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

Would sort of like it if this aspect was played up more deliberately, like the point is that it WAS the worst prison on earth, which is what made Bane so tough, but since taking over running it, it operates really differently, dude doesn't tolerate random prisoner-on-prisoner violence, etc etc...so it's basically just a holding tank for anybody Bane has a grudge against, or that he's not using on a project right this second.

what we didn't see of BANE'S GOTHAM was that everybody just hung out playing chess and making each other cups of tea.

I think Bane's argument was that it was the worst prison in the world because seeing the light above you constantly taunted with you with the hope of getting out. This is the kind of an opposing psychological theory to every other prison movie ever, where hope is the only thing that keeps people going. I'll let you know which is right if I ever get thrown in prison.

Maybe it makes more sense as a metaphor for capitalist society, in which people are fed the lie of social mobility but ultimately it's all awful.

and since Bane is an evil communist, he just doesn't get it, that you have to STRIVE to the light to succeed

Maybe it makes more sense as a metaphor for capitalist society, in which people are fed the lie of social mobility but ultimately it's all awful.

― Alba, Monday, July 30, 2012 3:20 PM Bookmark

Now that you say this, I definitely think it's in there, although underdeveloped, similar to how Catwoman's speech to Bruce while they dance doesn't ever really go anywhere. Say what you want about the unsubtlety of BB and TDK's themes, at least the movie seemed consistently aware that those were the themes. DKR keeps falling in and out of focus with that stuff.

Much as I enjoyed the movie, I think I'd like it better if it were 30-45 minutes shorter (cutting the superfluous subplots and characters, especially Talia)... OR if it were 30-45 minutes LONGER, adding back in some of the missing plot-transition stuff, and fleshing out Bane and Catwoman a bit more.

the sorrow and the pit-climb

sorry, what were the themes?

Climbing. Ageing. Cats.

weird i didnt like it more

The prison pit escaped bugged me, too, for a different reason. I thought, especially once the bats flew by, that savvy Bruce would see a small crevasse he could then escape through, thus avoiding the jump. The lesson being that most arrogant prisoners go for the leap and die, but clever observers (like the child) would see the easy way out if they simply paid attention.

But no, he made the stupid jump.

those scenes really could've used a rockin' joe esposito song to juice things up

Say what you want about the unsubtlety of BB and TDK's themes, at least the movie seemed consistently aware that those were the themes.

I watched TDK again the other day. The theme that seems clearly put across is human capacity for evil. My problem with the film is that the two big showpieces for that (the dilemma over blowing up the other boat, and Dent's transformation into 2-Face) were the two clunking failures of the film – neither felt psychologically true. So I was left feeling like the film was a failure.

Are there other big TDK themes that I'm missing? I guess the theme of deception and symbolism is something that unites the whole trilogy.

I agree that TDKR's themes are less clearly brought out, but neither did I feel like it made a hash of them, so it was the more satisfying film to me. Even though I concede that a ticking bomb is a disappointingly corny device to end on.

The war of escalation with a big theme in TDK, with the Joker himself being a response to the year of Batman cleaning up Gotham. "What am I gonna do, go back to rippin' off mob dealers?" Which does nicely lead into Bruce finally retiring in this film, though the revenge plot superceded everything in TDKR, since eight years on it seems that Gotham is generally cleaned up - no corrupt cops, Gordon as commissioner - to the point that the remaining criminals are more legitimate businessmen

I mean, you can accuse Nolan & Goyer of a lot of things, but not thinking through their scripts really isn't one of them.

― Andrew Farrell, Thursday, 26 July 2012 11:27 (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol you cannot seriously believe this

I get what he's saying - every on-screen plot point is meticulously placed, though they tend to handwave away lots of things

I mean it's not prometheus-level random unconnected scenes of stupidity, but so many holes already pointed out on this thread (not that I noticed so many of them at the time).

those scenes really could've used a rockin' joe esposito song to juice things up

I was thinking the same thing, there were a lot of elements of this movie that reminded me of different 80s action movies. Bane is basically Clubber Lang.

anne hathaway as apollo creed. halfway thru this i went from lolling 'o this is basically rocky III' to sighing 'o this is nowhere near as good as rocky III'.

No way, it's totally Die Hard With A Vengeance:

* formerly "nighttime" series is suddenly in broad daylight
* things are blowing up all over the city and there's a lot of commuting
* villain's scheme involves phony 'construction' projects
* villain speaks largely in riddles, nobody really is clear what his actual plan is (1)
* but definitely the plan involves bomb(s) whose location in the city is not always clear
* way way longer and more episodic/rambling than previous two movies
* unlike previous two movies, long sequences are devoted to non-lead characters pursuing subplots and tracking the bomb(s)
* hero previously seen as a loner (though sometimes connected by radio links to ground personnel) now has a partner with whom to butt heads
* said partner calls into question hero's assumptions about himself, suggesting he may be a privileged insider to the system
* hero spends most of the movie recovering from a serious physical disadvantage
* also, hero is recovering from loss of his major love interest, a key character in previous two movies but not seen here
* an underground locale is flooded catastrophically by river water
* new villain has family connection to first movie's villain, second movie's villain is not mentioned
* new villain claims to be motivated by revenge re: dead family member, although sometimes they don't really seem to give a shit about that
* villain is actually a villain-pair, male and female, one brains and one brawn (2)
* staggered multi-ending, with final coda at considerable geographic remove from climax
* etc.?

(1) though, to be fair, Joker's schoolbus heist in TDK is a lot closer to the DHWAV heist
(2) DHWAV makes the woman the brawn, somewhat refreshingly

Oh, and

* villain answers mainly to an adopted name which makes him more sinister
* villain speaks in a crisp, somewhat hard to place Euro-accent
* villain constructs elaborate scenarios designed to torment the hero as a sideshow to his REAL plan

I don't see a lot of holes as much as people just rolling their eyes at why is this here? Like, the assistant police commissioner is a waste of every second he's in, but still in his scenes he's acting like he should.

xp Doctor Casino you are the true mad genius here.

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