"The Dark Knight Rises" Review and Discussion Thread (spoilers)

[stj]

^^^If the entire trilogy is Triumph of the Will, maybe it's a good thing to miss the point?

Beyond the obvious joke, especially if the movies' overall theme is the will, skipping over physical reality falsifies the theme. Physical reality is an inescapable constraint. Wishing it away with FX and appeals to genre conventions means loading the dice, instead of honestly confronting the issues involved. Which do include physical reality for one.

Even if you try to reduce the will in these movies to a matter of being willing to believe in myths or to enact those myths, the assumption that myth binds society or polity is a gross misreading of the human world. On that level it's all too silly for words.

[RoJoHen]

Gojira wrote:

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Batman Begins is my favorite of the nolan trilogy. I think it set the right tone. The Dark Night did not have that tone...it was too serious. The Dark Knight Rises did move back to that tone more.

I would agree with you here. The Dark Knight feels like the odd man out compared to the other films in the trilogy. It doesn't even feel like it takes place in the same city as the first.

What happened to Wayne Tower? What happened to that monorail after it got blown up? I would have liked some mention of these things in TDK.

[Gaith]

<Plinkett voice>

Hey, look, someone dressed up as 7 of 9's mother!

... I don't know why I'm posting this here

[Captrek]

I don’t know either, but I’m glad you did.

[Trekker4747]

Captrek wrote:

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I don’t know either, but I’m glad you did.

Likewise.

Bane is HOT!

[Agent Richard07]

Gojira wrote:

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I have an appreciation for Nolan's Batman movies but I have to say that, for me, they are too serious. Yes, Batman is a Dark charcter but I think Nolan went too dark and serious. Even though I have been a DC comics fan all of my life, I think the Marvel Movies really set the right tone for superhero movies.

At the end of the day superhero movies need to have some fun and have some fantasy elements to them. The Nolan movies, while engaging and exciting, they lacked some fun.

I wouldn't have wanted Nolan's trilogy to be like the Marvel movies. They were fun, but there are too many of them already. It's nice to have something different. And more than that, it's nice to see a movie that takes the genre seriously. I wouldn't want everything to be popcorn entertainment.

RoJoHen wrote:

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The Dark Knight feels like the odd man out compared to the other films in the trilogy. It doesn't even feel like it takes place in the same city as the first.

What happened to Wayne Tower? What happened to that monorail after it got blown up? I would have liked some mention of these things in TDK.

I didn't like that Gotham City was obviously Manhattan in Rises. Nolan could have jazzed the cityscape up a little more.

Gaith wrote:

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Hey, look, someone dressed up as 7 of 9's mother!

Gotta love cosplay.

[Forbin]

If you watch the extras on the Rises BluRay, they show that the monorail is visible in some of the wide establishing shots of the city. It's there, but it REALLY has to be pointed out to be seen.

[Samurai8472]

Agent Richard07 wrote:

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I didn't like that Gotham City was obviously Manhattan in Rises. Nolan could have jazzed the cityscape up a little more.

Seeing the Freedom tower after Bane blows up the streets and bridges felt like a lazy thing to keep in.

Takes you out of the movie

"Oh look they filmed in NYC"

[Trekker4747]

I think the Freedom Tower would be more appropriate in Metropolis, anyway.

[GalaxyX]

stj wrote:

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^^^If the entire trilogy is Triumph of the Will, maybe it's a good thing to miss the point?

Beyond the obvious joke, especially if the movies' overall theme is the will, skipping over physical reality falsifies the theme. Physical reality is an inescapable constraint. Wishing it away with FX and appeals to genre conventions means loading the dice, instead of honestly confronting the issues involved. Which do include physical reality for one.

Even if you try to reduce the will in these movies to a matter of being willing to believe in myths or to enact those myths, the assumption that myth binds society or polity is a gross misreading of the human world. On that level it's all too silly for words.

Ya that's pretty much what I would have said.

I love the whole triumph of the will idea, but it falls apart if I can't believe the journey there.

Btw holy crap female Bane! yummy!! lol

[Sci]

Yminale wrote:

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So what?! People get upset about a lot of things but what you fail to realize is that people's attention span is pretty short. People would get angry for a week or two and then the news cycle moves on.

You asked if government could be totally apathetic. I gave you a real world example.

I'm sorry, but Bane's takeover of Gotham is just not comparable to the Hurricane Katrina response. It's completely fair to say that the federal and state governments responded lethargically to Katrina, but that was a function, frankly, of class and racial biases -- the majority of people left in New Orleans were poor black folk, after all; the wealthier white folk to whom the governing elite tend to feel the closest kinship had escaped. And while the government's response was lethargic, it was not nonexistent.

Meanwhile, Bane's takeover of Gotham resembles, quite frankly, nothing that has ever happened in modern history. You are, after all, taking about the violent overthrow of a municipal government and the taking of millions of people hostage with a nuclear bomb, by a foreign terrorist organization.

The closest comparison we can realistically draw upon would be 9/11 -- a single day's attack on three buildings in two cities. Not an entire city taken hostage for five months. 9/11 happened 11 years ago, and the country still hasn't gotten over it.

So the idea that "[p]eople would get angry for a week or two and then the news cycle moves on" is just absurd. People don't just forget about their most important city being cut off from the world by a foreign terrorist because Kim Kardashian is pregnant. This is the sort of thing that would profoundly change national politics and culture, that would traumatize the country for decades afterwards.

But, that doesn't mean that the federal government's response to Bane's actions in The Dark Knight Rises is itself implausible. After all -- Bane cut off all their options very quickly; anything they could possibly do openly would almost inevitably end in the destruction of the city and the deaths of millions. And their main attempt at covert action ended in failure (because of Miranda/Talia's presence among the corporate hostages).

Personally, I think it's completely plausible that the federal government would essentially try to appease a Bane-like figure in an attempt to avoid the instant nuclear death of millions. (Though, of course, being that no terrorist organization has ever taken a city hostage with nuclear weapons before, we can't know for certain.)