was great, the end was so, so touching, but I agree with the flaws mentioned above, so it’s still just somewhat better than the first, as I think Liam is miscast and mishandled as Ra’s, he never felt threatening as the antagonist. He was better as the mentor, but you need a good antagonist in a Bat movie.
@92/Sunspear: That’s pretty much the problem I have with superhero stories. Having good superpowered beings save us and fight evil superpowered beings relegates us all to the status of children. It’s anti-emancipatory. If there really were superpowered beings with the wish to do good, I’d want them to join existing organisations like the police.
@94/The.Schwartz.be.with.you: I agree about Star Wars, but not about Star Trek. For me, the year 2009 marks a break – the first time I intensely disliked something called Star Trek. In both cases, there may be anti-emancipatory impulses at work too. The Star Trek reboot replaced a kind and thoughtful semi-military commander with an egocentric overgrown child who’s in need of a wise mentor from a different universe. And the Star Wars sequel passed up the opportunity to tell a story about rebuilding the republic in favour of another story about a cosy band of rebels in a big, evil world.
@97 – JanaJansen – What I meant was not giving marks to the movie itself but to the tryout to make a reboot without destroying the former canon chronology. They started fresh, but left all the former well alive. It’s so not original of course, but it worked taking into consideration the fans, yes those fans who stuffed you them dollars into the franchise, which made you (Disney) take up the franchise in the first place, but then disregarding COMPLETELY all that fans loved with their original cast and their adventures/chronology. Disney wanted the money and they didn’t give a crap about what they erase (30 years, 30 YEARS of novels, comics, and for what? for what? to tear down the little good that survived in the Skywalker tragedy? making Solo forgeting the force all of a sudden, the trio being split as if their being together was circumstancial without friendship? Why Disney? Why going that way? The prequels were so lousy that there were many ways for you to revive the franchise without trampling the characters to the ground not to mention most fans. I can’t forgive them)
And about the “kind and thoughtful semi-military commander” – well he was once a teenager growing up. If he would be the same as a child I would be freaked out. For him to mold into what he became is in my opinion better storytelling. But I truly understand and respect your view as a hardcore fan (which I am not)
@98/The.Schwartz.be.with.you: Oh, absolutely, he should be different as a teenager. He just shouldn’t be a self-centered jerk. I admit to being a hardcore fan, but I would dislike the film for this even if I weren’t. Basically, I hate stories that tell me that boys (for some reason they never tell this story about girls) have to go through an antisocial phase in order to grow into great men, and I dislike stories where the hero must be forced to take up a responsible position (in this case, join Starfleet).
I liked the childhood scenes in The Autobiography of James T. Kirk.
I know that you’re a hardcore Harry Potter fan, so let me add that the kids in Harry Potter are nice, competent people right from the start, when they’re eleven years old. I would never have read beyond the first book otherwise.
@99/JanaJansen – :)
I really agree with all, just a sidenote – while for a character to be “kind and thoughtful” and to be a scientist/explorer it is of course plausible to be a “nerd” (for lack of better definition right now) from the get go. But to be adventurous and becoming a militarylike commander (army characters tend to be in general more macho) and being brave, and bending the rules with confidence is naturally fitted with a more mischievous youth and sometimes aven selfcentered. the male hormone testosteron boosts your boldness, braveness and all other stereotype in a soldier/adventurer , while it also gets mostly with being a jerk.
So for our beloved James T. Kirk to have a ‘cleaner’ beginning is plausible as well of course, but I understand the psychology and therfore the natural choice of such storytelling instead. But again that’s just explaining what maybe made them go that way, and not saying if it is for the better.
back to topic – I think in retrospect, it is more important to me the aspect of good portrayed emotional driven evolving of plot/relationships, than political whimses or plotholes. If the characters are great and their engaging one another, the motives, the psychology, the emotions, if those are well done, then I’m forgiving of many other mistakes. Superhero movies are a lot about values, motives and personal evolution through tough circumstances that I look for in comics mostly, so if (and it happens so many times in comics) there are plotholes I’m more flexible. Of course I need good storytelling, and crescendo and pacing for it to work – this is after all no Dawson Kreek.
So that’s where we differ, CLB, Krad and all – I see what you mean, but the characters were so well played and interacted so well with each other with some touchy moments that are surprising in an action/superhero blockbuster that I adored.
So now that I see that it’s just a matter of personal preferences in a movie, and not a debate about facts (almost), I take a step back – CLB, Krad – you guys of course still rock. I love your comments/threads. Keep it coming
@93/spencer: “It might seem that way because of an extremely vocal minority but it’s pretty far from the popular opinion. Ask any casual audience member and they’ll say it’s a worthy sequel to TDK or even a close second in the trilogy.”
I’m not sure that’s a meaningful standard. Casual audience members just want something to kill time for a couple of hours. Casual audience members are what make Michael Bay movies successful. It takes more than a casual viewing to judge a work critically. Heck, I liked TDKR on first viewing, but on further thought, I’ve found many problems with it that undermine my appreciation. If a film is only enjoyable if you apply no thought to it beyond the immediate experience, then maybe that’s good enough for a mindless popcorn movie — but the Nolan films’ whole selling point is that they were something smarter and deeper and more sophisticated than that, something that would hold up to more thoughtful critiques. And both the first and third films in this trilogy fall short of that standard in some pretty significant ways.
“All the people did in the boat scenario was to not blow each other up, that’s it. They didn’t take down the Joker by doing this, They still needed Batman to save them from blown up in the end.”
That’s missing the point. The bomb threat was merely a means to a philosophical end. The Joker’s goal wasn’t just to kill people — it was to prove that the people of Gotham were as bad as he was, that given the chance they’d do the selfish, anarchic thing and turn on each other. And the people proved him wrong — that they wouldn’t sink to the same level as the Joker. It’s the same dynamic as The Killing Joke — the Joker tries to “prove” that he can make Gordon and Batman sink to his level, that he’s no worse than anyone else, and their real victory over him is not merely that they catch him, but that they prove him wrong, that not everyone would sink to his level and “maybe it’s just you.”
@97/Jana: “That’s pretty much the problem I have with superhero stories. Having good superpowered beings save us and fight evil superpowered beings relegates us all to the status of children. It’s anti-emancipatory. If there really were superpowered beings with the wish to do good, I’d want them to join existing organisations like the police.”
In the comics, Batman was essentially deputized by Commissioner Gordon by 1942 or so, a formal relationship with law enforcement that continued until the reboot in the ’80s. Superhero teams like the Avengers and the Justice League have often been shown to have formal relationships with the government or law enforcement; even the X-Men ran missions for government intelligence in the ’60s comics.
And I see superheroes more as inspiring ordinary people to be as heroic as they are. I’ve always been a big fan of the “normals” who are allies to the heroes — Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, Lois Lane. I love stories where they get to be heroic in their own right. And I love scenes where the normal people rise up to come to the hero’s rescue, like the train sequence in Spider-Man 2.
Besides, a lot of superheroes are just ordinary people who got lucky and gained some special advantage through an accident or from some tech or magical gizmo, something that could’ve befallen anyone. And just being random, ordinary people who accidentally got these gifts bestowed on them, their first impulse (usually, at least in the early, less cynical days of comics) was to use those gifts to help people. I think that’s a very populist message, that the average person would choose to do good if given the power to do so.
@102/CLB,
” … the average person would choose to do good if given the power to do so.”
That is a very pleasant thought. I am reminded of Plato’s story about the Ring of Gyges. And also of the TNG episode where Riker is given Q powers.
In Tolkien’s letters he says the call of the Ring upon Gandalf would be to have the power to do good, but that it would warp him into a do-gooder, a person who seeks to remake the world in his own image.
And in Serenity, Mal says something similar about the evil of trying to “make people better.”.
It’s a curiously resonant topic, given that we are very unlikely to ever be tested in such a way.
” … the average person would choose to do good if given the power to do so.”
Or, at least, would choose not to do evil. Witness the extremely low level of random murders. I’m sure that any of us could think of five or ten ways in which we could kill a random individual and get away with it. It’s motive and connection that gets you investigated and ultimately arrested. But if you just wanted to have killed someone, and it didn’t matter very much who, you could do it with impunity.
And yet people don’t.
https://www.xkcd.com/1958/
Of course, the flaw in my premise is that for every single hero character who stumbles into powers and uses them for good, there are several dozen one-shot or recurring villains who stumble into powers and use them for selfish gain or revenge or outright evil, because it’s the nature of the medium that villains have to outnumber heroes. But that’s where the heroes can make a difference by mentoring people with powers and guiding them to become heroes as well, as sidekicks or partners or teammates.
@104,
“Most people aren’t murderers” (from the link).
Let us hope it is not just because most people are too lazy. :)
@104 – it’s been a few years since I’ve read it so I don’t remember all of the intricate details/analysis, but this is basically the plot of Crime and Punishment. The main character (who is not sympathetic) basically has that realization and decides to be the aberration.
@104 I would argue most people don’t commit murder because we have a criminal justice system/prisons. If there was no possibility of getting locked up for years there would be a lot more violence in the world.
@108 History does not bear that out. We’ve seen time and again that when “Law and Order” collapses, people form into mutually protective communities and actively support each other rather than turn on them. That isn’t to say there are not violent thugs in the world, but the good people outnumber them. Remember that, always.
I find that even watching my kids (who – while the line is getting ambiguous especially with my 7 year old as he is now in school and subject to/more aware of social expectations) I feel like people are basically good (or at least not actively bad). Yes, on one hand kids/toddlers can be selfish and self-absorbed and will basically take stuff from each other, and it’s also obvious to me that so much of temperament is there from the start – but they definitely don’t go out of their way to hurt people for the sake of hurting people and generally want to be good and in good social standing and to make people happy/be loved. So maybe you could argue that social standing and relationships is its own motivator instead of punishment, or recognizing the mutual benefit of living in a stable society – but I believe in general people want to be good. And honestly, I’m not even that cynical that I think that’s a bad thing to want to be in relationships or part of a social cohort.
On the other hand, I do believe it takes active (and continuous) effort to be truly virtuous and selfless, to exhibit self control and not succumb to our vices. It’s very easy for people to get lazy (or blame others for their faults and wrongdoing because they couldn’t help themselves, and sometimes they seem to really believe that).
@102/Christopher: I knew that about Batman, but I thought it was the exception to the rule. And, as you say, it’s no longer true.
That’s a nice thought about the choices ordinary people make.
@104/ajay: Lovely comic!
@110/Lisamarie: “[…] toddlers can be selfish and self-absorbed and will basically take stuff from each other […]”. – True. But if you give them a bag of sweets, they will share them much more easily than older children do. – “but they […] generally want to […] make people happy/be loved.” – Yep, I’ve seen that with my daughters too.
I think Nolan deliberately left that ending open to interpretation. If Alfred travelled to Florence every year, sat in a café, and imagined seeing Bruce with a woman sitting in another table living a happy peaceful life, there’s no reason to think the film’s ending was any different, from his point of view. For all we know, Bruce really died in that nuclear blast, and I find that to be a valid interpretation as well.
Dark Knight Rises is definitely the most flawed of the Nolan Batman entries, but still pretty watchable. Definitely better than the Snyder entries (minus the excellent Wonder Woman). Some pacing issues, some muddled characterization, but still doable. Anne Hathaway kills it as Catwoman.
This Bane never particularly comes together, because the script never follows through on his motivations. Why is he promoting anarchy and power to the people if he’s terorrizing them? What’s his goal? Of course, his characterization is deliberately left vague so we can get the reveal that he’s simply a devoter follower/protector of Talia and her cause.
I like the notion of going back to the League of Shadows as a threat for the third film. It’s a better choice than trying to do a bigger, badder threat than the Joker. But Talia wasn’t well introduced, with a poorly defined arc and a questionable relationship with Bruce and Wayne Enterprises. Even if she felt anger over the death of her father, there’s no reason for her to suddenly take up the mantle of destroying Gotham after all these years. This cold, calculated demeanor makes zero sense.
Plus, it feels as if Nolan just wanted to find something for Marion Cotillard to do, following their work on Inception. At least, there’s a justification for using Joseph Gordon-Levitt in this one. I would have gladly watched a sequel focused on Robin, with him playing the character. When Blake charges to rescue Gordon in the hospital, Gordon-Levitt makes the sequence come alive with his physicality and a sense of urgency that none of the other cops are able to convey.
While I enjoy the prison escape sequence, I do have one question: is it even possible to repair that kind of back damage the way they did? Given how rooted in realism these movies were, I have to question this particular recovery, because it feels too miraculous, even when rooted in a comic-book flexible reality.
Plot-wise, this is a bit of a mess. Looking back on it, you can start to see Jonathan Nolan’s storytelling flaws. Having endured Westworld‘s questionable second season, I can appreciate just how much a needlessly complex plot with obscure motivations can cloud character arcs, undermining the drama. Dark Knight Rises tries too hard to cram as many characters, motivations and plot twists as it can, bringing the whole finish to a big bang finish. It’s easier for me to swallow the plot contrivances and excesses if I believe that Batman truly died at that ending.
@general conversation regarding the nature of humanity:
I personally believe in the depravity of the human condition. But actually killing someone is extremely difficult for most people, and it’s not about fear of prison.
That said, for those people who do have the capacity to kill, either through training or some difference in brain chemistry, murder is very rarely profitable, even without prison and capital punishment factored in. People tend to do what is in their own self-interest when the realize what that is. That’s the nature of depravity.
@109 “mutually protective communities ‘ as you say infers consequences. I’m talking about if there was truly no consequence.
@113-114: In my experience, most people are helpful and care for each other even if they don’t benefit from it. Actually, as far as I know, people are more helpful when there aren’t any others around who could judge their behaviour. Why would that be unless they really wanted the other person to be well?
@114 Even if there are no consequences people tend to be a communal species and prefer cooperation over coercion. I worry deeply about people who think otherwise.
@116 Counterpoint. Every internet message board that isn’t heavily moderated.
Oh, and if it isn’t obvious, but should be stated above by someone, regarding the lack of world’s greatest detective, it is easy to assume that Blake was supposed to be that next incarnation of that specific kind of batman, as is logical (though not beloved by most fans maybe) that Bruce alone couldn’t be Bruce Lee, and Einstein, and Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Gadget all together while still young enough. So Bruce was the martial artist, while Blake might more the detective sort of bat.
Oh guess I haven’t posted in here yet.
Well, I definitely agree that TDKR is the weakest of the trilogy. Far less thematically cohesive than either Begins or Dark Knight and I’d argue less entertaining as a result. The first two movies in the trilogy(while having their own issues) at least don’t try to pack in quite as many characters and plot lines in as this one does. I think this movie would have been much stronger if they dropped Talia entirely. Yes, it would have meant the whole movie revolved around the Batman/Bane dichotomy, which might have been too close to the Dark Knight thematic arc for comfort. Also with Bane representing loose anarchy and Batman representing the iron fist of the law…well – is that really what we want to see in our Batman? I really think the whole latter half of this movie could (and should have been!) be reworked. Give Catwoman more time and more agency. Give Bane more motivation – and differentiate him from the Joker somehow. And at the end of the day, still have Batman fade from view as Gordon & Blake take care of business. …now I’m getting too deep in the weeds here, but I can definitely say that the muddled characters/themes of this movie are the reasons I don’t enjoy this movie half as much as the other two.
Still – this movie’s set pieces and gorgeous camerawork elevate it far beyond anything else DC has done(yes, even above WW for me!) and the acting *is* superb, regardless of the plot/writing. Seeing it in cinemas was a grand event and I’m grateful this movie exists.
And as I don’t want to wade too deep into the philosophical discussion, I won’t say much more than that I agree with Anthony @@@@@ 113 in regards to the human condition. Utterly terrifying, yes. Thankful for the restraining influences/institutions that protect us from worse evils than we’re already beset by in this world.
@117/John: That isn’t a counterexample. Rudeness isn’t unhelpfulness. It’s perfectly human to insult people on the Internet and then help a stranger to find the bus stop or bake a cake for the widowed family next door.
This is off-topic, but I have to respond to Schwartz’s comment #98, which is, bluntly, wrong. Disney did not piss off “most fans” of Star Wars by not acknowledging the tie-in fiction, because tie-in fiction only reaches less than 10% of the audience for the thing it’s tying into. The audience for the novels and comics is a statistically irrelevant percentage of the audience for the movies and TV shows. No movie studio is going to cater to a few thousand people at the expense of confusing a few million.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Also off-topic. Regarding Disney’s “treatment” of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, I might add that elements and events introduced or mentioned in passing in many of those stories were being contradicted long before Disney was ever involved.
For instance, the Clone Wars, as mentioned in the earlier novels of the 1990’s, was assumed to be a conflict in which the Empire fought against and overthrew the Old Republic. That was the assumption of those authors at the time. When Episodes I, II and III came out, that assumption went out the window when Lucas established that the Republic simply became the Empire from within.
@122/Eduardo: You’re quite right. The claim that the EU was “canon” was always false; it was just an inaccurate way of saying that all the books and comics and games were required to be consistent with each other. The actual movies were always free to ignore or contradict them. So the movies did whatever the heck they wanted, and the tie-in creators had to gloss over or retcon the new contradictions piecemeal while trying to keep the rest of their continuity intact as best they could. The only difference with the new system is that the films and tie-ins finally actually are in mutual continuity (at least in theory), and since that was finally happening for the first time, it was deemed more practical to start over from scratch.
“I’m not sure that’s a meaningful standard”.
It’s more or less the same consensus for actual film critics as it is for audience members. It’s only really somewhat divisive amongst the fan community and even then, There’s some devout fans in that area so this whole consensus of it being “disappointing” is really only a small minority of the general population.
“That’s missing the point”
I know full well what the point of all that was, My point was that it’s unfair to try and compare the situations in TDK and Rises are completely different. Bane is not an enemy that can be defeated the same way Joker was, He doesn’t care about morals.
@122/Eduardo: That’s surprising. I no longer own the first Star Wars novelisation, but I remember that it compared the Old Republic to a tree rotting from the inside and mentioned Senator Palpatine’s grab for power on the first page. So I thought there was never any doubt that the Republic simply became the Empire.
Sorry, still off-topic.
@125/JanaJansen: I recall that passage fairly well. It took a while for continuity to become a bigger factor in these novels.
Even in the Timothy Zahn stories, the prevailing idea was that the clones were enemies of the Republic and the Jedi. And that’s not even factoring in the unstable clone mind plot twist that became the basis for the C’Baoth character, which as far as I know was never a plot point in any of the subsequent films or animated shows that dealt with clone characters.
For a promising start to an examination of what it means to be a paragon of idealism and virtue, check out Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new Captain America series. After the apparent disaster of the HydraCap storyline, it was a surprising new direction. Also raise my regard of Coates, who seems to understand writing characters much better now that he’s less of a novice comics writer. He represents Cap’s point of view without necessarily injecting too much of his personal views.
Wellll since we’re talking about it :) – I love the EU, read the EU for years and years still read the old EU. But I honestly had no issue with Disney starting fresh because as others have mentioned there were already inconsistencies (in fact, my most recent read was Open Seasons, which was a comic intended to reconcile all the conflicting Boba Fett lore after the AOTC revelations) and I really don’t expect them to be beholden to old stories. I love every aspect of the new stories, but I do appreciate the attempt to keep a continuity. And I have been happy with how they’ve pulled in and drawn from Legends.
@103, et al
Sort of an addendum to my own remarks, an excerpt from what I consider to be a wonderful speech:
“No individual – not Mandela, not Obama – are entirely immune to the corrupting influences of absolute power, if you can do whatever you want and everyone’s afraid to tell you when you’re making a mistake” – Barack Obama.
Strictly speaking, not a matter of being either a (moderate) conservative or a (moderate) liberal; issues in the real world are always complex and there is generally room for reasonable differences of opinion. In these trying times I feel it necessary to add that.
Honestly, I think the biggest problem with the EU at its end was that there was just so darned much of it; to the point where it would’ve been pretty much impossible to shoehorn in a new movie or set of movies in the timeframe they were using based on the age of Hamill, Fisher and Ford. Easier to kind of wipe the slate clean.
And of course it’s worth noting that a number of things from the old EU have been put back into the new canon in some form, like Thrawn in Rebels and Mimban and other elements in Solo.
For instance, the Clone Wars, as mentioned in the earlier novels of the 1990’s, was assumed to be a conflict in which the Empire fought against and overthrew the Old Republic. That was the assumption of those authors at the time. When Episodes I, II and III came out, that assumption went out the window when Lucas established that the Republic simply became the Empire from within.
That doesn’t even mesh with the films. There’s a line in the first one about the emperor finally abolishing the Senate – “the last vestiges of the Republic have been swept away”. I thought that made it pretty clear that the Empire was what the Republic had turned into, not that the Empire was an outside force that had conquered the Republic.
@132/ajay: It’s actually pretty common for conquerors to keep the existing bureaucracy and institutions of a conquered nation intact, because it’s more efficient to co-opt the regulatory mechanisms that already exist than to tear them all down and rebuild them from scratch. Often conquerors will ally with an existing faction and get their support in exchange for increased power. So the fact that the Senate was kept wouldn’t necessarily have meant that the Republic wasn’t conquered by an outside force.
@92 I think I have to disagree with your interpretation a bit. I think that’s a misreading of Nietzche and also of the goals of comics writers like Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel, Bill Finger, Jack Kirby, et al. Superman may have origins in an idea of Ubermensch, but I’m pretty sure they would have been reacting to Nazi appropriation and perversion of Nietzche’s concept (and the philosopher himself seems blameless for that.)
And in relation to my prior concept, I don’t think that the power fantasy of superheroes means that ordinary people are unimportant. The infinitely powerful Superman is surrounded by a well-known and well-loved cast of ‘ordinary’ people whose have agency, and whose lives are important. People are more than just objects for Superman to save. That is what I am objecting to–the way that Gotham’s people can seem like objects rather than people. That goes for the people in that weird prison-pit too.
TDKR is particularly vulnerable to this because Batman has had most of the people around him stripped away. Nolan made the choice to avoid members of Batman’s extended ‘family’ like the Robins or Batgirl, and meanwhile Rachel is dead, and Alfred abandons him.
@133 Agreed, in fact one of the reasons the 2003 Invasion of Iraq turned into such a disaster was that the Allies refused to keep any of the Ba’athist bureaucratic apparatus or personnel from the previous administration intact and tried to run it directly themselves.
@130. I agree with that too. After a certain point the old SW EU just suffered from continuity lock out. I missed a couple of books, and from that point on I just couldn’t catch up. Especially once they started with the illegible intergalactic invaders plots. It made sense for Disney to hit the reset on that one.
@115:
If no one was around to judge their behavior, then how would you be able to judge that they were more helpful?
@136/Anthony Pero: I meant bystanders or other potential helpers. Obviously, there is always the person who is being helped.
@134. Colin R: ” but I’m pretty sure they would have been reacting to Nazi appropriation…”
Of course they were. They were doing an appropriation of their own, while subverting it. Look at Steve Rogers. He’s the epitome of the Aryan ideal, co-opted so that he can punch Hitler in the face.
@krad – You’re right. As someone reading close to 100 novels of SW I never thought that novel/comics loving SW fans are the minority of them. So unlike ST canon which consisted mostly on screen chronology, it is a wrong comparison. On a side note, Thrawn’s original trilogy – on my harcover Heir of the empire, it is stated by Lucas that it is the official continuation of the movies, though I agree with the meat of what posts above mentioned about novels and canon. That doesn’t change my personal view about the bad (in my opinion) ripoff of the same universal plot (and also character’s but that’s already way off topic), and though I turned my back on the new trilogy not seing ep VIII, from what I heard here and with EAP’s threads concerning the Skywalkers being trashed, I moved on. (Krad, on a side note, sorry for making you use such a language with me in @121, which was my language back at me. You’re usually very Vulcan (in a most positive way) with you’re replies and for me to upset a Vulcan even this little bit… I’m rather new with the social chats, and I’ll learn from mistakes. CLB I wanted to write you a personal message concerning all this but there is no way I found to do so)
#139: If you’re logged into the Web site, there should be a drop-down panel available by clicking on your username in the upper right corner of the top of the page screen, and that drop-down has a link to the “Messages” utility. It is not, oddly enough, a feature I’ve actually used in the several years I’ve been active on Tor.com, but it’s there. OTOH, I use the “My Conversations” link at the bottom of that drop-down panel pretty much constantly….
Yes, but see when I click here on your user name a window opens to your activity and so, and there I see a -send message option, but that is not available with all guys here. But with your sollution I can compose, but what do I write in the box “send to”?
Never mind John, I managed. thanks for the info
So the fact that the Senate was kept wouldn’t necessarily have meant that the Republic wasn’t conquered by an outside force.
True. But it did.
@143/ajay: Yes, of course we know that now, but the discussion is about what was known before the prequels came out, and what was asserted and assumed in the tie-in fiction at the time.
@141:
People can turn off private messages in their settings. I used to use messages a lot more on the old Tor.com, which had more community features, but most of my conversations with Tor.com readers has moved to Facebook groups and private messages on FB.
I actually liked this movie a lot, sad to see myself so at odds with the reviewer. But I guess that’s part of the value of reviews, we get to see how other people perceived things we enjoy.
Random observation: Gordon didn’t send every cop into the sewers, A sizable portion remained top side and form the resistance against Bane’s rule.
Quoth spencer-malley: “Random observation: Gordon didn’t send every cop into the sewers, A sizable portion remained top side and form the resistance against Bane’s rule.”
Gordon didn’t send anyone into any sewers because he was in a hospital bed at the time. Foley was in charge, and his exact words at 1.31.02 of the movie while talking to Blake: “Jesus, Blake, every cop in the city’s down in those tunnels!” He was exaggerating some for effect, but he wouldn’t have said that unless most of the force was down there.
Which, as I said in my review, is absurd and a failure of writing.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad: “Which, as I said in my review, is absurd and a failure of writing”.
For this film series, It’s really not. These films may be more grounded than usual superhero movies but they’re definitely not set in the real world. Gordon and Foley in previous scenes talk about how they’ve already sent teams into the sewers to search for him and how huge a network it is. At the point when Bane kidnaps the Wayne Industries board of directors, The cops have already patrolled the sewers multiple times and found nothing since Banes men have basically been cat-and-mousing them. They’ve already tried sending one shift (maybe even a couple) and they’ve turned up nothing so what exactly are their other options. Keep doing that and keep coming up with nothing?
I reiterate, It was every available cop, not everyone and they couldn’t have known about the explosive laden concrete either. If the police had found nothing, They would have just exited the sewers the same way they entered. It’s certainly requires some suspension of disbelief (like Batman kidnapping a Chinese national and his nation making no demands to get him back) but I wouldn’t call it a “failure” either.
spencer-malley: All right, how about the fact that all those cops sat on their asses for three months and made no attempt to free themselves despite the fact that they all were armed?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad: “All right, how about the fact that all those cops sat on their asses for three months and made no attempt to free themselves despite the fact that they all were armed?”
Fair enough, I suppose. We don’t have any confirmation that they just sat on their asses though, They probably spent all that time looking for escape routes only to find them blocked because of Bane’s meticulous planning. That’s just how I personally choose to view it though.
@151. spencer: “They probably spent all that time…” grooming.
Chiming in on this, yes the film is a mess trying to stuff 3 epic Batman storylines into one film but it also has to me the greatest Commissioner Gordon moment ever.
“Clear the corners, Rookie.”
Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon is the greatest thing about this movie.
@153/supermanmoustache: “Chiming in on this, yes the film is a mess trying to stuff 3 epic Batman storylines into one film”.
The Dark Knight technically “crammed” both The Killing Joke and the Long Halloween into one movie you know. Whats more, the storylines in Rises actually compliment each other pretty well so they don’t feel crammed. Being out of the game for a period of years is a much better alternative to weakening Batman than setting a bunch of rogues to fight him one on one, and the No Man’s Land scenario gives Bane stuff to do after he breaks Batman unlike the source material where he’s shuffled off the board pretty quickly after doing the deed.
I don’t see how this movie is any more a mess than Civil War or Infinity War.
@154/ It’s a mess trying to stuff 3 epic storylines into one movie because it is, ha.
No Man’s Land lasted a whole year in the comics, knightfall was over a year long, and well this is not DKR in the slightest although it does try to be and fails totally in getting the feel of the story.I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love the movie, but it is a mess of storytelling where they just pick a few bits from each story while not really going in depth into them, it’s the Frankenstein Monster of Storytelling approach that ended up giving us Batman vs Superman.
Oh, as to how it tries to be the different storylines; No Man’s Land was designed as a storyline to reinforce and revive the trust and character dynamic of Gordon and Batman, yet apart from the separating Gotham from the mainland and Scarecrow sending Rich people onto the ice it has none of the stories themes or impact.
Knightfall was designed to show why Batman needed the Bat Family and also how Bruce Wayne was Batman and not just a symbol in a mask, none of this is even touched upon in the film apart from Bane breaking his back.
DKR is rightly famous and the movie takes these themes from it while avoiding the main theme of the work: Batman is retired at the start and a older weakened Bruce Wayne returns, at the end he apparently dies yet only fakes his death, Bane is closer to The Mutant Leader than Bane in the comics.
This is not even touching on the Catwoman/Batman relationship, or Bruce Wayne losing his company and fortune (Which ironically for once they took from Green Arrow).
I mean, I am not saying that Christopher Nolan didn’t bring anything to this movie, he did. But as the article states, he really didn’t know what story he wanted to tell and as a result this film isn’t as focused in it’s narrative: Is it the last days of Bruce Wayne? Is it how Gordon is the true hero of Gotham? Is it a straightforward sequel to Begins? It’s sorta all of them and yet not,which is a sign that it’s a mess which does not know which story it wants to focus on so it focuses on them all.
I mean Infinity War (which you call a mess) for all it’s faults at least knew it was focused on Thanos as the Protagonist and all the events in the movie are built around him. Civil War is about the fundamental difference and opinions between Captain America and Iron Man (which were foreshadowed in the first Avengers movie 4 years before) and how one event can split apart the Avengers (The Winter Soldier Killing Howard and Maria Stark). The introduction of Black Panther and Spider-Man to the story (which I assume is the mess you mean) are just distractions to the main focus of the film, which is the ideologies of Captain America and Iron Man.
For all the jokes and bad villains of Marvel movies the one thing the films are not are a narrative mess (well maybe Age of Ultron but whatever).
@156 “It’s a mess trying to stuff 3 epic storylines into one movie because it is, ha”.
Well that’s an argument If I ever heard one.
This movie isn’t trying to make a direct adaptation of either Knightfall or No Man’s Land, It’s telling it’s own story while cherry picking certain concepts and ideas from both, just like basically every comic book movie ever made (Infinity War for example). Honestly, The Stories of Knightfall and No Man’s Land compliment each other pretty well. The latter give Bane more stuff to do after he breaks Batman as opposed to the source material where he’s given the boot by AzBat shortly after.
It’s completely unfair to compare this to BVS. It may not be perfect but it’s leagues above that atrocity.
@156. I try and explain in my previous post what I meant by the movie being a mess, I am not interesting in starting an argument. As I said, I actually do love this movie and have watched it more times then Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I also didn’t say that this film is as bad as BvsS, I said it’s the Frankenstein Monster Storytelling approach which ended up giving us Batman vs Superman.
The practice/process of movies taking aspects from different comic book stories existed long before this, yet by using the process the film isn’t a straightforward adaptation of a comic storyline (like say V for Vendetta), it’s a combination of different bits of the stories that the fans will recognise while being separated from their thematic underpinnings. And that process is what ended up giving us Batman vs Superman (which is a clear example of what happens when a director who isn’t as talented as Christopher Nolan tries to do what Christopher Nolan did). Hope this clears up whatever misapprehensions you may have about what I said.
@157/suoermanmoustache: I appreciate the explanation of your viewpoint and I thank you for clearing up any misconceptions.
I will say this, I don’t agree with Rises not being focused. Bruce Wayne’s journey is the heart and soul of this movie as much as Thanos is of Infinity War or the Cap/Iron Man disagreement is of Civil War. The movie in it’s entirety is built around Bruce as a character and really doesn’t feature anything that doesn’t relate directly back to him. I never said Civil War or Infinity War were messes (I enjoy both) and I didn’t mean to come off that way if that is indeed the case.
Oh no, Infinity War is most definitely a mess. It’s just a mess that knows that it’s focus is on Thanos as the Protagonist of the story, ha.
Edit: I Actually like Infinity War (He writes before people start responding about how I don’t get Infinity War)
This film was OK (at least it wasn’t The Dark Knight, whch I find boring as hell), but even though I know they couldn’t have made comic book Bane work in this context, I found this Bane to be quite underwhelming. Having Bane beat Batman because Batman is an old and injured man takes away the merit of Bane wearing down and outsmarting Batman in the comics, only to then break him.
The relationship between Wayne and Kyle seems very forced, very rushed. And the out of left field Batman inheritor they had Gordon-Levitt play was weird, it would have made much more sense to have him actually suit up as Robin (or straight-to-Nightwing) and assist Batman. Oh, and having an orphanage on top of the Batcave was a very stupid idea.
Also, as you point out, krad, Batman retiring after the last movie makes no sense at all. As for Wayne getting back to Gotham from another country, with no money, passport, etc… that I don’t have a problem with, as he’s BATMAN and is very resourceful on his own.
@1 – Colin: Yes, Tate being Talia was blatantly obvious.
@16 – John: Yes, bankrupting Wayne in one single stroke is pretty stupid.
@25 – Cleggster: The Dark Knight Rises and Bruce Wanes. :)
@61 – Stephen: Yes, I remember theorizing that Ra’s was not actually a hallucination.
@139 – Schwartz: ST chronology mostly on screen? Uh, there’s probably more Star Trek books than Star Wars books, despite having more screen time than SW. ST books weren’t canon either, that much is true.
MaGnUs: He hasn’t been BATMAN for eight years, and all his resources were taken away from him.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m not talking about his monetary resources, I’m talking about his skills and resourcefulness. I don’t find it unbelievable at all that he could get back and into Gotham. Not trying to convince you, I understand you don’t share my opinion on this matter.
@160/MaGnUs: “Batman retiring after the last movie makes no sense at all”
I’ve actually thought long and hard about this and honestly, I think it actually makes perfect sense for Bruce to stop being Batman after The Dark Knight. Think about it like this. After the events of TDK, Bruce isn’t just going to be another name on the wanted list like Rorshach in Watchmen, He is going to be public enemy number one. As far as Gotham knows he murdered there DA, there great hope. If he’s till active, The cops are going to be putting more effort into catching him than they are the actual criminals and Batman won;t even be able to do his job as well with the police dogging his every step. The way I see it is He retired Batman for the good of Gotham city, to ensure the police would go after the remaining criminals instead of wasting time trying to catch him and also because he really wasn’t needed anymore. The Mob is shredded, the Joker is locked up in Arkham and no new threat rose after him up to then, So what exactly is the work he needed to put in?
To quote The Dark Knight, He is whatever Gotham needs him to be, so it makes perfect sense that he won’t be whatever Gotham doesn’t need him to be.
@163: spencer: ” the Joker is locked up in Arkham…”
Haven’t thought about this before, but why doesn’t the Joker turn up after Bane takes over the city? It’d be the perfect chaotic environment for him. Obviously, we know Ledger died and they didn’t consider recasting, but there’s no reference to Arkham in the movie as far as I recall.
@163 – spencer: Then he just ditches the costume and name, and continues working without revealing himself. Bruce is about the mission.
@165-MaGnUs “Then he just ditches the costume and name, and continues working without revealing himself. Bruce is about the mission”.
That would completely negate the whole point of Batman Begins. He wouldn’t be a symbol anymore, He’d be a “man caught in the scramble for his own gratification” like Ducard said. also, What exactly would the “mission” be now? The Mob is no more. No more threats of the Joker’s caliber emerged. Would Bruce just spend his nights prowling the streets looking for purse snatchers? The mission is over, Bruce has succeeded, Gotham doesn’t need a vigilante anymore.
@166/spencer: You’re right. Most incarnations of Batman would never give up the fight. But Nolan’s Bruce Wayne saw Batman only as a necessary evil, one that he was working to make unnecessary. Batman was an extreme solution for an extreme crisis, but once Gotham City had a legitimate police force and functional justice system again, once the people of Gotham had found hope and civic responsibility again, then a vigilante was no longer needed to keep the peace. That was the whole arc of The Dark Knight, and as I recall mentioning earlier in this comments thread, it’s unfortunate that TDKR undid that for the sake of filling out a trilogy.
@krad, you mention in your write-up that after two straight Batman flicks filmed in Chicago, filming for this sequel took place in NYC, but a significant chunk also took place in Pittsburgh as well, such as the Tumbler scenes and the football game scenes. I remember reading an article way back when before filming started that Pittsburgh was replacing Chicago as Gotham City and man was I bummed because I was going to try to be an extra again after not being selected for TDK!
I think I’ve only scene this movie once and that being it’s first weekend in the theaters. I think it’s length, it’s overall legacy, and the fact I don’t ever seem to find it on on TV when channel-surfing unlike the prior two films has something to do with it. One thing that was pretty vivid to me from that initial screening is that I could barely understand anything Bane was saying. It was so frustrating to me because I actually thought I might have had a hearing problem as I couldn’t tell if anyone else in the theater was having the same issue. Come to find out it wasn’t just me but Nolan wasn’t going to take any drastic steps to fix the “problem”!
My other impressions were that Anne Hathaway did an excellent job as Catwoman; it was interesting that she was never referred to as such because I guess that would have been “silly”; the Scarecrow/Cillian Murphy cameo was fun (the one villain to be all three movies in the trilogy); the naming of JGL’s character as Robin at the end was cute and got the pulses raising as he discovers the Batcave; and the police standoff/bridges blowing up scenes were also very dramatic. But I think I’ll just stick to only BB and TDK for repeat viewings.
I think the TDKR is partly about the “noble lie”, and how such an institutionally perpetrated lie can destroy a society from the inside out, e.g., indefinite suspension of the writ of habeas corpus (Dent Act). Generally, not a good thing.