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

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by JacksonArcher, Jul 10, 2012.

?

How do you rate "The Dark Knight Rises"?

  1. Excellent

    147 vote(s)
    58.3%
  2. Good

    61 vote(s)
    24.2%
  3. Fair

    26 vote(s)
    10.3%
  4. Poor

    12 vote(s)
    4.8%
  5. Terrible

    6 vote(s)
    2.4%
  1. Silvercrest

    Silvercrest Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 4, 2003
    Thor:
    I say thee nay, mortal! Surely thou jest! Grounded??? Mundane??? I be a god of Asgard! I be not mundane! And I canst not be grounded!

    No, seriously, I can't be grounded. Everytime I ground mine hammer and try calling the lightning, I get this cross-current that makes my fillings hurt. And sometimes I turneth back to Don Blake without intending to. I need to talk to Shazam and see how he makes it work.
     
  2. Set Harth

    Set Harth Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 10, 2010
    Location:
    Annwn
    Not in the comics either. Not when you have characters casting magic spells and making deals with demons, or when one of your characters is the son of the devil.
     
  3. A beaker full of death

    A beaker full of death Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 23, 2002
    Oh please. For every one Doc Strange you've got a Corps of Green Lanterns, all-powerful aliens, ghosts, demons and sorcerers over at DC. Meanwhile the bread and butter of Marvel was a virtual army of New York-based street-level crime-fighters (or criminals). To which DC has... Batman, tooling around his imaginary city in his limitless supply of cars and planes.
    When he's not IN SPACE.
     
  4. Gojira

    Gojira Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Oct 15, 2008
    Location:
    Stompin' on Tokyo
    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 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.
     
  5. Alidar Jarok

    Alidar Jarok Everything in moderation but moderation Moderator

    Joined:
    Apr 14, 2003
    Location:
    Norfolk, VA
    I don't think whether a film is derivative depends on its realism. Thematically, the story has always been about personal will. In that sense, his training to be Batman in the first movie and his overcoming his physical ailments in the last movie represent a clean, consistent literary theme. If you miss the theme for the details while already accepting plenty of fantastical details, you miss the point of the films. And I'm using films plural. If you're focusing on his knee, you aren't understanding the entire trilogy.
     
  6. stj

    stj Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Dec 27, 2006
    Location:
    the real world
    ^^^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.
     
  7. RoJoHen

    RoJoHen Awesome Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 14, 2000
    Location:
    QC, IL, USA
    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.
     
  8. Gaith

    Gaith Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    May 11, 2008
    Location:
    Oregon
    <Plinkett voice>

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

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

    Captrek Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    May 24, 2009
    Location:
    Captrek
    I don’t know either, but I’m glad you did.
     
  10. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

    Joined:
    Jul 16, 2001
    Location:
    Trekker4747
    Likewise.

    Bane is HOT!
     
  11. Agent Richard07

    Agent Richard07 Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jun 20, 2001
    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.

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

    Gotta love cosplay. :bolian:
     
  12. Forbin

    Forbin Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 15, 2001
    Location:
    I said out, dammit!
    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.
     
  13. Samurai8472

    Samurai8472 Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 27, 2007
    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"
     
  14. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

    Joined:
    Jul 16, 2001
    Location:
    Trekker4747
    I think the Freedom Tower would be more appropriate in Metropolis, anyway. ;)
     
  15. GalaxyX

    GalaxyX Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Jan 28, 2004
    Location:
    Canada
    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
     
  16. Sci

    Sci Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 2, 2002
    Location:
    Montgomery County, State of Maryland
    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.)