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The Dark Knight Rises

MacGuffin

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Why is this complicated for you to understand? I didn't miss that. But even aware of it, I just ended up not enjoying the movie because it's not what interests me (remember in my first comments when I said I felt nothing throughout the movie, it was just.... there?) and I'm explaining why. Kind of like when Christians tell me why I should like a Kirk Cameron movie ("but it's about hope, it's right there in the title!") but the way it's presented just doesn't do anything for me.

Apologies, when you wrote:

It wants to portray itself as some kind of complex movie as the last, but it really never engages the questions.

I don't think it was trying to do that at all. I believe Nolan doesn't want to repeat himself. That's why the test of corruption in TDK is over. Batman and Gotham passed (Dent failed) the test. The dark and complex questions are settled. This film is about hope, a far simpler theme.

I think you hit it on the head though, TDKR is a religious film about faith and hope. In the first two films he is just two masks: the billionaire playboy and the avenging angel. In the TDK he gives up the Batman mask to elevate Harvey Dent into a symbol for Gotham. Afterward he tries to use his billionaire side to create something wonderful and accidentally creates a terrifying weapon. So he gives up that side as well. That's why he's adrift at the beginning, stripped of the two personas he has no "self" left. When the money is finally gone, he doesn't care, that mask holds nothing for him. The only thing left is Batman, and he gets to redeem the dark knight back to the white knight and then sacrifice it to go to "heaven". That "heaven" is the life Alfred has wanted for him all along: to be the person he would have been had not the deaths of his parents crippled his soul. He no longer isn't afraid to die, he wants to live.

A leap of faith without a rope.

The cycle is complete for Bruce Wayne, but Batman will be needed again. Bruce Wayne can no longer do it, so he hands the legacy off to a new champion.

I think I like this movie the more I think about it.

Though in the past two days I've gotten more dissatisfied with Marion Cotillard's character. She's a fine actress, but the character adds nothing. One could fold her into Bane and lose nothing. The betrayal is just a superfluous plot twist.

Agreed 100%. I thought this movie was magnificent and easily the best of the three. While TDK is also very good, the only explanation I can think of for the slobbering of Heath Ledger's wildly overpraised performance is his untimely death.

I'll disagree about Heath Ledger. He's the best movie villain since Darth Vader. He is what is missing from TDKR to make it a great film. I think TDK is the best comic book movie of all-time and is one of the best films of the last decade.
 

MacGuffin

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It is a good summer movie with a lot of rousing moments.
Visually and aurally, TDKR decimates anything else this year, hands down.

But it stank of the third movie curse.
And the cards were in place to give us the greatest Batman story of all time.

We didn't get it.

I think Nolan could've ended with TDK, there's a natural stopping point at the end of that film that leaves the legend to continue, but I also think he wanted to show the end of Batman (or at least this version of Batman). To not leave it ambiguous but to close it off.

INTJs and their closure issues!
 

Totenkindly

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I'll respond to the rest later, I had a response and my browser crashed, so I'll have to rewrite it.

Though in the past two days I've gotten more dissatisfied with Marion Cotillard's character. She's a fine actress, but the character adds nothing. One could fold her into Bane and lose nothing. The betrayal is just a superfluous plot twist.

Wow. Spoiler alert on that one.



I'll disagree about Heath Ledger. He's the best movie villain since Darth Vader. He is what is missing from TDKR to make it a great film. I think TDK is the best comic book movie of all-time and is one of the best films of the last decade.

I agree with you there. I don't think we should be punishing Ledger's performance just because all the fanboys creamed their pants while watching it or because he happened to die shortly after. I felt he really did do an excellent job with the part, and in a portrayal of the Joker that we'd never really seen before on-screen. (Nicholson's Joker was more by the book and immoral rather than amoral.) It was a brave exploration to allow himself to mentally go there.
 

The Ü™

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I think now they should make Batman Beyond movies, with Michael Keaton as the elderly Bruce Wayne, perhaps pulling a Superman Returns and keeping the timeline of Batman and Batman Returns and disregarding Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. (Though, to be fair, Batman Forever wasn't that bad, nor was Val Kilmer a terrible Batman. But since it shared more than a few characteristics with its successor, mainly Joel Schumacher's less-than-subtle expression of his homosexuality (gone full-throttle in B&R, no pun intended), and since it also had Robin, I think it'd be safer to disregard it from the timeline.)
 

Poindexter Arachnid

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Despite everything I have said, now that I think about it, the "real life" approach to Batman actually works in its favor.
I realized that Nolan's version isn't a "fictionalized" account of Batman.

This is the story from which the legend derives. Kind of how the movie Troy was a real world take on the Trojan War, with allusions to the idea that word of legend blew the story up to ridiculous properties.


This is a genius move from Nolan.
 

MacGuffin

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Wow. Spoiler alert on that one.


Eh, it's a thread about a movie, enter at your own risk.

I'm not a Batman fan in general, so I know nothing about any of that other than when I go poking around wikipedia. I never really trusted her because she just came in out of the blue, and there were some hints about her when she talks about her past and the "story of Bane" in the pit. Not big hints, but they were there.
 

Totenkindly

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I'm not a Batman fan in general, so I know nothing about any of that other than when I go poking around wikipedia. I never really trusted her because she just came in out of the blue, and there were some hints about her when she talks about her past and the "story of Bane" in the pit. Not big hints, but they were there.

Well, I don't really agree that they were "hints" because it wasn't any more than what you hear in other movies that never amounts to much. If it had never amounted into anything in this movie, no one would have been sitting around saying, "But what about...?"

Compare it to other Nolan movies where "hints" are given and you'll see a difference.

Anyway, it was funny because I hadn't thought about that part of the series for years and years, and at that part of the movie, the name immediately popped right into my head and triggered everything I knew about the character.
 

Mal12345

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Having not seen the movie yet, I went to Wiki and read the plot synopsis. (Big deal, it's not like I haven't seen the same movie with different titles over and over again coming out of Hollywood.) The ending, while shocking to some youngsters I suppose, was actually based on an old trope. A VERY old trope.
 

AOA

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I watched it a second time with a friend at his hometown, and again, I really enjoyed it!

..I swear to God, the Catwoman ruined it. Her role was not necessary, in my opinion.

I noticed quite a lot of the scenes were bland, in fact. But so were a lot of the scenes in The Dark Knight. I think if people pay more attention to details than character analysis then they'll be able to appreciate this as one of the strongest movies ever made.
 

Totenkindly

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I watched it a second time with a friend at his hometown, and again, I really enjoyed it!

..I swear to God, the Catwoman ruined it. Her role was not necessary, in my opinion.

I love movie discussions, you'll hear just about every opinion under the sun.

Technically yes, they could have pulled the catwoman without any harm done, really; but her part at least was interesting.

I noticed quite a lot of the scenes were bland, in fact. But so were a lot of the scenes in The Dark Knight. I think if people pay more attention to details than character analysis then they'll be able to appreciate this as one of the strongest movies ever made.

Could you explain what you mean by "details," since you're also saying alot of the scenes were bland? If they were bland, that makes it sound like there wasn't much detail to look at. What sort of "detail" are you referring to?
 

Poindexter Arachnid

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I watched it a second time with a friend at his hometown, and again, I really enjoyed it!

..I swear to God, the Catwoman ruined it. Her role was not necessary, in my opinion.

I noticed quite a lot of the scenes were bland, in fact. But so were a lot of the scenes in The Dark Knight. I think if people pay more attention to details than character analysis then they'll be able to appreciate this as one of the strongest movies ever made.

Every character "ruined" it. They were cardboard cutouts--filler. Nothing more.
This was Bruce Wayne's story, where he climbed out of the nightmare well he fell into as a child.
Gotta love those metaphors!


Glad this series is over.
David Fincher for the reboot.
 
R

ReflecTcelfeR

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I thoroughly enjoyed the film. It seemed to follow along the same kind of skeleton as TDK, but I enjoyed that one, too.
 

MacGuffin

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The first comment in the article is what I agree with:

Some of the 'plot holes' in the above article I agree with. I actually said out loud in the theater, 'What, he just left The Bat on that roof?' when he returns to it. I love the Batman films Nolan has made, and I love films in general, but I'm not going to let that blind me to genuinely confusing parts of the movie like some psychotic fanboy threatening to murder a critic because he disagreed with me.

That said, there are a number of the 'plots holes' in this article that, I think, can be addressed with a reasonable degree of (a) suspension of disbelief because it's a film that is literally incapable of filling in every detail without being sixteen hours long and thus excruciatingly boring, (b) a little bit of imagination on the part of the audience, and (c) a knowledge of the source material, at least as a bonus for those who read comics.

He goes on explaining in detail, proving his point that showing all the details is really boring.
 

Totenkindly

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The first comment in the article is what I agree with:
He goes on explaining in detail, proving his point that showing all the details is really boring.

I only skimmed them all. I think the major problem if any is, that if you get TOO many of those questions during the movie, you spend more time having to process the questions and then ignoring them, rather than being able to just be in the zone during the movie experience, and it stops feeling real. I had a lot of small, "What??" moments followed by, "Okay, whatever."

Did you read the other two articles?

Thought the most interesting was questioning Alfred's perception at the end of the movie, a la Inception. There are other hints in the movie that it IS a real perception, but it makes you think, at least. :)
 

MacGuffin

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I only skimmed them all. I think the major problem if any is, that if you get TOO many of those questions during the movie, you spend more time having to process the questions and then ignoring them, rather than being able to just be in the zone during the movie experience, and it stops feeling real. I had a lot of small, "What??" moments followed by, "Okay, whatever."

Did you read the other two articles?

Thought the most interesting was questioning Alfred's perception at the end of the movie, a la Inception. There are other hints in the movie that it IS a real perception, but it makes you think, at least. :)

I did think the exact same thing about the Bat. "It's just sitting on some roof covered by a camo tarp??? Thank god it wasn't Osama bin Laden."

The third one was interesting, but I avoided all speculation beforehand.

As far as the second one, I can only repost what Phobik did the other day:

BE.jpg
 

Totenkindly

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[MENTION=3]MacGuffin[/MENTION]: Lol.... missed that graphic, but yeah!!!

And the example I almost included in my post was the tarp. I was like... "Really? Bane must just be phoning it in, or not give a crap about The Bat."

I think part of my reaction is also that this is CHristopher Nolan, not Sam Raimi or Michael Bay or "sloppier" director; I'm not used to him leaving a bunch of stupid things like that through.
It's not typically part of his style or the approach he takes.

It would be worth a discussion of how tone and expectation change evaluation. For example, one of my favorite movies (and I still get it out to watch 1-2x a year) is "Face/Off." There is no question that so much of this movie is just pure cheese. The science is a joke. (For one of those "wtf" moments, the doctor actually cuts Archer's hair on the operating table while his entire face is a messy wound! What on earth???) At the end of the movie, his family isn't at the hospital or waiting for him somewhere, they're just all at home... and meanwhile, he just brings this kid home without going through adoptive services or ANY real part of the process. And honestly, there were a LOT of those crazy "no way!" moments. So much that I have to laugh.

Yet I actually was so much more emotionally invested in that movie. Why?

Part of it I think is that it's not pretentious. It never portrays itself as deep, it just portrays itself as having a lot of heart. It also is clearly written to think in terms of "emotions and relationships," not rational logic. The logic is all subjective and based on Archer's values. What's important to him is highlighted; what is not is just blown off.

I had the same response to "50 First Dates," which is just a goofy, irrational movie in terms of "being realistic," yet I still had a positive reaction to it. I don't judge it by a rational framework, per se, even though it's consistently within its own framework. (Even the first GI Joe movie was similar, again; not very rational, but internally consistent and meant to engage one's emotions.)
 

Mal12345

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The first comment in the article is what I agree with:

He goes on explaining in detail, proving his point that showing all the details is really boring.

You can just save it all simply by lending the movie some poetic license.
 

Totenkindly

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You can just save it all simply by lending the movie some poetic license.

How far does poetic license go before it disrupts the audience's experience?

I mean, yes, you're right within reason; but the sloppier the creative staff gets, the worse the response might be and the more ineffective the work in question might be.

Also, poetic license suggests there is some "method to the madness" -- like up above, when I discussed Face/Off, it was clear the director was making choices to sacrifice some things for a more emotional response from the audience. (like the gist about Archer coming home with the kid and just taking him in, and the family not being at the hospital.... the scene of him coming home is emotionally evocative in a way that the "realistic version" would not have been, and Lee opted for the emotional card).
 
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