The Dark Knight Rises The TDKR General Discussion Thread - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Part 149

[shauner111]

That's baloney. The shootouts and fighting in Inception were good. The Selina stuff at the bar? How was that confusing. There was nothing wrong about it at all.

 

[shauner111]

Maybe that's because you're blinding yourself to them. I don't pause the film or put it in slow motion. I noticed goons standing there with guns just waiting for Batman to clock them the first time i watched it. I noticed Bane's silly spinning jumping punch thing not being anywhere near Batman's face the first time i watched it. Again why did he do that silly spinning jumping punch? That was more stylized or "hollywood" than anything Cap did in his film.

Of course the punches don't land. But in TWS it FEELS like they do. When Cap boots some guy in the face, you understand he is knocked out. When Batman punches someone in the shoulder and they stay down it's like... really? None of his strikes seem incapacitating. Not just because of the choice of martial art, but because the stunt actors are terrible and the way they are filmed.

The fighting style used by Cap isn't stylistic. He's still just punching and kicking. But it feels brutal because of the way it's filmed and edited.

Everytime i see the Bane spinning punch it's perfect. It's quick and IMO there's no way you can see it not land unless you're slowing it down. We'll never agree on that.

Maybe im blinding myself to what's going on in the frame. But im focusing on batman and catwoman fighting, my eyes aren't wandering around in the frame to see what the mercenaries are up to. That's just me.

 

[Tacit Ronin]

The shootouts were bad. The scene in Inception when they are boxed in at the car chase has laughable continuity. In one cut, the yellow cab that JGL is driving is undamaged with the windows intact, in the other, glaringly, the car is damaged with the windows shattered. And then the same pattern is shown to us quite a few times so that we see the damaged and undamged versions of the car in repetition.

And I meant not in the bar specifically, but outside of it where the cops are attacked by the League from the outside that is poorly edited and confusing.

 

[Tacit Ronin]

Maybe im blinding myself to what's going on in the frame. But im focusing on batman and catwoman fighting, my eyes aren't wandering around in the frame to see what the mercenaries are up to. That's just me.

Everything in a frame matters because every frame, every shot is chosen specifically by the director to present to the audience, not just the center.

 

[Tequilla]

I love, love, love Nolan's stuff but it's no secret that he has a very, very, very hard time directing a good hand on hand combat scenes. He's had his moments but you can tell it's nowhere near his forte.

It's definitely not his forte. At all.That's why Rises surprised me , because it's so much better than anything he has done in that department (especially after dark knight which looks very ridiculous in that aspect).

But i also don't see much american movies in the same style that i would consider much better in that hand to hand stuff. Especially in big blockbusters movies.I see many people confusing choreography with manipulating imagery in a computer.

In constructing set pieces , he is actually really majestic and knows his ways (outside of his idea of making two squadrons of people equipped in white fighting in a white background , i don't know what might have gone through his head )

 

[shauner111]

The shootouts were bad. The scene in Inception when they are boxed in at the car chase has laughable continuity. In one cut, the yellow cab that JGL is driving is undamaged with the windows intact, in the other, glaringly, the car is damaged with the windows shattered. And then the same pattern is shown to us quite a few times so that we see the damaged and undamged versions of the car in repetition.

And I meant not in the bar specifically, but outside of it where the cops are attacked by the League from the outside that is poorly edited and confusing.

Never noticed.

 

[MagnarTheGreat]

I was happy to hear that Dennis O'Neil's reaction to the last moments of the movie were exactly the same as mine. But I figured as much beforehand.

 

[The Joker]

What did O'Neil say?

 

[MagnarTheGreat]

What did O'Neil say?

"Hey, listen. It was a good movie. But the last 30 seconds--lose it! Come on, this thing in the <grumbles> cafe in Paris*? Story ends with the plane** going over the ocean." "It was a story about redemption. And that would have been redemption." "What was interesting is about that entire trilogy is they didn't end with two guys bashing each other. Even the first Iron Man movie [did that]--which I thought was a damn good movie..."

* Florence
** The Bat

It was on Kevin Smith's Fat Man on Batman recently.

He also said he envisioned Angie Harmon as Talia, someone tall and strong, and wasn't trying quarrel about Marion Cotillard, but admitted he was probably being way too much of a comic book guy trying to translate the page to the screen.

 

[Travesty]

Yeah, I listened to that one a few days ago. Basically, every guest he's had on that's talked about the movie, has had some serious problems with it.

I'm actually going through all of them right now.

 

[shauner111]

Oh well, yuh can't please everybody i guess. Just have to please yourself.

His choice for Talia is bad. And i could have sworn he said something in the documentary that the ending was the perfect way to go about ending the story. Maybe he just meant the trilogy as a whole.

Anyway, i would have left disappointed if they ended it with Batman dying, never showing him in Florence. How is that redemption? Redeeming yourself from what if you're dying? Surviving and moving on with your life, that's redemption after all the years of anger and depression, and pretty much childish behaviour.

Killing him off in the ocean is just anti-climactic and depressing. No thank you.

I would have became a TDKR hater if that happened. I would STILL be arguing with you guys about it, only, it would be reversed.

 

[Shikamaru]

The Godfather of Batman has spoken. Take that, TDKR fans .

But in all seriousness, that's his opinion just like Dini's. It goes both ways. Funny how you don't see "this famous guy you like hated it" being thrown around like the alternative seems to be.

 

[Isearch4dope]

TDKR was an awkward thrown punch wondering if it should land, graze or miss all together. From the moment Selina back-flipped out that window (floating like a napkin) I knew the movie wouldn't improve on the grounding it was trying to achieve all series long which gave it it's appeal in the first place. If you ask me this movie should have really tried to convincingly take that idea a little further which in my opinion was the only way to go. The style in which it was shot in would have you believe this is what they were going for but with children making jumps adults couldn't, Selina floating (already mentioned) and manhandling bulky, dangerous thugs like the Batman himself, punches blatantly not being landed (Bane spin punch), people falling without being hit, miraculous spinal healing, unbelievable escape from neutron bomb, feeling it in your bones and stuff, Bane unexplained superhuman strength and much more but whatever. It was too much to overlook on this level alone.......not even going any deeper into the anti-climactic, boring, uninspired story and characters. So disappointing Still feel it in my bones and stuff.

 

[shauner111]

Children making jumps adults couldn't? What children?

 

[shauner111]

Found a good post/blog on the movie/trilogy. Most here won't agree with it but i do. In every way.

Life, Death, and the Failure of Force

While Bruce laments Rachel’s death, Alfred shatters him with the revelation that Rachel had preferred Harvey Dent anyway. This severs their friendship, but Alfred reminds him that the only thing worse than being hated by and estranged from Bruce would be the thought of Bruce’s reckless death. Alfred offers his vision of Bruce learning how to live as a civilian with a wife and kids, his bat-days behind him. And yet a potent mixture of personal anger and the hero’s call to deal with Bane persuade Bruce to again live through his persona as the Caped Crusader, now a reckless vigilante with no fear of death or, as Alfred would say, with an eerie attraction towards it. Alfred’s (2nd!) use of the Law to kill Bruce disabuses him of his obsession with what could have been, but it doesn’t make him fully alive. For that, he needs the true death of brutality and failure, the kind that only lived experience and the failure of self-reliance preach effectively.

Enter Bane, a vicious mercenary and agent of the genocidal League of Shadows, which our hero spent most of Batman Begins destroying. As Alfred reminds Wayne, Bane is younger than him, far stronger, tougher, faster, and trained in Batman’s same fighting style. While Ledger’s Joker questioned all of the hero’s values – parodying, complicating, and negating them – Bane is devoted to his own ideals: a young woman, savagery, mastery by force. If the Joker was the perfect counterpoint to The Dark Knight’s Batman, Bane fits perfectly with a vengeful and disaffected Bruce, intent on using sheer force, as he did when he was younger, to fight crime. The end of sin is death, and the end of Wayne’s devotion to self-reliance and force is literally being broken, his back in two. He has tried sheer force…and it didn’t work. His self-destructive orientation has, as Alfred predicted, killed him – he lies on the floor of a dark pit, “where the worm never dies and the fire is not quenched.” Sounding familiar? It becomes even more so with the Rising.

Fear and Humility

The first movie started with Bruce Wayne overcoming all of his fears – especially of bats and death – and Rises comes full-circle when a wise man in the Pit tells Bruce he must relearn the fear of death and use it. But first Bruce must have something real to live for. Bane ends up giving Batman exactly what he needs: death to victory by sheer individual force, and then the will to live. Only by entering a living hell of death does Bruce realize that he wants to live for something outside of the Pit and outside himself, looking at the TV and realizing his calling is to help Gotham. Thus Wayne again transcends himself for the city he loves; his humiliating death to self opens the space in his heart for renewed devotion to Gotham. And so he rises out of the prison, making the final leap without the customary safety rope. Now that his fall has renewed his desire to live, he becomes afraid of death again; this fear, in turn, propels him. Wayne has moved from reliance on his own power to humility, and he’s concomitantly shed the fearlessness of nihilism for the bravery of one who feeds off of fear because there is so much to lose. The character development is astounding.

A few critics were concerned that Rises didn’t have enough Batman; that is, Bruce’s character wasn’t as prominent. Indeed, the side-characters take up a massive amount of screentime, and yet this is appropriate for an aging Batman who has, at last, met someone too powerful for him to deal with. Paradoxically, Bane’s very use of force to break Batman teaches Bruce that force doesn’t always work. To this end, he relies on Fox, a brilliantly-acted Detective Blake, Miranda Tate, Gordon, and Catwoman.

Catwoman is a smart, resourceful and beautiful thief (played by Anne Hathaway) who only desires to clear her record and get a fresh start. Batman’s knowledge of his inadequacy against Bane, as well as Catwoman’s inability to escape her involvement with Bane’s thugs, force the two into a beautiful relationship. Catwoman grudgingly gives up her independence and Bruce, in turn, must trust someone who betrayed him into his first death at Bane’s hands. Batman’s honest reckoning with a world in which the good-evil fault line runs through every human heart finds its highest expression in Catwoman. He trusts that there’s “more to [her] than that”, meaning deceit and self-preservation. The ending will prove his judgment correct and/or his imputation effective: if Batman does have a superpower, it’s anthropological insight into a crippled yet redeemable human nature.

Alfred’s Vision and the Ending

Now that Bruce has experienced the same death as Bane in the Pit, he’s prepared to face him again. Batman doesn’t defeat Bane because he’s been working out more; instead his secret weapon is humility. Knowing that he cannot defeat Bane in some idealized contest of physical prowess, he more humbly targets Bane’s mask, taking slashes (aka ‘cheapshots’) at its valves. With Bane finally defeated, however, Batman finds again that he cannot attain victory on his own: he is still the quintessentially human superhero, and this time his wits and judgment have failed him. Miranda shockingly stabs him, reveals her leading role in the League of Shadows, and stabs the Caped Crusader. Again, however, Batman’s humility (you could even say ‘desperation’) saves him: his dependence upon Catwoman pays off, and she promptly destroys Bane with the Bat-bike’s cannons.

Some may complain that Batman never quite ‘gets the best of’ his enemy, and yet none of us ever do – that would be more appropriate to more super-human heroes. Nolan’s Batman must open himself to the world to find victory and redemption, and it’s a victory which happens despite his prior arrogant and self-destructive attempts to take on Bane’s entire army by himself. The side-characters are so prominent because that’s their natural role in any remotely honest story of human heroism. And so Batman’s victory finally costs him his life as he fails to account for all the contingencies (i.e. Miranda’s treachery and flooding the reactor), so he must give up his last resource to stop the bomb.

–Or so we think. He survives through the banal, down-to-earth magic of autopilot, so again his humanity is affirmed. He doesn’t survive through heroics, but rather through a painfully obvious software patch. He can now begin to live Alfred’s vision for him as a normal human being; both his victory over Bane and its attendant humility allow him to do this. Evil is not, of course, naively eradicated; instead, Nolan gently reminds us that others are capable of taking up this mantle for Gotham. His death hidden in Batman’s, Bruce has now been freed to be…drum roll…a mere human! He died to bodily self-preservation in the form of fear in Begins, he died to self-justifying moral high ground in The Dark Knight, and now in Rises he dies to being any kind of hero at all. And this is why Nolan concludes the trilogy perfectly: evil isn’t vanquished permanently, Gotham’s era of heroes isn’t over (as we see from Robin’s spelunking scene), but age and humility have finally freed Bruce. As befits Batman, the closing scenes are not epic rebuilding of Gotham or the punishment of evil. Instead, we see one man’s delight in simple human life (after dying to the hero’s burden) and a woman’s freedom now that her record has been cleared. To paraphrase Gerhard Forde, life isn’t about being a Godlike hero; it’s about learning how to live as a creature. And so Bruce Wayne does. Nolan’s final frame, however, resonates even more than Bruce’s and Catwoman’s ‘normal lives.’ If there’s any symbol for God in the movie, it’s Alfred: the one who adopts Bruce, who bears Bruce’s hatred to save his life when telling him about Rachel’s letter. And it’s Alfred we see in the final scene, a benevolent smile on his face, reveling in Bruce’s and Selina’s liberty and rest.

I believe the third movie completed Bruce's arc in the best way possible. It felt like a perfect conclusion. Everything tied up nicely like a bow.

The greatest films all have flaws. But some of the flaws that i do acknowledge don't bother me because im watching a comic book movie. Things don't have to be realistic 24/7, there needs to be a disconnect every once in a while, which is why i loved Winter Soldier. Balance is a good thing. Heck, even Breaking Bad and True Detective tend to have a couple of rare instances where it disconnects from the grounded reality that they have set up hours & hours prior.

Moments like the back break or the microwave emitter. ETC.

Overall though? I mainly concentrate on themes and character development for this trilogy. Since that was always the priority from the opening seconds of Batman Begins. Not in a way of comparing it to what the character has been about before, you know..how his journey would normally move forward in a comic book. But as the films have set it up, as if comic books never existed before. To just focus on the story im watching. I believe when you go into a film you should throw away the source material out of your brain. That goes for Walking Dead, Hunger Games, Harry Potter or Lord Of The Rings. Batman and Superman, whoever. If the basics are intact (name: Bruce Wayne, parents murdered, dark vigilante in bat-suit) then everything else is open to interpretation. Ill go into it without thinking of the past films, tv shows or graphic novels. They just dont matter beyond those basics. For some that's not true but im not about that mentality.

What's presented in front of me is all that matters at that point. Nolan's story. It'll be the same with Affleck.

And so, i see Bruce's arc as being full, complete, a progression. It's a story about starting life with a bright light surrounding you...to falling into the depths of darkness, deeper and deeper until you can't see the light anymore. Even though it shines bright. But you can't see it because you've fallen so far into the black. Then rising from the darkness until you can move on completely. So your entire future is bright again, until you can no longer see the darkness at the bottom anymore. This is what happens to Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne. Not Kevin Conroy's, Michael Keaton's, Denny O'Neil's, Frank Miller's or Paul Dini's. Just another version tossed into the bat-hat. Another decade, another interpretation. None less valid than the next.

The lesson is...

Bruce was too young. And inside he never grew up. So he had no damn idea that there could be a light at the end of the tunnel. As far as his ignorance was concerned, it went away when Joe Chill showed up that night. The lesson is that he's now experienced hell. He knows where it lurks (his parents will always be dead and so will Rachel). But now he knows how to stay away from it. He's got the tools. It's almost a story about addiction. What makes people dive headfirst into that stuff, what makes them get through to the other side and how possible it is for them to keep moving forward without looking in the rearview mirror.

Think of it like all the other versions are about a man (Bats) who falls to his addiction. Think of all of the casualties. And then Nolan's Batman is the one type who gets through it by fighting tooth and nail.

 

[georgec]

Great post and thank you for sharing, shauner.

 

[shauner111]

 

[Kane52630]

That post was rather shallow and pedantic.

 

[shauner111]

Sorry for the long post. It's mainly due to what i was quoting (which is worded in a weird way). But i agree with what he was saying. Shallow though? I dont see it.

 

[Travesty]

 

[Kane52630]

 

[Travesty]

 

[Tacit Ronin]

"Hey, listen. It was a good movie. But the last 30 seconds--lose it! Come on, this thing in the <grumbles> cafe in Paris*? Story ends with the plane** going over the ocean." "It was a story about redemption. And that would have been redemption." "What was interesting is about that entire trilogy is they didn't end with two guys bashing each other. Even the first Iron Man movie [did that]--which I thought was a damn good movie..."

* Florence
** The Bat

It was on Kevin Smith's Fat Man on Batman recently.

He also said he envisioned Angie Harmon as Talia, someone tall and strong, and wasn't trying quarrel about Marion Cotillard, but admitted he was probably being way too much of a comic book guy trying to translate the page to the screen.

Not trying to defend Rises here (ewww), but that leaves JGL's arc hanging. I would much rather Robin wasn't in the film at all, but since he is there, TDKR would've been incomplete leaving with the Bat.

 

[shauner111]

It would be a good joke if it made sense.

 

[Travesty]

It's a Family Guy reference.

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