Come anticipate "The Dark Knight Rises" with *BATSPOILERS*

I wonder how much of the character stuff makes sense when you view them all as only Nolan creations and not in terms of what the actual characters are. Batman doesn't quit or nope about for 8 years cuz his lady and friend got offed , seeing as how it was the violent graphic loss of his parents is the foundation of him.

However, Nolan Batman would, I guess.

Saw this last night, and I don't know what I was expecting, but it was like getting teeth pulled. I remember liking the last one, but It didn't stay with me. This one was so incomprehensible and pretentiously delivered that the jumbled politics shouldn't have even bothered me because they clearly weren't thought out, but lines like "in order for despair to live, you must feed them... HOPE" get nothing more than one big Fuck You from my corner

Also, Prometheus ruled and I saw it twice

And I'm not dropping a non-sequitur by mentioning that film; I actually began taking it personally after reading so many reviews complaining about the implausibility of Prometheus, then going into this one which some reviews were freely calling a masterpiece, and getting something with so many gaping holes and insults to any intelligence - I kept thinking, why? This film is even -more- insufferably pretentious and filled with empty characters all overacted, and has less of anything to take home to think about. Once you cut away the distractingly bad TV acting & pacing, Prometheus had a good conceit.

all the connective tissue of plot and characterization that we used to require of a film in order for it to make sense, I'm all for it being taken for granted and cut away if it makes for a faster ride to your main point. But oh man, not this, please not this

frankly, i enjoyed Prometheus more than DKR!

thats another thing that bothered me about the lame-ass "now i give YOU permission to die!" line, batman should never threaten to kill anyone

I wonder how much of the character stuff makes sense when you view them all as only Nolan creations and not in terms of what the actual characters are. Batman doesn't quit or nope about for 8 years cuz his lady and friend got offed , seeing as how it was the violent graphic loss of his parents is the foundation of him.

However, Nolan Batman would, I guess.

thats another thing that bothered me about the lame-ass "now i give YOU permission to die!" line, batman should never threaten to kill anyone

In order to beat him, he had to become him! (dark superhero cliche #43)

what does it even mean to "become" bane, his only distinguishing characteristics are muscles and spooky voice (which batman already has)

during the stadium scene i kinda wished the nuclear physicist had answered the question "and who is qualified to defuse the bomb" by saying "oh any number of trained technicians"

was the talia thing actually meant to be a notable twist? i didn't know the talia al ghul backstory beforehand but it seemed obvious to me that she was implicated from the point that we zoomed in on the scar on her back. also cuz she had the same accent as bane. wise up bruce ffs.

The only action-movie line that bothered me was Anne Hathaway's "About that whole no-guns thing … turns out I'm not as commited to it as you are". When you know where a line's heading from the off, it needs to be lot shorter. "About that whole no-gun thing" followed by a look would have done it.

Mereyeux, I believe they are known as "hints" that you were clever enough to pick up.

during the stadium scene i kinda wished the nuclear physicist had answered the question "and who is qualified to defuse the bomb" by saying "oh any number of trained technicians"

Physicist should have said "you, Bane." Then Bane would have killed himself. The end.

When you know where a line's heading from the off, it needs to be lot shorter.

By this standard, the whole movie should have been a lot harder. Was there any twist or surprise not telegraphed?

she shoulda just said "guns ftw"

Like, was there a line with Alfred telling Bruce "be careful, master Wayne, or you will one day wake up to find yourself in a dark, deep PIT OF DESPAIR!!!!"

i gotta admit i didnt see the talia thing coming, although i was sort of rumbling with discontent about the marion cotillard character and the fact that they were making a batman/catwoman movie with no romantic subplot b/w them. so the twist worked for me, it was def the plot point i liked the most.

some of those early alfred lines were so literal... "so master wayne, you've been in hiding for eight years, however, you are unsatisfied and it is evident gotham needs you. also, it would please me if you took a wife. want something to drink?"

Speaking of pits of despair, when Batman was incapacitated I kept thinking of "The Princess Bride." "Oh, no one ever escapes! Have a cracker..."

Seeing as I'm on a negative tip, the only big plot point (hole?) to bother me was the idea of Bruce mothballing the fusion project when he found out that it could be weaponised. I mean, can't any nuclear programme be used for ill if you want? Why would this particular project make it easier for baddies like Bane to make a nuclear bomb? I couldn't figure that out.

ha, hints okay, but it seemed completely obvious! maybe i am just a terribly suspicious person.

Because it was telegraphed literally by the script, of course. "I shut down this secret nuclear reactor because I didn't want a villain to find out about it and kidnap this specific Russian scientist to tell him how to turn it into a bomb. Oh, also, the underground hiding spot floods."

xpost

I'm surprised he didn't add "if the reactor is weaponized, no one will be able to stop it, unless it is dropped 6 miles off the coast of Gotham, into the ocean. But that would take a vehicle traveling x miles per hour, strong enough to carry such a load ..."

You are SO MEAN to this film.

How do you turn a fusion reactor into a fissile bomb? Shits akin to saying, "Well, we're out of gasoline, so I stuffed hay into the tank. That should be enough to get us home. Fuel is fuel, right?"

Well, clearly the scientist was a genius. I mean, didn't seem too hard in the movie. Pressed a few buttons, looked serious ...

frankly, i enjoyed Prometheus more than DKR!

same

The only action-movie line that bothered me was Anne Hathaway's "About that whole no-guns thing … turns out I'm not as commited to it as you are". When you know where a line's heading from the off, it needs to be lot shorter. "About that whole no-gun thing" followed by a look would have done it.

― Alba, Saturday, July 28, 2012 3:37 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

i thought all her meant-to-be funny or crowdpleasing moments were really lame. its been weird to see people praising catwoman as one of the movie's highlights, because i thought they really bungled her character

i gotta admit i didnt see the talia thing coming, although i was sort of rumbling with discontent about the marion cotillard character and the fact that they were making a batman/catwoman movie with no romantic subplot b/w them. so the twist worked for me, it was def the plot point i liked the most.

― funny-skrillex-bee_132455836669.gif (s1ocki), Saturday, July 28, 2012 3:40 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

the twist was a cool moment in of itself, but it should've came way earlier in the movie. she was only a villain for like 10 minutes! i think if they excised catwoman and beefed up the romance b/w bruce and talia & moved the betrayal to some point in the 2nd act, the whole thing would've had more juice

i was actually expecting for most of the movie that cotillard would be talia, until like 10 minutes before the twist where i was like 'well shes barely done anything in this movie so i guess shes just some random lady'

that's true, although there's a problem built-in to doing that which is that it makes bane less cool and then the movie has less cool bane. though maybe if they'd done it earlier they could have fleshed out the bane/talia thing a bit more or at least given us more of a sense of what was goin' on in the ol' bane-brain

it was just so weird to have the bad guy motivated by vengeance and then we find out it's like, 3rd-hand revenge he wants for a guy he didnt even like anyway

http://nonadventures.com/2012/07/28/anti-monitor/

She pulled all the strings - but she was so good you didn't see it!

I think I shed a tear three times, though maybe not at that bit. One of Bane's bits (maybe his speech to the masses about taking over the city), Anne Hathaway's "you've given these people everything" and then the kiss. I cry a lot.

fair enough, and I do cry at films but not this one - I can see a tear at the "you've given..." quote and then the "not enough" response.

The kiss was funny - this bomb is gonna blow in a minute but lets get a snog in there! I thought it was a tribute to Hiroshima Mon Amour for a sec.

The only thing that really annoyed me is that if you have a bomb that will explode due to nuclear decay, that shit is pretty random! You're not going to get a to-the-second timer, surely?

I think that Anne Hathaway's character was rather underwritten (though not as underwritten as her pal Juno Temple's wtf) – her anti-rich stuff specifically. But with what she was given I thought she totally lit up the screen with her performance and gave the film another dimension.

It was a lot about the way she looked too – her face, that lipstick, the way she was lit by Wally Pfister, who hasn't received much credit in this thread. Although I rated the film-making as highly when when I saw it in a crappy digital, pixelly projection, the way some of those shots looked like on IMAX film (not so much the scale – just the quality of the image) was like night and day. Some shots you wanted to hang on a wall were reduced to low contrast mush in the multiplex.

("underwritten" probably the wrong word re: Juno Temple – I'm guessing a lot of her stuff was cut out)

Yeah I'm looking forward to this at the IMAX -- must wait till the end of August, unfortunately.

lol Andrew, fuck knows how that device worked! Another 'plot hole' indeed.

Wondered what the relationship with Juno Temple was. Was it romantic too?

Apparently a ref to Catwoman's roommate in Year One

yeah, she's a kid in Year One though

How do you turn a fusion reactor into a fissile bomb

By asking your brother to collaborate on the script.

I think that makes it a facile bomb.

i think the most awkward use of technology was having batman holding a flash drive, tbh. couldn't they have outsourced some of the 'how-to' stuff to just the idea that he was gonna get morgan freeman to do it? one of the deleted scenes is catwoman calling batman at 1am saying that she doesn't have the right drivers installed, & batman asking her which OS she uses & telling her to check the manufacturer website.

Reminds me of one of Adam Carolla's bits mocking movie villain executive-types shown to be all-powerful with walls of computers/screens, but not shown where they call Doris their secretary because they forgot their password again and the machine locked them out.

Why did we need two different ticking-clock scenes in the movie, anyway?

Also, TV Tropes chimes in with the relevant cliches:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoingCritical

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DidNotDoTheResearch

i kinda hate plot devices like "the computer program that will erase you from the world's crime databases"

"The computer program will erase you from ILX."

"Oh fuck."

*contingent of supervillians descend on Gotham from all corners of the globe*

haha

Oh, I meant to mention the clean slate thing. I liked that as a theme (not sure if it's been dealt with by Hollywood before) but like her anti-capitalism, it felt rather undeveloped. Was it just her criminal record that she wanted wiped so she could start again, or, as Ned jokes, something wider about the internet? I think she has a line about everything you do being all over social media or something?

Batwitter

in the next reboot the bat-signal will just be a hashtag