The fall out from the Reese discovery (Citizens going nuts trying to kill him, hospital explosion, even Fox''s brilliant handling of his blackmail attempt) are far more compelling than most of Blake's sleepy scenes with orphans, moral posturing of Gordon, blabbing about looks on faces and feelings in the bones etc.
I should have been more clear. The Reese subplot had a great payoff with the hospital sequence, but that was mainly due to The Joker's scheme. In other words I'm just saying everything good Reese brings to TDK is more a result of how the characters around him react to him. So he works well as a minor character, I just think it's a bit misguided to compare him to a more important character such as Blake.
And personally, I find the scene between Blake and Gordon to be a very powerful one. And I'm totally on Gordon's side in it. That's what's compelling about it though, they're both right and they're both wrong. A fine tribute to the moral complexity of TDK's ending.
There are other, not to mention better and more plausible ways of showing he will be an important character than this laughable scene.
I still think it was a good way to establish Blake as an eventual heir to the cave. I know the popular preference is for Blake to have deduced it based on a piece of hard evidence (thus proving himself as a detective), but I still feel like placing the emphasis on the emotional core of their relationship was a good way to go. Not to mention, because of Reese, we've already had a scene in the trilogy where a character explains how he was able to logically deduce the identity based on some snooping. The Blake reveal was more dramatic because it broke from that and he just knew it from a gut level, at least IMO. It took me completely off guard but I liked it for that. The important part of that scene is that Blake is trying to get Bruce back into action. Blake bringing up the loss of his own parents is bound to get through to a hardened and shut-off Bruce. From a storytelling perspective, it's also a good way to start bringing things full circle. Especially after TDK made no mention of the Waynes (which I liked btw). Blake could've went on to elaborate on how he realized the Bruce fit the profile, had the motive and the money, was gone for 7 years and returned shortly before the first appearance of the Batman. But that's kind of unnecessary, because there's no reason to assume he
didn't put all of that information together. He does prove himself to be a good detective later in the film, after all.
Not at all. There's not many fans of Rachel Dawes, but we all accept she was an important character. But people don't have to accept bad writing, like this Blake scene had. Well acted by Levitt, but such awful material he has to verbally spew.
Well, I based that on some of the things I've seen Blake-haters say, such as preferring to see Bruce die in the end if it meant he didn't have to pass the mantle. That's a pretty extreme stance to take IMO (one I totally respect I might add), and to me that indicates a huge resentment of Blake's mere existence in the movie. You can acknowledge something is important while not liking the fact that it's important. That's what I take away from Blake haters. They get it, they just don't like it. And that's FINE. That's the subjective part. All I'm saying (and have been saying for the past year) is that if you actually like Blake as a character and what he represents in the movie, that first scene between him and Bruce is a less cringe-worthy experience. It's a bit melodramatic, sure, but I think Nolan and JGL (with a huge assist from Zimmer) were able to nail down the emotional truth of that scene. When the high-pitched version of the two-note Bat theme creeps in as Blake starts his story, it's like the sound of something faint and dormant awakening within Bruce, while a new separate legend is beginning all at the same time. I love it.
