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

prometheus was at least impressively bad

Yeah, they put some work into it to make it that terrible. "Dark Knight Rises" just sort of ... glides along a monorail of its own mediocrity. There was a distinct lack of rising, or falling, for that matter. Just ... being.

I always find the Red Letter Media guys remarkable perceptive, so I was surprised not that they liked this but by how much they liked this. They stressed in their review that it's more about character than plot, but even if that were true, I'm not sure how much of a character arc this movie successfully illustrates (even if it does it better than, say, The Avengers, which doesn't aspire to anything deep and succeeded wonderfully as a comic book film). I'm not really sure how much I cared about Bruce Wayne's personal and literal fortunes or fate, and the other characters really got short thrift on the development department.

I liked how Cat Woman was given no back story (or nickname Cat Woman, for that matter), but she felt like a lot of good lines in search of her own arc, which a movie this overstuffed had no room for. JGL had a lot of pathos, but I still felt he was pretty broadly painted and squeezed into the movie at every opportunity with the most cynical of franchise-floating motives. And Bane ... I don't know what the fuck was up with him, as much as I liked him as a villain until he was instantly cuckolded by Talia.

oh yeah catwoman had no reason to be in it but then nor did anything else. cotillard had a reason to be in it but pretty much wasn't. the movie's judgments about whom and what should be given screen time and how much were so weird that i just focused on catwoman's dece oneliners and her studied cartoon movement, and bane's inflections, instead of on her irrelevant flashdrive macguffin (where the fuck does bruce suddenly get it from, by the way, near the end? i probably missed something) or his exhausting empty it's-power-no-it's-communism-no-it's-revenge-no-it's-a-girl-oh-he's-dead motive shuffle.

loled when morgan freeman introduced THE BAT with something like "it was designed for urban pacification." no wonder you guys are broke, you designed a manned vehicle for urban pacification. get w the times.

Yeah, where the fuck is the Bat Drone? Get on it!

you people who wanna see HOW batman does every single thing he does kinda don't get batman imo

otm

I'll settle for "why" things happen, then I'll get around to complaining about "how."

the movie fit together enough while i was watching it that honestly i am happy to reconcile most of the plot holes or leaps of logic with the knowledge that it's a fucking batman movie

if it was a hard sci-fi movie or a historically based movie (or even the 'true crime' movie some loons thought the last one was) it might drive me up a wall but nope, fucking batman movie, it's all good bruh

i totally had fun watching this! it's so escapist! nolan loves the surface of surfaces! and making that look all heavy and deep when it's so obviously not! it's great and all i wanted from a batman movie tbh

xp! totally

again, i would have forgiven this movie a lot if i had had any fun watching it, i don't really care about most leaps of logic if i'm distracted by bat-antics

Yeah the plot issues weren't "holes" so much as just dramatically inert. Motivations were opaque to me.

i saw it in faux-imax and the sound was such that it shook the seats, so i give some points to that for visceral entertainment value

are you sure that wasn't because you were headbanging so hard

i'm gonna say maybe

so that's a yes.

it makes it hard to watch a movie but when something rocks what can you do

maybe it helped that i only understood 30% of bane's lines

It was just some stuff about revolution so you didn't need to understand all of it.

i bet if there had been a big metal apparatus on the mouths of most of the characters in prometheus, i might have liked that too

WHEE WHGRH SHO... WRRNGG

lol

Just got back from seeing this for a second time, and really enjoyed it again. It cemented in my kind that, despite all the faux social commentary and depth, it IS a comic book movie, just a very serious and bleak one. Also picked up on a lot of little bits of foreshadowing and plot bits that I'd missed first time out - like Talia being the one who tags the wrong truck, etc.

Better than the naysayers say, not as good as the fawning fanboys say, not as good as TDK, but ends the trilogy well, and thoroughly enjoyable.

otm

again, i would have forgiven this movie a lot if i had had any fun watching it, i don't really care about most leaps of logic if i'm distracted by bat-antics

― Author ~ Coach ~ Goddess (s1ocki), Saturday, August 4, 2012 11:54 AM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah the plot issues weren't "holes" so much as just dramatically inert. Motivations were opaque to me.

― ryan, Saturday, August 4, 2012 11:56 AM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark

otm

"where did batman suddenly get this item half the plot is revolving around and treating as very important and lecturing us about whenever possible even tho it hasn't yet decided whether or not it actually exists" is not exactly a nitpick on the level of "hey how come batman's so good at flying experimental planes" or whatever

thing is when batman flies a crazy plane its cool so u dont care

he's a supersmart rich guy with his own tech specialist. and it wouldn't be out of character for him to have been deceiving catwoman about whether it exists. (xpost)

i didnt really care about that tbh, that explanation is perfectly valid

How long until a "Downfall"-style meme kicks in, with people redubbing Bane?

its scheduled for 4pm today

xxxp but he's been playing prince of persia in a pit for three months

anyway i know it doesn't matter because the sun's gonna explode and this wasn't my primary problem w the movie it was just a question i asked cuz it seemed unusually egregious and i figured i must have missed something while staring at one corner of the screen waiting for tom hardy to lilt something again

but i see that i did not i just did not use my imagination hard enough

the clean slate suddenly being real is such a ridiculous moment

like i said, maybe it was always real! maybe he just had it sitting in the same safety deposit box outside the batcave that he kept his backup batsuit in.

its a pretty uninteresting macguffin imho

it always was real. thought it was pretty obvious that bruce was keeping it hidden. the reveal was still dumb & unnecessary

yeah it was so uninteresting that i went 'ok that whatever problem is solved, back to the action!' and got more action (xpost)

if the movie had concentrated more on selina as a character, it could have been a good macguffin. as things are, it was just another pointless distraction.

Really starting to hope for a four-hour cut of this thing, inexplicably.

i mean, it's a stupid thing to be real though. it's better as what it was before we find out that it's real - an obvious fantasy tailored to the urgent wishes of a desperate woman, who could then be manipulated into doing or believing anything for it. but then bruce wayne just whips it out and is like, heh, looking for this? it's such an indulgent and pointless moment by nolan

Maybe Bruce whips out a fake? I don't care either way, much like the top at the end of Inception.

I liked the Bat, because Nolan got his own version of a Blade Runner spinner/flying car to play with. Dude's a fan of BR enough to have apparently screened it for the crew of his first batflick as a model for tone & vibe that he wanted.

Really starting to hope for a four-hour cut of this thing, inexplicably.

ditto, though "less important than the matthew modine storyline" is kind of a frightening concept.

or maybe it's just the same scenes but slightly longer, more references to "fear" and "anger"

if the movie had concentrated more on selina as a character, it could have been a good macguffin. as things are, it was just another pointless distraction.

― contenderizer, Saturday, August 4, 2012 1:22 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

i thought hathaway was pretty successful at hitting the basic necessities of catwoman: hot, sassy, vaguely mysterious, the latter quality kind of precluding the need for a well rounded character with clear motivations. bane having fuzzy motivations is frustrating because of who he's supposed to be (really smart, with traumatic backstory), but a lot of the classic batman villains have pretty arbitrary and ever changing motives by design.

I don't know anything about the comic-book source material, but as someone who grew up with the TV show, I did question--as much as I liked Hathaway--why she was working together with Batman. She was always a villain...are you allowed to just change the rules like that? It was like King Tut had suddenly switched sides in the middle of one of the old TV episodes.

isn't having conditional alliances and romantic entanglements with batman like THE defining trait of almost every incarnation of catwoman besides, like, the catsuit

The romantic element was always there, absolutely, but I don't remember her ever siding with and actively assisting Batman. Not in the TV show, anyway, and I don't think I remember Michelle Pfeiffer doing so, either--maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, I'd put Hathaway right there with Julie Newmar for best-looking Catwoman ever.

its usually like, in love while out of costume, rivals while in costume. this movie could def have used more of a romantic spark