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The Dark Knight to have a female villain?

Yeah, but how does that really fit in with her working with not-Lex (but she doesn't know it's not-Lex) like two weeks later? That's really weird.
 
Couldn't Ra's just go, like, have some more sex? Or do Lazarus Pits mess up the twin gentlemen?
Ra's has been fecund across the centuries. Talia is not his only child. She had a much older sister named Nyssa, and she had a brother, Dusan. Nyssa was finally killed by Cass, and Ra's transferred his spirit into Dusan's body in "The Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul." (So, biologically, Talia is now her father's sister. Only in comics...)
 
Talia also had sex with
Jason Todd
at the end of the mini-series. She's had lovers and stuff.
 
Allyn Gibson said:
Ra's has been fecund across the centuries. Talia is not his only child. She had a much older sister named Nyssa, and she had a brother, Dusan. Nyssa was finally killed by Cass, and Ra's transferred his spirit into Dusan's body in "The Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul." (So, biologically, Talia is now her father's sister. Only in comics...)

What do you have against non-traditional families? :p

The twins thing was a rhetorical question, though.

AY: Yeah, I knew about that. Creepy quasi-necrophilia. You know, for the kids. : /
 
I'd like to see Catwoman as the love interest and Harley Quinn as the Villian. The only thing about Harley is it would have been cool to see her break Joker out of Arkam, but I guess that won't be happening. To have Harley Quinn without Joker would just seem like something is missing, but if anyone can pull it off it would be Nolan.
 
I would have introduced Selina just by herself and spent a film having her as Bruce's new love interest then showing Catwoman in the third movie.
 
The Timmverse series also showed that Ra's had a son who was his second in command back in the Wild West days, Arkady Duvall. But unfortunately he was also a violent psycho who Ra's eventually abandoned when Jonah Hex came after them.
 
Dude, it's fucking Christopher Nolan. Man hasn't disappointed yet. You couldn't force me to pass on this movie if you put a gun to my head.

Yes, I rather think someone could. :p

I wonder if they might not go the route of making Selina not quite a villain in this movie. Still a criminal, but more of a petty thief type who teams up with Batman (after about an hour or so) to take down some larger threat (Talia?). That way, we could have Catwoman and some other major female member of the rogue's gallery, and also a love interest for Bats. ;)
 
I would argue again that Talia is the way she is through conditioning and breeding along with training. Talia is meant to be nothing more than a desirable object for men since Ra's means for her to mate with a suitable candidate to be his heir. He would have much preferred a son but got Talia instead and has treated her as such. I don't get what is so hard to contemplate about her. Her entire purpose is to serve the means of her father and that is what generates the conflict between her. She is incapable of having a destiny or life of her own. Every time she has attempted to do so she's been either manipulated by Ra's or forces belonging to Ra or has come back on her own whim. This is the tragedy of Talia al Ghul.

I'm not having any trouble grasping the character - I'm saying the way her "tragedy" is written is dumb. It's a contrived tragedy which anyone as intelligent as she is said to be would easily throw off by realizing, hey, I'm a grown woman, I'm a master assassin with mad organizational skills, and I don't have to please Daddy, who's been treating me like shit all these years, and if Bruce doesn't want me, I don't need him either. The girl needs to read a copy of "He's Just Not that Into You".

I mean, you're saying the very things about her that make her an unlikeable character - she is incapable of having a destiny of her own. Why? She's supposedly an extremely intelligent, capable person. She's manipulated by Ra's (or Nyssa, or Bruce, over and over again), which indicates to me she's weak willed and stupid. Why that is considered a good villain or a fabulous love interest for someone as strong willed and smart as Bruce Wayne is unfathomable - it breaks one's suspension of disbelief. Or at least it breaks mine.

The main reason I don't care for Ra's and Talia as villains is their plans always seem remarkably dumb - the very epitome of overly convoluted, cliche comic book villain crap complete with pompous, posturing monologues.

Which brings me back to 'Liam Neeson made it work'.

A monologue about how corrupt the world is and you've got to fix it, well, it's far too easy to go into righteous fanaticism territory. Liam Neeson makes his grandiose aims and terrorist plans seem calm and sensible, or at least is able to present himself as such. He's almost unassuming about it: This violence is how you fix things, I'm going ahead with it, probably not a good idea to get in my way, waiter get me the check. I think with the wrong casting Ra's al Ghul could have been a pretty weak villain in that movie.

I dunno. Skimming Wikipedia there's something vageuly silly about the guy. The sinister foreigner who is sinister and ancient and has an evil plan.

I heartily agree all the way around. Nolan did a very good thing by changing the basic motivation of Ra's away from eco-terrorism (lord, some of the comic book monolgues about why wiping out 9/10ths of humanity to restore the purity of the earth is a brilliant idea on his part are unbelieveably painful) to correcting the corruption of civilization. It's equally as nutty, but it makes for a tighter story as to why Gotham specifically would be targeted, and it was a fun "shadow history" bit in his speech at the end about burning London and loading trade ships with plague rats. It also put the aims of the League into a more reasonable scale - destroying one city versus 9/10ths of humanity. And I personally loved the business about decoy front men and the question - never really answered - about whether or not Ra's al Ghul was immortal.

Lapis Exilis said:
For a brief period they crossed her over into Superman and she took over LexCorp and she got interesting for about half a minute -

Yeah, I generally agree, although it didn't t make a lot of sense. I mean, Osama bin Laden is/was pretty good recruiter, organizer and leader of men, but I wouldn't put him in charge of General Electric. Aside from the obvious reasons, I'm not really sure the skill set that permits one to run a global criminal-terrorist conspiracy is exactly the same skill set required to be a legitimate CEO.

Well of course it didn't make sense - what in comics does? But it was nice to see her actually have a plan of her own for once. She could be such an interesting character, if they could stop playing her as hot Fatal Attraction psycho with a Daddy complex.
 
The point is that I have always felt that Talia should have been in "Batman Begins" but if she does appear in "The Dark Knight Rises" that Nolans and Goyer will find a way to make her work and in an interesting way.
 
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