Is "The Dark Knight Rises" as grounded in reality as its predecessors?

Sure, why not? As plausible as a huge military microwave emitter that boils only water and not the blood in people's bodies.

 

TDKR and BB are having a similar grounded tone, but I feel that TDK was the most grounded version.

 

Yes. None of the movies are actually realistic and if Rises seems less so compared to the others it's only because the scope of the story is so large. These are, after all, movies about a guy dressed in a glorified Halloween costume battling crime. Nolan shooting on location and basing a lot of the tech on real world technology doesn't change that.

 

I'd say Batman Begins is less realistic than Rises. Some of the ninjitsu, fear toxin, microwave bomb stuff, and other details seem less plausible than the city being held hostage in TDKR.

The least plausible thing in Rises was the healed back injury in a matter of days/months. They could've made the training sequences more impressive to make it seem possible, I thought.

 

TDKR was VERY realistic.

CIA in Kazakhstan, Patriot Act/Dent Act, Lazarus Pit in Syria/Arab Spring, LOS/Al-Qaeda...

The only surreal things in the film are some of the gadgets (Bruce's knee brace, Bat-Pod, Selina's identity wiper).

The Bat might as well be an F-22 so I'll keep that off the surreal list.

 

Yes.

 

Agree.

BB is definitely the least realistic of the trilogy.

1. Begins
2. TDKR
3. TDK

Bruce took 4-5 months to heal. It's undoubtedly plausible that a trained fighter(he did took a lot of time off) recovers in that amount of time. I think the least plausible in Rises is Bane's mask. He got beat up by the prisoners decades before the events of Rises, and yet he still needed a mask to ease pain of a source we don't know.

 

Also, I think TDKR paints a very plausible picture of what would happen if a terrorist group would invade and take a major American city.

As me and my brother left the theatre, that's all we talked about. It could happen.

 

I think the problem is that people held those films up in an unrealistically realistic light, as though there was absolutely no suspension of disbelief. As far as I'm really concerned, a man getting over a broken back or dislocated vertebrae in a matter of months is as plausible as a man having half his face burned off and walking around still able to function normally, for one example. So yes, it is, but people expected it to be absolutely clinical and 100% accurate to real life when the preceding films weren't.

 

There is a difference between Grounded and Realistic, Nolan's movies are Grounded, but they are Not Realistic.

 

True. Realistic is a tough word to crack. I see TDKT as a whole more as a combination of grounded and realistic, they have verisimilitude. But the important thing is that it created a world in which all of the events of the films can happen, and that makes us connect with the characters on a deeper level.

I think if the next batch of films manage to create a world that can achieve the same connection, even if the world is thematically different, they would be on the right path.

 

I wouldn't call any of the Bat films realistic, I would rather call them "aesthetically grounded". It has a very lived in feel, a world you recognize as your own; this helps you get immersed in the more modern themes and ideas that are dramatized. With that said, these films' regard for things like physics are not even a cut above its comic book counter part (especially TDKR). But that is a good thing, at least most of the time. Nolan wisely understood that he is still making comic book films.

 

Darren Aronofsky's take on Batman reboot was supposed to be ultra grounded and realistic.

 

I would have to say Rises is on the exact same level as far as realism goes, as the other two films.

 

I want someone to explain to me how Batman in general is not realistic? It has not happened but again I see no reason how it is not realistic.

 

Because in the real world after about a week the police would have figured out who Batman was and arrested him (example: Gotham was being watched by a satellite in TDKR, and that could be used to track Batman), provided he wasn't dead because in the real world people don't suffer from "Stormtrooper syndrome" where they couldn't hit water if they fell out of a boat and they don't attack one at a time when in a fistfight.

 

I disagree.

If 2 armed robbers with body armor could get the upper hand on the LAPD for an hour, a trained ninja with billionaire resources could easily evade them for years.

There are still dozens of murderers at large being sought out by FBI and other federal agencies. None of them have Batman's training or money. You do the math.

 

I'd say it's about second.

Batman Begins seems the most plausible to me, it took great care to be, it knew which world it wanted to occupy.

The Dark Knight Rises seems at about a similar level. I'm going to say it's slightly less, if not equal.

The Dark Knight without a doubt to me is the least grounded and most unrealistic of the three, it's still very grounded, just not quite as much as the others.

 

I've said this before, the struggle between grounded drama and superhero film is never more paramount than in TDKR.

 

Nolan puts up on illusion of realism. The only thing in the movie that really stood out was the response to Bane's threat. Would that really keep the government at bay for 5 months? I get the purpose, though: to add a more seemingly realistic set-up to a No Man's Land scenario.

 

Honestly, I think the LOS plot is more over the top and unrealistic than the actual government response. If a terrorist group could actually raise an army in the sewers of a major city, get their hands on nuke, trap the entire police force and threaten to detonate the nuke if the outside world interfered...who the heck knows how the government would respond? That would be completely unprecedented.

It's just that the chances of that happening are pretty much zero.

 

The forced peace of the Dent Act made it more reasonable. Corporate crime was the big thing in Gotham after the streets were cleaned up. Bane milked Daggers pretty well to set things up.

I was more thinking about enemy occupation; not necessarily who the enemy's troops were.

 

Some of the things in Rises were much more plausible than Begins but they both draw a thin line in how it handles it's grounded in reality tone. The Dark Knight is easily the most grounded.

 

As realistic as the movie with ninjas in the mountains and a microwave emitter vaporizing water in mains but not bodies or the movie with a guy who is able to talk perfectly fine after having half his face burnt off and falling from the top of a building and surviving? Yes.