The Dark Knight Rises The TDKR General Discussion Thread - - - - - - - Part 156

I dont think TDK works as a wrap-up movie, it feels very much like the middle act of a trilogy to me. It would have also left a pretty sour taste to have the series end with Batman being a "fugitive vigilante".

For me, Bruce actually suceeding in his mission by turning Batman into something bigger than just himself is a much more satisfying ending.
I hear what you’re saying, i just don’t feel like the ending of rises feels very batman. It’s all too happy and perfect imo. Something i’ve always loved about batman is the dark/bittersweet nature of his victories. He’ll save the city but lose the girl etc.

I actually prefer the ending of TDK in regards to the symbol he intended to create in BB. By the end of TDK, he realises the symbol can become something completely different when he’s willing to take the blame for harvey’s murders and be whatever gotham needs him to be, becoming the dark knight. To me that’s a much more interesting evolution/wrapping up of that journey compared to what we got in rises.

I just hate how the john blake/robin stuff is handled in rises. It’s my biggest issue with the movie and i have many. Batman just palming off batman duties to this guy he barely knows feels so incredibly unearned and rushed. I’m fine with the john blake character i suppose, i just wish the movie ended with him joining batman by the end, not him completely taking over.
 
By the end of TDK, he realises the symbol can become something completely different when he’s willing to take the blame for harvey’s murders and be whatever gotham needs him to be, becoming the dark knight

I'm not denying that it's a great ending for the movie itself, I just don't think it's a satisfying wrap-up to the series on the whole. Then again, I've always preferred triumphant endings to tragic ones.

I feel a lot of people tend to misunderstand the point of Rises' ending. It's not that Bruce has passed on the mantle, It's that he's turned it into something bigger than just one man, something that can inspire the people of Gotham to be better while also leaving behind a "just-in case" in the form of giving his resources to Blake.
 
The ending is pretty clearly signposted IMO. When coming up with the Batman concept in the first film, Bruce clearly said "As a man, I'm flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol, as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting" - and the film clearly treads that path, with Bruce vacating the Batman role but seemingly leaving it to Blake. And in due course, we can probably assume that Blake will pass the mantle on to someone else worthy enough too.

Nolan seemed very focused on this idea of Batman - the persona, not the man underneath the mask - becoming a symbol, a legend. Ra's Al Ghul also spoke of something similar (""If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become something else entirely") and there was his very focused rhetorical questions like - "Is Ra's al Ghul immortal? Are his methods supernatural?" which hinted at Bruce possibly exploring those avenues too.

So perhaps in the Nolan universe, Batman really does become 'everlasting' and in the eyes of his enemies, perhaps even something more terrifying and timeless, like some supernatural being who doesn't age.

I do agree that the implementation of it in TDKR felt a little clunky. John Blake would ideally have been introduced in TDK and then brought back for TDKR, so that him and Bruce had more of a fleshed out relationship and thus the passing of the torch felt more authentic and earned. And it would also have made it more believable that he worked out who Batman was so quickly. I'm also not sold on the Bruce/Selina relationship and him leaving everything behind to have a life with her - he wanted to have that that with Rachel, yes, but he had much, much more of a backstory with Rachel. Selina was someone he encountered who betrayed him initially (twice, if you could robbing his mother's pearls as well as selling him out to Bane :rofl:) , and then the time they spent together subsequent to that was quite limited so it felt a little forced also.

With that said, I think Nolan's intent was very clear and the TDKR ending does kinda bring it full circle from the first film in a tonally neat way.
 
The Dark Knight RIses doesn't hold up under any scrutiny. Naturally, people can enjoy the film, but the writing is so contrived, and nonsensical, the behavior of the characters in it so bizarre, it verges on parody.

Bruce Wayne is written as the world's biggest dupe, he wholeheartedly trusts people he knows for hours, not days, not weeks, not months. He trusts Selina, even though the only thing he knows about her is that she robbed him, and that gets him brutally beaten up, and for all intends and purposes should have been killed by her betrayal. He gets robbed by her, which results in his life publicly destroyed, then gets beaten to an inch of death, but he still trusts her, even though he knows nothing about her. He doesn't know ''Miranda'' at all, considering the conversation when they sleep together, yet gives her oversight of Wayne inc. which leads to her betraying him, stabbing him, which should also have resulted in his death without the plot preventing that to happen.

And finally, he trusts John Blake, someone he once had a conversation with. It's one thing to have a notion that ''Batman'' is a symbol, a mask anyone can wear, quite another for Bruce Wayne to give up the mantle to a cop whose only predisposition for being Batman is that he's an orphan. The entire sub-plot of Blake figuring out he's Batman because he had a look which only orphans have, is singlehandedly the most ridiculous thing (the) Nolan(s) ever wrote. What if Bruce was someone who had a lost a child due to violent criminals, what if his wife was raped and killed, is there a particular look for every type of anguish, pain and isolation? Instead of writing Blake as someone intelligent, someone who doesn't need resources to figure out who Batman is, to give weight about why Bruce thinks he can take over, the Nolan's don't even bother. He knows, and that's it, Bruce doesn't deny it, and that's all the development of their relationship. Their last interaction is Blake just about to get executed, being saved by Batman, and this is the guy who will protect Gotham without any training, tactics, connections, or money. It's like someone who played football in high school meeting Tom Brady in 2007, telling Brady he understands the chip on his shoulder because he was cut from the high school team, and Brady proceeding to give up his position as a starting QB, even though the other person has no training, no experience, no coaching, no skills apart from ''i know the general rules of the game''. That's how absurd Blake becoming Batman is.

The villains behavior and motivation make even less sense. Why in the world are Bane, Talia and their entire army suicidal? The League of Shadows in Batman Begins is anything but. They're methodical, ruthless, and obviously a continuous organization who serve justice, and disappear until they're needed again. Ra's goal is to eradicate unsavable metropoles but from the perspective of Talia and Bane, who have no idea about the ''lie'', Gotham has been living in peace and prosperity for eight years. Ra's ''destiny'' wasn't to destroy Gotham for the sake of it, but because he was convinced it was beyond saving, had he been resurrected he would have been convinced he was wrong. Yes, the peace was built on a lie, but Bane conveniently found Gordon's letter while they were deep into their plan, so their destruction of Gotham boils down to petty, personal revenge on Bruce Wayne, and their idea of revenge is to nuke 10 million people, AND their entire organization while Bruce Wayne watches it on TV. It's incredibly stupid and preposterous. When you add that Bane has no ideology, the entire revolution schtick is nothing but a ruse to buy time, and not only he doesn't follow what Ra's believed in, but everything he does is because his beloved Talia decided to avenge her father, it makes their entire plan straight out of a bad cartoon. To tie it all up, Bane, the main villain of the film, is revealed to be a stooge five minutes before the film ends, gets blown away unceremoniously, then Talia who becomes the revealed villain, follows him to hell two minutes later with a notoriously bad death scene. Their plan to torture Bruce's soul by watching Gotham get destroyed on TV was foiled when Bruce decided to spend a couple of hours making a Batman symbol on a bridge, so why didn't Talia press the button then? If someone wants to argue that the reason she didn't was because she wanted to know Bruce it was her, Ra's daughter who did it, it's even worse. Who cares whether Bruce knows that for ten seconds, when she was going to blow them right after it? He's going to be dead literally seconds after the reveal, so there's no time to even process that information let alone haunt him.

That's not even half of what the nonsensical writing offers, every cop going into the sewers, unarmed policemen run heads-on into tanks and armed militia, turn it into a melee and win, a chasm that only a 10-year old girl can jump over but no grown man ever could, a billionaire losing everything, even electricity, a day after criminals attack the stock exchange in the middle of the day...the list could be longer than my post, which is already way into TLDR territory.

Nolan said everything he had to say, and asked every interesting question about Batman in the first two films, the ethics, and pros vs cons of vigilantism, the thin line between the overreach of justice and the lack of it, anarchy and order, the vulnerability of the social order, surveillance and torture as questionable methods for the greater good, etc...

The moment he couldn't figure out a more interesting story than ''The League of Shadows yet again but this time more suicidal, less ideological, with a nuke to boot'', he should have left it on the page and moved on.
 
The Dark Knight RIses doesn't hold up under any scrutiny. Naturally, people can enjoy the film, but the writing is so contrived, and nonsensical, the behavior of the characters in it so bizarre, it verges on parody.

Bruce Wayne is written as the world's biggest dupe, he wholeheartedly trusts people he knows for hours, not days, not weeks, not months. He trusts Selina, even though the only thing he knows about her is that she robbed him, and that gets him brutally beaten up, and for all intends and purposes should have been killed by her betrayal. He gets robbed by her, which results in his life publicly destroyed, then gets beaten to an inch of death, but he still trusts her, even though he knows nothing about her. He doesn't know ''Miranda'' at all, considering the conversation when they sleep together, yet gives her oversight of Wayne inc. which leads to her betraying him, stabbing him, which should also have resulted in his death without the plot preventing that to happen.

And finally, he trusts John Blake, someone he once had a conversation with. It's one thing to have a notion that ''Batman'' is a symbol, a mask anyone can wear, quite another for Bruce Wayne to give up the mantle to a cop whose only predisposition for being Batman is that he's an orphan. The entire sub-plot of Blake figuring out he's Batman because he had a look which only orphans have, is singlehandedly the most ridiculous thing (the) Nolan(s) ever wrote. What if Bruce was someone who had a lost a child due to violent criminals, what if his wife was raped and killed, is there a particular look for every type of anguish, pain and isolation? Instead of writing Blake as someone intelligent, someone who doesn't need resources to figure out who Batman is, to give weight about why Bruce thinks he can take over, the Nolan's don't even bother. He knows, and that's it, Bruce doesn't deny it, and that's all the development of their relationship. Their last interaction is Blake just about to get executed, being saved by Batman, and this is the guy who will protect Gotham without any training, tactics, connections, or money. It's like someone who played football in high school meeting Tom Brady in 2007, telling Brady he understands the chip on his shoulder because he was cut from the high school team, and Brady proceeding to give up his position as a starting QB, even though the other person has no training, no experience, no coaching, no skills apart from ''i know the general rules of the game''. That's how absurd Blake becoming Batman is.

The villains behavior and motivation make even less sense. Why in the world are Bane, Talia and their entire army suicidal? The League of Shadows in Batman Begins is anything but. They're methodical, ruthless, and obviously a continuous organization who serve justice, and disappear until they're needed again. Ra's goal is to eradicate unsavable metropoles but from the perspective of Talia and Bane, who have no idea about the ''lie'', Gotham has been living in peace and prosperity for eight years. Ra's ''destiny'' wasn't to destroy Gotham for the sake of it, but because he was convinced it was beyond saving, had he been resurrected he would have been convinced he was wrong. Yes, the peace was built on a lie, but Bane conveniently found Gordon's letter while they were deep into their plan, so their destruction of Gotham boils down to petty, personal revenge on Bruce Wayne, and their idea of revenge is to nuke 10 million people, AND their entire organization while Bruce Wayne watches it on TV. It's incredibly stupid and preposterous. When you add that Bane has no ideology, the entire revolution schtick is nothing but a ruse to buy time, and not only he doesn't follow what Ra's believed in, but everything he does is because his beloved Talia decided to avenge her father, it makes their entire plan straight out of a bad cartoon. To tie it all up, Bane, the main villain of the film, is revealed to be a stooge five minutes before the film ends, gets blown away unceremoniously, then Talia who becomes the revealed villain, follows him to hell two minutes later with a notoriously bad death scene. Their plan to torture Bruce's soul by watching Gotham get destroyed on TV was foiled when Bruce decided to spend a couple of hours making a Batman symbol on a bridge, so why didn't Talia press the button then? If someone wants to argue that the reason she didn't was because she wanted to know Bruce it was her, Ra's daughter who did it, it's even worse. Who cares whether Bruce knows that for ten seconds, when she was going to blow them right after it? He's going to be dead literally seconds after the reveal, so there's no time to even process that information let alone haunt him.

That's not even half of what the nonsensical writing offers, every cop going into the sewers, unarmed policemen run heads-on into tanks and armed militia, turn it into a melee and win, a chasm that only a 10-year old girl can jump over but no grown man ever could, a billionaire losing everything, even electricity, a day after criminals attack the stock exchange in the middle of the day...the list could be longer than my post, which is already way into TLDR territory.

Nolan said everything he had to say, and asked every interesting question about Batman in the first two films, the ethics, and pros vs cons of vigilantism, the thin line between the overreach of justice and the lack of it, anarchy and order, the vulnerability of the social order, surveillance and torture as questionable methods for the greater good, etc...

The moment he couldn't figure out a more interesting story than ''The League of Shadows yet again but this time more suicidal, less ideological, with a nuke to boot'', he should have left it on the page and moved on.
Except don't we know that Bruce looked up Selina (how he finds her) and I'd assume Miranda as well. Man has a super computer in his basement. Alfred looks up Bane in like 10 seconds.
 
The Dark Knight RIses doesn't hold up under any scrutiny. Naturally, people can enjoy the film, but the writing is so contrived, and nonsensical, the behavior of the characters in it so bizarre, it verges on parody.

Bruce Wayne is written as the world's biggest dupe, he wholeheartedly trusts people he knows for hours, not days, not weeks, not months. He trusts Selina, even though the only thing he knows about her is that she robbed him, and that gets him brutally beaten up, and for all intends and purposes should have been killed by her betrayal. He gets robbed by her, which results in his life publicly destroyed, then gets beaten to an inch of death, but he still trusts her, even though he knows nothing about her. He doesn't know ''Miranda'' at all, considering the conversation when they sleep together, yet gives her oversight of Wayne inc. which leads to her betraying him, stabbing him, which should also have resulted in his death without the plot preventing that to happen.

And finally, he trusts John Blake, someone he once had a conversation with. It's one thing to have a notion that ''Batman'' is a symbol, a mask anyone can wear, quite another for Bruce Wayne to give up the mantle to a cop whose only predisposition for being Batman is that he's an orphan. The entire sub-plot of Blake figuring out he's Batman because he had a look which only orphans have, is singlehandedly the most ridiculous thing (the) Nolan(s) ever wrote. What if Bruce was someone who had a lost a child due to violent criminals, what if his wife was raped and killed, is there a particular look for every type of anguish, pain and isolation? Instead of writing Blake as someone intelligent, someone who doesn't need resources to figure out who Batman is, to give weight about why Bruce thinks he can take over, the Nolan's don't even bother. He knows, and that's it, Bruce doesn't deny it, and that's all the development of their relationship. Their last interaction is Blake just about to get executed, being saved by Batman, and this is the guy who will protect Gotham without any training, tactics, connections, or money. It's like someone who played football in high school meeting Tom Brady in 2007, telling Brady he understands the chip on his shoulder because he was cut from the high school team, and Brady proceeding to give up his position as a starting QB, even though the other person has no training, no experience, no coaching, no skills apart from ''i know the general rules of the game''. That's how absurd Blake becoming Batman is.

The villains behavior and motivation make even less sense. Why in the world are Bane, Talia and their entire army suicidal? The League of Shadows in Batman Begins is anything but. They're methodical, ruthless, and obviously a continuous organization who serve justice, and disappear until they're needed again. Ra's goal is to eradicate unsavable metropoles but from the perspective of Talia and Bane, who have no idea about the ''lie'', Gotham has been living in peace and prosperity for eight years. Ra's ''destiny'' wasn't to destroy Gotham for the sake of it, but because he was convinced it was beyond saving, had he been resurrected he would have been convinced he was wrong. Yes, the peace was built on a lie, but Bane conveniently found Gordon's letter while they were deep into their plan, so their destruction of Gotham boils down to petty, personal revenge on Bruce Wayne, and their idea of revenge is to nuke 10 million people, AND their entire organization while Bruce Wayne watches it on TV. It's incredibly stupid and preposterous. When you add that Bane has no ideology, the entire revolution schtick is nothing but a ruse to buy time, and not only he doesn't follow what Ra's believed in, but everything he does is because his beloved Talia decided to avenge her father, it makes their entire plan straight out of a bad cartoon. To tie it all up, Bane, the main villain of the film, is revealed to be a stooge five minutes before the film ends, gets blown away unceremoniously, then Talia who becomes the revealed villain, follows him to hell two minutes later with a notoriously bad death scene. Their plan to torture Bruce's soul by watching Gotham get destroyed on TV was foiled when Bruce decided to spend a couple of hours making a Batman symbol on a bridge, so why didn't Talia press the button then? If someone wants to argue that the reason she didn't was because she wanted to know Bruce it was her, Ra's daughter who did it, it's even worse. Who cares whether Bruce knows that for ten seconds, when she was going to blow them right after it? He's going to be dead literally seconds after the reveal, so there's no time to even process that information let alone haunt him.

That's not even half of what the nonsensical writing offers, every cop going into the sewers, unarmed policemen run heads-on into tanks and armed militia, turn it into a melee and win, a chasm that only a 10-year old girl can jump over but no grown man ever could, a billionaire losing everything, even electricity, a day after criminals attack the stock exchange in the middle of the day...the list could be longer than my post, which is already way into TLDR territory.

Nolan said everything he had to say, and asked every interesting question about Batman in the first two films, the ethics, and pros vs cons of vigilantism, the thin line between the overreach of justice and the lack of it, anarchy and order, the vulnerability of the social order, surveillance and torture as questionable methods for the greater good, etc...

The moment he couldn't figure out a more interesting story than ''The League of Shadows yet again but this time more suicidal, less ideological, with a nuke to boot'', he should have left it on the page and moved on.

I don't totally disagree with a lot of your points, and I always thought the story TDKR is nowhere near as tight as it is in TDK. But just a couple of things -

'Miranda' - she didn't just appear on the scene a day or two before the events of TDKR. It's mentioned/implied that she has been a benefactor to Wayne Enterprises (particularly into the fusion reactor development) and also an executive on their board for at least a year. Lucius Fox is also taken in by her and gives Bruce a very positive opinion of her. Given the skills, resources and so on that the League of Shadows has access to, it's not too much of a stretch to think she covered her tracks well enough that even Bruce Wayne didn't suspect her true identity.

John Blake - I think the approach Nolan was trying to take here was meant to hark back to the conversation Bruce and Ra's had in Batman Begins whilst training on the ice - when Ra's claimed that Thomas Wayne's failure to act was what caused the death of him and Martha.
"The training is nothing! The will is everything! The will to act!"
We are meant to buy that despite lacking the kind of ninja skills Bruce has, John Blake is still motivated enough, honest enough and driven enough to become Bruce's successor. How it's implemented is a bit clunky though. If his 'intuition' that Bruce is Batman was meant to be a sign that he has similar detective skills, it didn't come across well. I guess he does have some formal training as a policeman at least.

Can't argue about the complete inability of all the grown men in the prison to make the jump, all the cops in the city rushing into the tunnels and the other bits you mention. It felt like Nolan knew the end point of the trilogy and forced the story into shape to reach that point, rather than letting it flow totally naturally like how TDK flows on from BB.
 
The Dark Knight RIses doesn't hold up under any scrutiny. Naturally, people can enjoy the film, but the writing is so contrived, and nonsensical, the behavior of the characters in it so bizarre, it verges on parody.

Bruce Wayne is written as the world's biggest dupe, he wholeheartedly trusts people he knows for hours, not days, not weeks, not months. He trusts Selina, even though the only thing he knows about her is that she robbed him, and that gets him brutally beaten up, and for all intends and purposes should have been killed by her betrayal. He gets robbed by her, which results in his life publicly destroyed, then gets beaten to an inch of death, but he still trusts her, even though he knows nothing about her. He doesn't know ''Miranda'' at all, considering the conversation when they sleep together, yet gives her oversight of Wayne inc. which leads to her betraying him, stabbing him, which should also have resulted in his death without the plot preventing that to happen.

And finally, he trusts John Blake, someone he once had a conversation with. It's one thing to have a notion that ''Batman'' is a symbol, a mask anyone can wear, quite another for Bruce Wayne to give up the mantle to a cop whose only predisposition for being Batman is that he's an orphan. The entire sub-plot of Blake figuring out he's Batman because he had a look which only orphans have, is singlehandedly the most ridiculous thing (the) Nolan(s) ever wrote. What if Bruce was someone who had a lost a child due to violent criminals, what if his wife was raped and killed, is there a particular look for every type of anguish, pain and isolation? Instead of writing Blake as someone intelligent, someone who doesn't need resources to figure out who Batman is, to give weight about why Bruce thinks he can take over, the Nolan's don't even bother. He knows, and that's it, Bruce doesn't deny it, and that's all the development of their relationship. Their last interaction is Blake just about to get executed, being saved by Batman, and this is the guy who will protect Gotham without any training, tactics, connections, or money. It's like someone who played football in high school meeting Tom Brady in 2007, telling Brady he understands the chip on his shoulder because he was cut from the high school team, and Brady proceeding to give up his position as a starting QB, even though the other person has no training, no experience, no coaching, no skills apart from ''i know the general rules of the game''. That's how absurd Blake becoming Batman is.

The villains behavior and motivation make even less sense. Why in the world are Bane, Talia and their entire army suicidal? The League of Shadows in Batman Begins is anything but. They're methodical, ruthless, and obviously a continuous organization who serve justice, and disappear until they're needed again. Ra's goal is to eradicate unsavable metropoles but from the perspective of Talia and Bane, who have no idea about the ''lie'', Gotham has been living in peace and prosperity for eight years. Ra's ''destiny'' wasn't to destroy Gotham for the sake of it, but because he was convinced it was beyond saving, had he been resurrected he would have been convinced he was wrong. Yes, the peace was built on a lie, but Bane conveniently found Gordon's letter while they were deep into their plan, so their destruction of Gotham boils down to petty, personal revenge on Bruce Wayne, and their idea of revenge is to nuke 10 million people, AND their entire organization while Bruce Wayne watches it on TV. It's incredibly stupid and preposterous. When you add that Bane has no ideology, the entire revolution schtick is nothing but a ruse to buy time, and not only he doesn't follow what Ra's believed in, but everything he does is because his beloved Talia decided to avenge her father, it makes their entire plan straight out of a bad cartoon. To tie it all up, Bane, the main villain of the film, is revealed to be a stooge five minutes before the film ends, gets blown away unceremoniously, then Talia who becomes the revealed villain, follows him to hell two minutes later with a notoriously bad death scene. Their plan to torture Bruce's soul by watching Gotham get destroyed on TV was foiled when Bruce decided to spend a couple of hours making a Batman symbol on a bridge, so why didn't Talia press the button then? If someone wants to argue that the reason she didn't was because she wanted to know Bruce it was her, Ra's daughter who did it, it's even worse. Who cares whether Bruce knows that for ten seconds, when she was going to blow them right after it? He's going to be dead literally seconds after the reveal, so there's no time to even process that information let alone haunt him.

That's not even half of what the nonsensical writing offers, every cop going into the sewers, unarmed policemen run heads-on into tanks and armed militia, turn it into a melee and win, a chasm that only a 10-year old girl can jump over but no grown man ever could, a billionaire losing everything, even electricity, a day after criminals attack the stock exchange in the middle of the day...the list could be longer than my post, which is already way into TLDR territory.

Nolan said everything he had to say, and asked every interesting question about Batman in the first two films, the ethics, and pros vs cons of vigilantism, the thin line between the overreach of justice and the lack of it, anarchy and order, the vulnerability of the social order, surveillance and torture as questionable methods for the greater good, etc...

The moment he couldn't figure out a more interesting story than ''The League of Shadows yet again but this time more suicidal, less ideological, with a nuke to boot'', he should have left it on the page and moved on.

I've always held the opinion that if any other so-called "Masterpiece Superhero Movie" were held to the same level of eye-rolling scrutiny that Rises gets pelted with, They would fall apart and this comment is a shining example of that. Let me correct a few misconceptions here.

Bruce didn't "trust" Selina, He had something she wanted and was bartering it in exchange for taking her to Bane and even when she double-crossed him, It was clear she only did that because her life was at stake. Bruce went to her again because he didn't exactly have a luxury of allies to choose from. Miranda Tate had been a member of the WE board for years and had earned the trust of Lucius Fox, What reason would Bruce have of suspecting her of any wrongdoing?

Bruce isn't leaving the mantle to Blake expecting that he'll go out and fight crime as soon as he gets it. The idea is that Gotham is now in peace time, It's got it's act together again, It's rebuilding without Batman's help but inspired by his example. He leaves all that for Blake as a "just-in-case scenario". He's not ready yet but if Gotham ever needs a hero again, He will be. The deeper point that a lot of people miss with the ending is that Bruce has turned Batman into something bigger than just one man. He's ensured that it's now an immortal symbol of heroism inspiring the people of Gotham to do better.

Another baffling criticism I've never understood is the notion that the LOS should no longer have an issue with Gotham in Rises, It's pretty clear that they would have suspected something was fishy even if they didn't have all the facts and I just can't bring myself to believe that if Ra's saw the state of Gotham, He'd say something like "Oops, I was wrong. Everything I said about Gotham being beyond saving and needing to be destroyed? Total 180. If only they enacted harsher penalties on organized crime everywhere in the world, balance would be restored and I could finally retire"

My understanding was that Bane intended to go back to the pit once Gotham was destroyed to "give Bruce his permission to die and it only became a suicide mission when they found out he was back in Gotham. He was also no more a "stooge" than he was in Arkham Origins.

A few minor misconceptions here, They didn't send every cop into the sewers, Quite a few are top side helping Blake and Gordon during the occupation. The cops charged the men because it was literally the only thing they could do, The girl was the only one who made the jump without the rope which no one else dared to do and it was said to be a legend anyway and Fox very explicitly said they'd be able to prove fraud on the stock exchange sabotage and Bruce would only be broke for the short term.

I feel Nolan was thinking more "Bruce finally moves on with his life and succeeds in his mission" in terms of the story more than "League of Shadows comes back" and the fact that he chose this when he could have just acquiesced to WB and made it "Batman vs The Riddler" tells me that he absolutely had his heart in making it.
 
Probably an apt time to post this from Begins:
  • Alfred Pennyworth: Are you coming back to Gotham for long, sir?
  • Bruce Wayne: As long as it takes. I'm gonna show the people of Gotham their city doesn't belong to the criminals and the corrupt.
  • Alfred Pennyworth: In the depression, your father nearly bankrupted Wayne Enterprises combating poverty. He believed that his example could inspire the wealthy of Gotham to save their city.
  • Bruce Wayne: Did it?
  • Alfred Pennyworth: In a way. Their murder shocked the wealthy and the powerful into action.
  • Bruce Wayne: People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can't do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I'm flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed; but as a symbol... as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting.
  • Alfred Pennyworth: What symbol?
  • Bruce Wayne: Something elemental, something terrifying.
Bruce clearly didn't intend for his return to Gotham to be permanent, nor for it to be temporary. He was there as long as he was needed. And there was no more 'dramatic example' to shake people out of apathy than Batman seemingly giving his life to save the city by flying a nuclear bomb out past the Gotham bay just before it explodes.
 
I think the general idea is that Gotham has to rebuild itself without Batman's help but inspired by his example.

Doesn't the fact that he hands the mantle of Batman to Blake completely contradict your argument? If Gotham doesn't need a Batman anymore, why does the movie end with the idea that Batman is going to continue on? Which is it?

How exactly does it "need Batman more than ever"? All of Bane's army was defeated by the end of the movie, They're were no stragglers being shown. Blake is also just beginning his journey, there is nothing to suggest he's going to go out as Batman on the same night

Gotham spent months under occupation by a terrorist organization. The only "peacetime" the city ever achieved came from a lie, which was exposed as a lie on live TV right before Gotham's own citizens raided people's houses and dragged them out kicking and screaming and very likely murdered them.

What exactly was "cleaned up" from all of this?

In reality, it would take years for Gotham to get back to any sense of normalcy from what happens in Rises and be rebuilt.

And Batman and the cops were the only ones who saved Gotham. The citizens didn't do **** except hide or take part in the chaos. They certainly didn't "take back the city" from the LOS. They didn't save ****.

So Bruce picks that time to just walk away from Gotham after faking his own death? He didn't leave Gotham in a better place, he did the opposite. He left it in a state of chaos with a power vacuum that will need to be filled. And the only Batman Gotham now has is a hotheaded ex-police officer who has no real training.

Why would Bruce think this was the best idea, instead of doing the logical thing like staying around to help Gotham rebuild, or training Blake to take his place?
 
Doesn't the fact that he hands the mantle of Batman to Blake completely contradict your argument?

Nope. Because as Ive said before, Him leaving the cave to Blake is very clearly presented as a "just-in-case" scenario. Gotham doesnt need a Batman right now but if it ever does, Blake will have had time to prepare.


He didn't leave Gotham in a better place, he did the opposite.

That really isnt the case presented at the end of Rises at all. There is absolutely no indication that Gotham is going to backslide into something worse than what it was before or that a new evil is on the horizon ready to rear its ugly head.

Gotham is very clearly shown rebuilding at the very end with Batman now being used as a symbol of inspiration. It isnt shown as being in desperate need of either Batmans direct help or Bruces resources to make it better.
 

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