We saw "Dark Knight Rises" and it was good
Aug. 6th, 2012 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwex8/10 overall. Some 'dear god why do you not pick up the phone when it's Admiral Ackbar calling' moments but a solid ending. There's also a big social/plot thing that is sort of spoilery, so that's cut-tagged below.
In relation to the criticisms I've read:
- yes, the movie runs long. There are places where it was obviously cut. I think they probably could have taken out another 10-15 minutes without weakening it.
- yes, Tom Hardy's Bane does not dominate the movie the way Heath Ledger's Joker did. But that was a unique performance and it's unfair to slam Hardy for it. Given what he has to go on, Hardy does very well.
- yes, the movie pontificates a bit. But so what - Batman (good Batman, that is) has always had elements of a morality play in it. I'm old enough to have read Batman before he was the Dark Knight and I remember how important it was for DC to have a morally ambiguous major hero. Bale's Dark Knight isn't so much about moral ambiguity as it is a deep dive into the character's psyche and motivations. Given that, I think the Nolan's script is appropriate and I particularly give them marks for avoiding obvious "emo" or self-tortured moments. Michael Caine's Alfred particularly shines as a moral foil for Bruce Wayne, though I wish he'd avoided the weepier bits.
First of all, the ending. Aside from Caine/Alfred's graveside weeping, I really liked the ending. It was wholly predictable in every aspect, and wholly right. It had the key comic-book tropes you want from an arc ending: satisfaction, resolution, and hints of futures.
I was annoyed at places because, seriously, STUPID PLOT. TVTropes calls it Idiot Plot - the thing where the plot would not advance if the characters were not idiots. The police going underground en masse... really? And does NOBODY know how to walk on ice? Really? And you want the villainess to walk you into the bad guy's lair? Really? And you're going to take a thousand guys and charge them blindly down a broad street at criminals with automatic weapons? Really?
Each of those is frustrating because with a little work they could have been handled much better. OK, the need to make a whole city's police force disappear so you can reappear them later when needed would have taken a bit more cleverness, but I can write it and so can most of you I expect.
Which brings me to the biggest problem I have with the script/plot: it wouldn't work. One of the things that makes the script so good is that the Nolans carefully weave in elements of current reality. If you don't see echoes of #Occupy in the story then you're not paying attention. And high-speed trading is big in the news the past few years. They even get a lot of little details right, but here's the thing they miss: mass hostage-taking is over. We live in a post-AA93 world. People who know they're being held hostage and are likely to get killed don't sit still for that. You really think a thousand criminals with guns would be able to hold onto a couple million New Yorkers? I think not.
Some people would cooperate. Some would take advantage. But a lot would also say "fuck that" and jump the bad guys. Not necessarily publicly, or en masse, but enough. Even bad guys have to sleep some time, or have to walk through bad neighborhoods. When the takers are outnumbered hundreds to one it doesn't take long for the hostages to flip things. People may not be heroes when the gun is pointed at their heads, though Aurora may be a counter-argument, but Bane just doesn't have enough force to point enough guns at enough heads, and that's game over. The entire combined might of the Stasi, the Red Army, and the East German government couldn't keep Berliners behind their wall. Bane has far less force and no apparatus to work with - the island would be mostly empty in weeks, and he'd be facing down a large angry mob. Even if you buy that his core group are kamikaze fanatics, the majority of the freed prisoners probably want to live, too.
I remember having a similar problem with Inception: if you stop and walk through the story logically, accepting the premises as given, it doesn't work. I don't know if that's endemic to Nolan's work, which is otherwise good and thought-provoking. He just needs to stop and look at his big-picture stuff more.
In relation to the criticisms I've read:
- yes, the movie runs long. There are places where it was obviously cut. I think they probably could have taken out another 10-15 minutes without weakening it.
- yes, Tom Hardy's Bane does not dominate the movie the way Heath Ledger's Joker did. But that was a unique performance and it's unfair to slam Hardy for it. Given what he has to go on, Hardy does very well.
- yes, the movie pontificates a bit. But so what - Batman (good Batman, that is) has always had elements of a morality play in it. I'm old enough to have read Batman before he was the Dark Knight and I remember how important it was for DC to have a morally ambiguous major hero. Bale's Dark Knight isn't so much about moral ambiguity as it is a deep dive into the character's psyche and motivations. Given that, I think the Nolan's script is appropriate and I particularly give them marks for avoiding obvious "emo" or self-tortured moments. Michael Caine's Alfred particularly shines as a moral foil for Bruce Wayne, though I wish he'd avoided the weepier bits.
First of all, the ending. Aside from Caine/Alfred's graveside weeping, I really liked the ending. It was wholly predictable in every aspect, and wholly right. It had the key comic-book tropes you want from an arc ending: satisfaction, resolution, and hints of futures.
I was annoyed at places because, seriously, STUPID PLOT. TVTropes calls it Idiot Plot - the thing where the plot would not advance if the characters were not idiots. The police going underground en masse... really? And does NOBODY know how to walk on ice? Really? And you want the villainess to walk you into the bad guy's lair? Really? And you're going to take a thousand guys and charge them blindly down a broad street at criminals with automatic weapons? Really?
Each of those is frustrating because with a little work they could have been handled much better. OK, the need to make a whole city's police force disappear so you can reappear them later when needed would have taken a bit more cleverness, but I can write it and so can most of you I expect.
Which brings me to the biggest problem I have with the script/plot: it wouldn't work. One of the things that makes the script so good is that the Nolans carefully weave in elements of current reality. If you don't see echoes of #Occupy in the story then you're not paying attention. And high-speed trading is big in the news the past few years. They even get a lot of little details right, but here's the thing they miss: mass hostage-taking is over. We live in a post-AA93 world. People who know they're being held hostage and are likely to get killed don't sit still for that. You really think a thousand criminals with guns would be able to hold onto a couple million New Yorkers? I think not.
Some people would cooperate. Some would take advantage. But a lot would also say "fuck that" and jump the bad guys. Not necessarily publicly, or en masse, but enough. Even bad guys have to sleep some time, or have to walk through bad neighborhoods. When the takers are outnumbered hundreds to one it doesn't take long for the hostages to flip things. People may not be heroes when the gun is pointed at their heads, though Aurora may be a counter-argument, but Bane just doesn't have enough force to point enough guns at enough heads, and that's game over. The entire combined might of the Stasi, the Red Army, and the East German government couldn't keep Berliners behind their wall. Bane has far less force and no apparatus to work with - the island would be mostly empty in weeks, and he'd be facing down a large angry mob. Even if you buy that his core group are kamikaze fanatics, the majority of the freed prisoners probably want to live, too.
I remember having a similar problem with Inception: if you stop and walk through the story logically, accepting the premises as given, it doesn't work. I don't know if that's endemic to Nolan's work, which is otherwise good and thought-provoking. He just needs to stop and look at his big-picture stuff more.
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no subject
Date: 2012-08-06 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-06 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-06 06:01 pm (UTC)That said, the article's assumption that markets crash after disasters is shaky at best. Generally there's movement/volatility but the direction of the move is often related to the fundamentals. Building stocks tend to go up after disasters because, hey, people need to rebuild. Likewise healthcare. Tech stocks often seem to dip on disasters, etc. More than you probably wanted to know.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-06 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-06 10:58 pm (UTC)I think the problem with this was really just that Bane never explicitly added to his list of conditions for not detonating the bomb: "Oh yeah, and by the way, if my henchmen start dying mysterious deaths at the hands of vigilantes, we blow this thing sky high."
no subject
Date: 2012-08-07 02:44 pm (UTC)I will handwave that Bane's fanatic core are untouchable. But he's got maybe a dozen of them? His biggest force is that 1000 violent felons he released. And violent felons are (a) violent and (b) stupid (or they'd be violent still-free men). They have short life expectancies to begin with.
As I'm given to understand it, the people on AA93 saw the hijackers kill people, and understood that more would be killed. But probably at some point they realized they were going to die no matter what and decided to act. If Bane's time horizon had been days, maybe even a couple weeks, I might buy it. Five months, no way.
I think this is a fundamental change that has to be dealt with in plots to make them more believable. Like, every novel and movie now has to deal with the fact that a potential victim can pull out a cellphone and call for help. There are lots of ways to deal with it (forgot phone, no signal, steal phone, jam phone, etc etc) but it's a reality that has to be addressed or the suspension of disbelief gets hurt. I thought B:DKR dealt well with so many aspects of 21st-century reality that I was disappointed they ignored this one.