The movies have never really tried to make itself appear like it exists in a world governed by the laws of physics and nature. The first movie had a a blue flower that made hallucinate your fear, a microwave emitter, the second had Harvey Dent running around with half his face burnt nearly to the bone without any painkillers getting into car accidents, shooting people, kidnapping families and the Joker. Nature and physics aren't really fully there.Why doesn't it work?
God bless you! God bless everyone!
Before I respond I would like to apologize if the tone of the following sounds at all patronizing or condescending - I don't appreciate that kind of tone from other people, and try hard to avoid it myself. While I utterly disagree with you ( particularly given that a big part of Nolan's approach to Batman was to try and ground the films in reality) I still respect your opinion.
First, notice my use of the word "similar." i.e. a world similar to ours, but not the same, that appears to have many of the same rules - particularly with respect to physical injuries (at least at first).
Second, and more importantly, Nolan took great pains to make Batman believable, which is why there are so many scenes of Bruce putting the gear together, constructing the Batcave and all of Fox's explanations of how the tech works. If you get a chance you might check out interviews with Nolan he states that his goal was to make Batman realistic - not literal reality, but cinematic reality.
"The world of Batman is that of grounded reality. Ours will be a recognisable, contemporary reality against which an extraordinary heroic figure arises."
- Christopher Nolan.
read these:
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Why-Christopher-Nolan-Movies-Never-Like-Marvel-Movies-68542.html
http://www.ageekyworld.com/christopher-nolan-says/
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/batman-begins-films-christopher-nolan-1468058
BTW If you don't think flowers can make you hallucinate, well folks have been getting very trippy from poppy seeds for thousands of years, so that's hardly something that's much of a stretch on reality.
One of the better parts of TDKR was that it showed the accumulated injuries that Bruce had sustained - Nolan included that to make Batman (and the consequences of nighttime crime fighting) more believable. That those injuries could be overcome by a special knee brace...well okay maybe. That a damaged vertebrae can be punched back into place by some guy in a prison cell without causing serious harm to the spinal nerve column well that's a step too far.
Going back to TDK for a moment and Harvey Dent's injuries, 3rd degree burns don't hurt, because the nerve endings are dead. Could he run around doing all that psychotic stuff - possibly, although what's more unrealistic about that is that he does a pretty much 180 degree personality change after Rachel's death, he skips over mourning and goes straight on to full on psychosis. True Dent had a dark side, but even then he wasn't a killer - it's a bit much really - still somehow Nolan makes it work.
You put "the Joker" at the end of a sentence there, and I'm not quite sure what you were saying there. If you don't think terrorists or murderous clowns are realistic I wish I could say you were right - sadly, the truth (as in real world serial killers and terrorists) are much scarier than the Joker.
I remember when Silence of the Lambs came out, and it really creeped me out. Anyway, I told myself that nothing as horrific as that could happen in reality - and believed that until the stories surrounding Jeffrey Dahmer came out. It was then I realised that criminals in films (even in psychological thrillers) aren't nearly as horrific as real ones - real life is a lot scarier.
Is the Joker possible, hmmm..... could someone be that crazy. Well, I'm going to say yes, given the craziness I see when I turn on the news.
So, then we get to the bits of TDKR that are really unrealistic, so much so that they kind of bug me. First, Batman's escape from the blast - watch this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acX0DbBqXNI
we see him in the Bat roughly 10 seconds before the bomb goes off. Now given that the blast radius was 6 miles, even if he bales out with 10 seconds to go and glides using his cape how far could he get ? We see the detonation, which is clearly above the sea. Given the speed the blast wave and the radiation would travel, it's just not possible for him to get clear.
Even if he could glide at 360mph (which is the speed the bat would have been travelling to clear the city in the time it had) which is impossible for gliders, he still wouldn't reach safe distance.
As for swapping over to a different Bat, well when did that happen ? At 1:33 of the video we see him in the Bat (with bomb attached) press the trigger on his controls, at 1:34 we see an explosion (which is Batman blasting his way through the skyscraper). At 1:38 the Bat emerges from the flames. So unless Batman could swap to a different Bat in 5 seconds well........
Anyway, despite all that I'm still glad he gets a happy ending.
As for your final question, I can only assume that you are asking why it doesn't work for a film to attempt to portray itself as realistic and then suddenly, jarringly drop that pretense.
Probably the most unbelievable thing about TDK was Batman being able to catch and pull up the Joker after he falls off the Pruitt building. First, the Joker's acceleration towards the ground would probably mean that he'd hit the ground before the grapple hit him.
Second, assuming it did catch him, and wrapped around one of his legs (the leg would probably come off -but lets assume it didn't ) then Batman has to negate the momentum of his fall in order to pull him back up ( which Superman could probably do, but unless Batman has massive, superhuman strength, he simply could not manage).
I'm not saying it's utterly impossible (who knows, maybe a sudden gust of wind significantly arrested the Joker's fall) but it's getting towards the impossible end of the possibility spectrum.
In comparison, TDKR has several of these moments which I found very unsatisfying upon subsequent viewings.
The genius of Nolan is that so many other things in the trilogy are probably not possible, but he frames them in such a way that we suspend disbelief - and he does this by convincing us, as an audience that they may not be
actually possible (like the memory cloth glider) but are at least
theoretically possible - and that' s enough. But the suspension of disbelief remains a fragile thing, and he plays a bit too fast and loose with it in TDKR for my taste.
If you like Nolan, see The Prestige, because I think it's a good metaphor for Nolan's filmmaking. He deftly dresses up the impossible and misdirects our attention so that we are fooled by the trick and he sells it to us, and we eat it up ( particularly with BB and TDK) however, in TDKR he isn't quite as good with his cinematic sleight of hand and we start to say "wait a minute...."
But that, along with everything else is just IMO.
