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

and that attitude is exactly HOW we stole it, pal

That and electrocuting elephants

Hey, what was with all the Batman hanging up his cape and cowl nonsense? Was the implication that Gotham was somehow 100% crime free? Since when did Batman not care about petty thieves and criminals?

Also, I can no longer watch Michael Caine without thinking of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFIQIpC5_wY

yeah in the scenes where caine was doing his 'broken voice' i immediately thought of that clip

me too

Me three.

The Prestige is ludicrous but I love it.

SM you should read about Tesla he's fascinating

Hey, what was with all the Batman hanging up his cape and cowl nonsense? Was the implication that Gotham was somehow 100% crime free? Since when did Batman not care about petty thieves and criminals?

His body was badly wounded(presumably from the big fall he took at the end of TDK?) and, being demoralized both by Rachel's death, his failure to save Dent, and the burden of now having his Bat identity's reputation be just as shattered as his Wayne one, he seems to have taken this (consciously or subconsciously) as the cue to retire. I get the impression he convinced himself it wasn't even possible for him to continue. Would have been nice to get some kind of flashback or opening credits montage of the events immediately after TDK; I get the intrigue of starting from "EIGHT YEARS LATER" and piecing it back together, but here it does leave some weird gappy questions.

Oh I've read about him subsequently, and yes, absolutely fascinating.

How comes it's a superhero trope that when the superhero disappears, the criminals wreak unfettered havoc, but not in this movie? (Talking about pre-Bane and his militia). Also, gimpy Batman could still kick criminal butt. And what about other cities? Come on, Batman, show some initiative!

Because Nolan's main thematic arc is that Batman's very presence causes crime; that's what the whole escalation thing in TDK was about; "we but semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We buy bullet-proof vests, they buy armor-piercing rounds".

Yeah, essentially the story they're pitching is that Batman is sort of the brief period of martial law that's "necessary" (or is it?) to kick Gotham out of the cycle of corruption and fear that it was in circa Batman Begins. By The Dark Knight the system is righting itself, Gotham is capable of dealing with the more "ordinary" criminals, but now Batman has stirred up sociopaths like the Joker (and to some extent Bane) whose goal isn't profit or comfort, but to fuck with Gotham and with Batman in particular. Of course, this is undermined by having Ra's and Scarecrow antedate Batman, but you get the idea.

Thinking back on Oldman again, the guy really disappears into a role frighteningly well. Contrasting him in my head in this movie (and the previous two) with, say, George Smiley and on the one hand, yeah it's the same guy playing him but it's almost hard to sense it.

Of course me being me I'm also thinking of the scene where Tom Hardy as Rikki Tarr gets beaten up by Cumberbatch while Smiley watches and now in this film we have Tom Hardy going "Yeah about that" to a cowering Oldman near the start. Kinda. (Also lolling at the idea of Cumberbatch even slightly being able to beat up a Baneified Hardy.)

Ha, yes!

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/real-message-of-the-dark-knight-rises.html

"There is, however, one strain of thought that runs consistently through not only TDKR but the entire trilogy: an almost pathological New York–centrism. All three movies are about powerful criminal gangs that are fanatically devoted the reducing the quality of life in one particular municipality, Gotham, which is obviously New York City.

Two unstated assumptions are at work here: First, there is no point in unleashing this sort of hell on any other city, despite their being softer targets lacking superhero protection. And second, at no point can things get bad enough that the people of this city will actually, you know, leave. They can endure blackouts, nerve gas attacks, sadistic attempts to make them kill each other, and evil clown rampages, and they will simply think to themselves, “This is pretty bad, but what am I going to do, move to Jersey?” In this way, the Dark Knight trilogy is merely the flip side of a Nora Ephron movie."

At what point did Gary fucking Oldman become so avuncular? Was it Harry Potter that did it?

xpost -- Thing is, as I understand the numerous comic arcs that Nolan's movies have drawn from, that kind of obsessive focus/inability and-or lack of desire to leave is essentially built into the premise. There's always going to be a lot of people in Gotham, shit happens of all kinds over the decades, there's no sense of people leaving en masse. I figure if you know this, you're not surprised at Nolan's use of it; if you don't know this, you are or can be.

Bar Pompeii, has any city in world history ever suffered people leaving it in this way?

xxp except in the last movie (and in the comics) where it's obviously Chicago.

Gotham is actually in Jersey in the DC universe funnily enough

TDKR has it in 'Gotham State,' I noticed.

does NYC event exist in DC? where's metropolis anyway

*even

do you love all my remedial nerd questions itt

I think the inference in this one is that people would get tae fuck if it wasn't for Bane finally taking the action people have been calling for re: the Bridge & Tunnel crowd.

They change the locations all the time but i think Metropolis is in Delaware or something. New York (rather stupidly) does also exist

Also, there are lots of shitty cities that people still live in in the real world, because moving is expensive and difficult, there aren't jobs to move to, they own the house and can't find anyone to buy it because the city sucks so bad, whatever.

Bizarrely, in DC continuity (at least at one point?), Metropolis, Gotham, and Manhattan were all adjacent to each other. Like, Gotham just replaces Jersey City and Metropolis replaces Queens, or something. Love the DCU.

delaware lol gtfo

"Metropolis is NYC by day, Gotham is NYC by night"

But yeah I think they've been understandably cagey about where exactly the cities are.

looks crowded
http://www.karridian.net/images/dc/dcusa_ne.gif

At least in the 60s TV series it was clearly Gotham, California

Hmmm, things have moved around then, or my info was wrong to begin with. Is Coast City still blown up?

marvel doesn't have fake cities does it? besides like asgard or w/e

kind of an iatee vibe on that map

that's from The Atlas of the DC Universe from 1990. Coast City has been rebuilt i think

Marvel has some made-up towns and plenty of fake countries, but they just use New York as their "big city" setting pretty much. The Great Lakes Avengers were based in Milwaukee I believe.

Marvel's New York is absolutely crawling with superheroes. Some of them should move out

For a while a few years back they were doing a like "fifty state initiative" thing, where every state would get a super-team assembled for it by the government. Around the same time, the X-Men decamped wholesale to San Francisco, whose open-minded leftie government invited the mutant freaks to town to be their new super-cops. It was a fun idea, sort of diluted in the execution.

Oh, and the West Coast Avengers and, much more recently, the Runaways, are based in LA. The Thunderbolts were in Colorado or Wyoming or someplace, out of a Cheyenne Mountain type of facility. Asgard was in Oklahoma for a good while, though this doesn't seem to have made any difference in terms of crime. And so on...

i remember lol'ing at that on another thread somewhere. woeful midwest crews iirc.

I think I'd assumed that Stamford, Connecticut (which gets blown up at the start of Civil War) and Broxton, Oklahoma (current site of Asgard) were made up, but no, I guess that's some kind of Marvel point of pride (having definitely picked the right horse 50 years ago in choosing New York rather than making a Gotham/Metropolis)

Also next to Gotham is (bracer yourselves) Blüdhaven, the more crime-ridden younger sister.

haha what, seriously? Does Batman ever go there?

Nah, it was invented so that when the first Robin quit, he could become Nightwing and have somewhere nearby to brood and menace at.

So I think at least at the start it had low Batman presence so that he was giving Junior space.

those inner-ring suburbs are getting worse these days

Blüdhaven residents dream of moving to Gotham

(Also lolling at the idea of Cumberbatch even slightly being able to beat up a Baneified Hardy.)

Tbh even Cumberbatch being able to beat up regular size Hardy seems pretty dubious.

Wasn't Blüdhaven nuked or destroyed in Final Crisis, or am I misremembering?

Sounds like it might give the place a shot in the arm.

"In Infinite Crisis #4, the Secret Society of Super Villains drops Chemo, a gigantic, semi-intelligent pile of chemicals, on the city, causing a devastating explosion and toxic chemical fallout."