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

wow

Haha that is amazing.

what would be the equivalent of bruce willis forced by the villain to walk into a black neighborhood wearing a racist sandwich sign?

Dr. Morbius being forced to watch this movie

ding ding ding

LOL

but the real answer is "villain forces hero out of his comfort zone with regards to what he is wearing, however for most of the running time he wears his familiar garb" vis-a-vis unmasking The Bat

holy shit, doc, that's brilliant. jaw on the floor

anyway, i just saw this. enjoyed the first half quite a bit and was preparing to eat crow about my unkind comments upthread, but the second half was such a massive mess that i came out feeling more-or-less justified. i realize now that my real objection to nolan's batman films isn't their lack of poetry, wit, perversity (etc.), but simply that they're simultaneously ponderous and rather silly. big themes, epic length, heavy duty angst and import, but pretty damn dopey underneath all that. i did like certain scenes and sections, especially bruce's flirtations with not-catwoman and his long, slow "rise" from the pit, but so much of this movie seemed irredeemably ridiculous.

i get that the assault on gotham was all just talia's mad attempt to complete her father's plan and get revenge on batman, so the underlying scheme didn't really have to make any practical sense, but it nonetheless felt like complete hooey. not only was the plan nonsensical, it was presented in a silliness-maximizing manner. dumb coincidences and unlikely encounters mount (bruce showing up in the nick of time to save selina upon his return to gotham), useless secondary characters eat up vast chunks of screen time, bane looks and sounds like a doofus, themes walk on and offstage without amounting to much of anything, a couple thousand people apparently live in new york gotham, and so on.

i guess i just don't get it. the whole thing seemed like borderline camp to me, but boring camp, the kind that isn't even worth celebrating as charmingly goofy trash. mostly i felt bad for tom hardy, bulgily strapped into that dumb rubber mask for the entire length of the film. his head looked like a trussed ham.

hahaha thanks y'all - - - actually, I wonder how many of those would turn out to be true of a ton of "third movies" that were trying to juice the formula and keep things from going stale ("the other ones were inside, this one's outside!"). In a way I actually prefer the approach of the Alien films, which repeat the formula over and over but lean on the peculiarity of having four different 'name' directors, so you get these entirely different-looking, different-feeling, and differently-themed variations on the exact same story, heroine, monster, etc. Superheroes don't really work for that, since one thing you expect is getting the villains changed up and so on. I could almost imagine it working for, say, Superman, where I don't really give a shit about any of his enemies and Luthor would be fine as a recurring guy so long as people had different ideas for what to do with him. I'd certainly be cooler, in that scenario, with Gene Hackman hamming it up as a goofy real estate crook with a toupee.

It's funny, though this thread has definitely given me a LOT more to hold against TDKR, I gotta say it holds up against any other second sequel in a geek franchise. CERTAINLY as far as superhero movies go. I mean, that's kind of a stacked deck ("it makes Superman III look like Spider-Man 3!") but still, some kinda accomplishment to not just completely fall down in a heap of shabby confusing overproduced garbage a la most of these: Worst Third Film in a Series

that being said, I also think it's entirely possible that if I watched this movie again I might feel more like contenderizer - - for me at least it's probably going to depend on what kinda mood i'm in and so on. This thing would be murder with commercial interruptions.

Wish they'd done at least some scenes with Bane out of a mask. Maybe they were trying to go as far down the road as possible with this idea of the masked man becoming an icon, more than a person, just this faceless force, but that works against all the things about Bane that are quirky and unique to this one guy and his biography. Maybe that should have been played up more actually, like the way Batman really beats Bane is to stop seeing him as Bane the unstoppable force of evil and as Bob Bane, disgruntled sore-face guy who's got a thing for Marion Cotillard. Would parallel Bruce Wayne trying to figure himself out, having consciously built his own identity/cage around himself, and now stripping that away to retire and so on.

I gotta say it holds up against any other second sequel in a geek franchise

Sadly, this is sort of otm.

I feel like some of you bitching about plot holes and subplots being magically waved away don't really read comic books all that much. Not defending them really, this is a different media and all, but its not like there isn't a precedent in the source material for these sorts of contrived plots that don't really pan out under close inspection.

uh uh uh. this movie sucked on its own merits

I've read comics all my life but I can't get behind cutting a film critical slack because it's living down to its source material or because it's based on a(n arguably) less artful form of storytelling.

Again, I wasn't really trying to excuse them in the film, just pointing out that comics make those kind of frustrating leaps all the gd time. I think, ultimately, your willingness to overlook these plot holes depends on how fun you found the film. I found it fun, not as fun as TDK, but fun enough.

I feel like some of you bitching about plot holes and subplots being magically waved away don't really read comic books all that much. Not defending them really, this is a different media and all, but its not like there isn't a precedent in the source material for these sorts of contrived plots that don't really pan out under close inspection.

― heated debate over derpy hooves (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Monday, July 30, 2012 9:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the problem is dude, if the rest of the movie is blah/boring, you end up spending your time examining that stuff too closely

Wish they'd done at least some scenes with Bane out of a mask. Maybe they were trying to go as far down the road as possible with this idea of the masked man becoming an icon, more than a person, just this faceless force, but that works against all the things about Bane that are quirky and unique to this one guy and his biography. Maybe that should have been played up more actually, like the way Batman really beats Bane is to stop seeing him as Bane the unstoppable force of evil and as Bob Bane, disgruntled sore-face guy who's got a thing for Marion Cotillard. Would parallel Bruce Wayne trying to figure himself out, having consciously built his own identity/cage around himself, and now stripping that away to retire and so on.

― Doctor Casino, Monday, July 30, 2012 9:21 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really? do you wish the dark knight had done some scenes with the joker out of makeup too?

joker and bane aren't really comparable in execution imo

tho you couldn't have bane w/o the mask cause there's no way that voice can come out of tom hardy's mouth without him making hilarious faces

seeing him without the mask in the "present" would have demystified him even more than the reveal already did

might've preferred a less mysterious bane

i complained about the mask because, in conjunction with the processed voice & affected accent, it made bane seem more weird than terrifying. plus it all but erased tom hardy, confining his performance to a series of arm and eyebrow gestures. the joker's makeup didn't limit heath ledger in any noticeable way, so the comparison doesn't make sense.

that said, when it was revealed at the end that bane wasn't the big evil baddie he'd been built up as, that he was instead a damaged but loyal pet, the mask gave his monstrousness a sort of frankenstein poignancy. didn't really square w the character we'd seen up to that point though.

this was... i don't even wanna give it the benefit of a hyperbolic extreme, it was just dull dull dull and really stupid

nolan is incapable of creating any real movement in his films, his one cinematic register is like the ominous looming drift of letting go of the steering wheel of a very expensive walnut-dashed four door saloon on the freeway

thought bane was well conceived if it's possible to disassociate him from the lame script. they could have fleshed him out and made him weirder still even. (no screen villain will ever be as weird as tom hardy is himself though).

i probably most enjoyed the scarecrow kangaroo court section (and death by mau mau joke) - like joker in tdk the flashes of burton/gilliam absurdity focus the rest of the portentous doomy nonsense, and there wasnt enough of that. i really did suddenly wish i was watching 12 monkeys halfway through this

some of the dialogue was just like... sighhhh. the big bane bat confrontation:

"so you came back to die with your city"
"no i came back to stop you"

ohh-kay. great. thanks for avoiding the corny superhero conventions of engaging scriptwriting

and surely that was an injoke right, making bake do the whole WHUUURS THE TRIGGGUH WHURRR IS IT thing again

haha yeah that was totally HOW'D IT GET BURNED? HOW'D IT GET BURNED?

I wonder how much of the single day he had left to save gotham bats spent painting gasoline on a bridge and writing a new will.

this was such a waste of Tom Hardy, coulda been any bulky dude w/ a silly voice

nah hardy was worth it just for the voice

i assumed the redub was a different voice actor tbh, couldn't imagine tom hardy doing it

Huh?

his original recording was too mumbled and inaudible so they redubbed it

Yes, but why would it not be Hardy?

alba you didnt really cry at this film did you, be honest

I mean, he takes his acting pretty seriously. We can argue about whether putting a mask on an actor limits him too much, but that's no reason to take away one of the key things he's got left.

xpost yeah, I did! I often get emotional in cinemas though. You should have seen in me in Nostalgia for the Light the next day.

[backs away slowly]

well now listening to the before/after it's clearly him, but when i was watching the movie it just sounded so ridiculous i had trouble matching it to his face (and why not go the james earl jones/darth vader route)

meta gravitas is why not darling

people always respond well to outlandish actorly commitment and sacrifice and whatnot even if the result is the same

it would be more like orson welles / unicron than vader anyway

I appreciated his dialogue much more – and missed much less of it – on second viewing. It has pretty amazing cadences to it that really got under my skin.

I agree w/ whichever review described his tone as "weirdly jaunty."

I can't see the possibility of doing a scene with current Bane without a mask since when it was partially damaged he was noticeably suffering until Thalia fixed it.
Did leave me wondering how he ate or sustained himself, that can't all be from the Venom can it?

HUGE PLOT HOLE HOW DOES BANE EAT HIS BREAKFAST???

you guys are ridiculous, tom hardy is far and away the best thing about this movie, don't cry because you didn't get to see his mouth

some of the dialogue was just like... sighhhh

another one: when daggett realises bane is about to kill him: "you're... pure evil!!!" nah mate he's just another self-interested psycho like yourself, albeit with muscles.

i'm going to see this again (IN IMAX) so i really should be trying to talk myself round to liking it more.

ya that was ridic

xp the characterizations won't be any less incoherent, but i think the awesome explosions and crap in IMAX would make it a little more enjoyable. at least, it helped me ignore most of the stuff you guys are talking about while i was in the theater. but if you dislike it so much it much, why bother seeing it again?

HUGE PLOT HOLE HOW DOES BANE EAT HIS BREAKFAST???

xp friend bought imax tickets for end of august, couldn't wait that long so went to see it on the cheap. i never see films twice usually so er it'll be an interesting experiment.

its gonna be crazy

stoked for the madness ¯\(º_o)/¯