Tom Hardy for Batman 3?

Millar sure seems to love the sound of his own voice. Maybe he should go into politics or talk radio or become a sports agent.

 

That's exactly my biggest pet peeve about the Nolan movies. I see no point in doing superheroes if you try to do them just like everything else. Superheroes are supposed to big, exciting and larger than life. If that's not the sort of thing you like, why are you even reading comic books?

 

Dude, it's Batman, the only superhero that could be realistic, because it's just a man who uses technology to fight crime. If you like the cartoony approach, there's the Burton and Schumacher movies, or that 60s TV show, and lot's of other superhero movies. I have been wanting someone to do Batman exactly like this for a long time now. But that's just Batman. Superman, Spider-Man, etc... they can have the supervillains they deserve. Batman needs more realistic villains.

 

Superhero movie? I thought I was watching a crime drama with a superhero archetype. Killer Croc would be cool. Give him that lizard skin condition they gave Reptile on that Mortal Kombat spec film.

 

I like how whenever Tom Hardy is mentioned around here it has to be mentioned he's "recovering" from the Nemesis role. a movie he did almost 10 years ago and is a single blip in his career.

Seriousy, guys, I doubt the guy has been strugling or in need of a "career boost" since NEM. Frankly, the movie wasn't that important.

 

Exactly. That was the great thing about The Dark Knight. It wasn't a superhero movie.

 

Actually Hardy has said the failure of Star Trek: Nemesis seriously knocked his career off course, which he took so badly that it was part of the reason he turned to booze and drugs.

 

Way to totally misunderstand what I was saying. There's a long distance between fun, fantastic superhero adventures of the best Batman comics and the utter stupidity of the Schumacher movies or the outright parody of the 60s show. Nolan gets the general tone right, but he forgets the fun way too often for my tastes.

Like the Joker, Two-Face, Killer Croc, Mr. Freeze, Bane and Clayface, you mean?

 

I suppose at his most basic Deadshot is just an assassin who uses theatrics. Maybe he was trained by the League of Shadows in Nolan's world now that I give it some thought.

 

Yes, like the Joker, Two-Face and Scarecrow, as we've seen them in the Nolan movies. The idea of taking the ridiculous and re-inventing it in a down-to-earth, more realistic and more believable way. Just like they turned the Joker into a psychopath having nasty scars around his mouth. I love that. What I totally don't want to see is the Penguin on a giant rubber duck running for mayor. In the Nolan-verse, this would be a Mafia head with a crippled hand, at most. Not someone who's going to terrorize the city with an army of penguins. I hope you get what I mean.

 

I see the Penguin played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

 

Oh, I see. You like it when the character is depicted completely differently from the comics.

And BTW, Nolan wasn't the one who turned the Joker into a psychopath. That was folks like Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Denny O'Neill, Neal Adams, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers.

What in the world do crippled hands have to do with Penguins? And why would you nickname someone with a crippled hand "The Penguin"?

 

How was Dark Knight Joker different from his comic counterpart aside from appearance?

 

I don't see how Nolan is really taking that much away from the villains he's used thus far. I think he's stayed true to the essence of the characters and has made some alterations to them to perhaps modernize or make them more realistic, but at the end of the day these characters are still true to their comic-book counterparts.

Just looking at them stylistically or aesthetically speaking: The Joker from The Dark Knight had white make-up, a purple suit, and green hair. He was also very much in character from the Joker we've come to expect in the comics. Yes, there were some deviations, but I'm sure that was because Nolan and Ledger wanted to form their own unique version of the Joker that was different and fresh than what we've seen before. Two-Face had the scarred face- heck, he even had the burnt side part of his suit just like the comics. Ra's al Ghul was probably the most toned down, but even then he was still very much the Ra's al Ghul we've come to expect in the comics, with his ideology very much intact. I don't see a problem with just giving the Scarecrow a burlap sack- it was convenient for him, as a psychologist, to take it on and off. Plus, he had a sort of interesting costume with the straight jacket. It made sense for the character.

Nolan applied his approach to some of the characters that would make perfect sense in a more realistic approach, and his approach has never once diluted the characters and what they were characteristically from the comics. He has always stayed true to the essence of the characters, but like any artist put his own individualistic, creative touch on them for new audiences. He's purposely staying away from some of the less realistic characters, like Mr. Freeze or Clayface, so it makes sense that he'd leave those characters alone and instead focus on characters that fit his aesthetic approach to this iteration of the Batman on-screen mythology. Someone else will come along, after Nolan, and do their own approach. Burton's was different than Schumacher's, and Schumacher's was obviously different than Nolan's, and Nolan's is different than any of the others. However, Nolan still stays true to the essence of these stories and characters and that's the most important thing.

 

Well said Jackson, I agree completely. One of the great things about having mythological characters like comic book characters is that you can take them and reinterpret and "re-imagine" them over and over again so they're fresh and new.

 

The fact that this Joker paints his face white rather than having his entire skin permanently bleached out is a huge difference. If he can wipe his makeup off anytime he wants, it pretty much evaporates the entire rationale for the character that existed for 50+ years in the comics. The Dark Knight version favored knives when the comics character was much more likely to use a gun or an acid-squirting flower. As far as I can recall, the movie version never used the character's trademark Joker venom to kill his victims. The comic charcter never had a Glasgow smile. And then there's the fact that he hardly ever smiles or laughs.

Don't get me wrong, Ledger did an amazing job playing what he was given, but the Joker that was presented in The Dark Knight didn't have too much in common with the comics character, outside of the basic "psycho killer who looks like a clown" concept.

My point is that as good as Nolan's movies can be, he has a disappointing tendency to shy away from some trademark elements of his source material (costumes, the bat crashing through Bruce Wayne's window, the batcave) for fear that they'll look too "silly" on the big screen. And I find it equally disappointing that so many comic fans seem to go right along with it.

Batman to my mind is fun, dark, pulpy, operatic and larger than life all at once. If you drain away all of the fantastic elements in favor of a naturalistic style as Nolan seems intent on doing, you lose half of what's cool about Batman, IMO. If a filmmaker came along and made a Batman movie that was halfway in tone between Burton & Nolan (or a live-action Bruce Timm), that would be the definitive cinematic Batman for me.

 

The Batcave though wasn't fully furnished in "Batman Begins" and the mansion was burned down at the end of the film. The Bat bunker in Wayne Tower was straight from the 70's comics and something that Grant Morrison brought back for Dick Grayson to use in "Batman and Robin". I am confident that we'll see a fully furnished Batcave in the third film. As for the bat crashing through the window, we got a different interpretation of that which was fine with me.

 

The comics' headquarters underneath the Wayne Foundation still looks like the Batcave, though, not a well-lit, anonymous basement storeroom. And they could have easily had Wayne Manor and the Batcave fully rebuilt & furnished in the second film, but they obviously chose not to. It still shows that he's rather uncomfortable with the more pulpy nature of the source material.

The scene where Alfred idly points out a bat fluttering around in a corner of a room in the mansion? Yeah, that was much more dramatic than a bat crashing through a window.

 

No I'm talking about the scene at the start of the film where Bruce first falls through the old well and finds the cave which triggers his fear of bats. It's clearly meant to be a life long thing with Bruce not just one moment while contemplating in his study.

I don't think they could have had Wayne Manor fully rebuilt "with improvements in the south east wing" in six months which I believe is when "Dark Knight" opens.

 

No, when they take the essence of that character and build it again in a non comical fashion.

How the hell would a guy with permanently bleached skin fit in that world? I found the reinvention with the scars more realistic and thus far better.