The Dark Knight Rises
People are surprised that a Nolan film is deathly serious?
“’…how super serious it was.”’
That scene in the trailer with the football player running in front of the explosions did not seem serious.
Yes, let’s keep posting the same picture of Christopher Nolan as a means of making fun of him. Well done.
Anyway, I loved the film and actually thought it had quite a bit of levity in some scenes; that surprised me. I think The Dark Knight is still the best of the three, but The Dark Knight Rises is simply stunning on a real IMAX screen (Pfister is amazing) and more immersive than any 3D I’ve ever seen. The 165 minute runtime flew by for me and I actually think it would have benefited from being longer, so I can definitely sympathize with the criticism that it was rushed. But, personally, I will always give points to ambition, even if that means there are a few stumbles. And this movie has ambition in spades. Anne Hathaway delivers, Bale continues to go under-appreciated, Hardy really delivers – his cadence and rhythm of speech is incredible and very unique/menacing, as is his physicality. Anyway, everyone delivers and the final product is a grand scale spectacle, sometimes messy; a combination of pulp, commentary and melodrama that never loses its heart, satisfyingly concluding this trilogy. My favorite film of the year as of now and I look forward to a repeat viewing soon.
Now hopefully everyone here who hates Nolan (so everyone) will just avoid the film, because they will, without any doubt, also hate this film. But like another member here said, basically if you liked the first two Batman films then watch The Dark Knight Rises; if you didn’t, don’t. Pretty simple. But people (and film snobs in particular) love to hate certain films, so I’m imagining many will see it simply for that reason.
I’m glad you liked the film, Takaawesome. I haven’t seen it yet. but . . .
Really? By the end of the summer there will be 60-70 threads (at least) all on this film, the past two installments, Nolan in general, etc.? Are we so touchy about the things that we like and fetishise that it’s going to be insisted that we take all of them with prim and dire seriousness with Nolan seems to regard himself and his work? Is that what we’re doing now?
No and I didn’t imply that; but rehashing the same picture that to me was already a lame joke/criticism just seems… trollish and/or lazy? But you’re right, maybe someone else will find it funny or valuable.
And I hope you’re wrong about the thread-count… But that could very well turn out to be true – but I always keep in mind what either Polaris or HoL said once (I always mix the two up for whatever reason) – to never judge a film by it’s audience. I think this is deadly. If I did this, I would hate a decent chunk of the films that I love.
But at any rate, I just thought your joke was lame.
It was lame, yes (but, come on, that picture is itself ridiculously lame, right?). But I’m genuinely surprised that someone would expect anything but grim earnestness from a Nolan Batman film, as that has been a hallmark of the previous two installments (and really Nolan’s filmography as a whole).
I hope I’m wrong about thread count to, but I’m basing that on what I saw here during the releases of Dark Knight and Inception. I’m not at all against discussing the film in a somewhat engaging, somewhat unified fashion, but something about Nolan tends to clog the forums with lots of people who want to say something but don’t want to bother reading or engaging what has already been said about a given film by others, so there end up being a lot of short, go-nowhere threads about more or less exactly the same things.
Just seen it. It’s a good final film in the trilogy. Here’s how the three films stack up:
Batman Begins 7.5/10
The Dark Knight 7/10
The Dark Knight Rises 7/10.
for the record, i laughed out loud when i saw matt’s nolan pic =)
…and i don’t have a problem with the batman movies
“After repeatedly sending Batman down Gotham’s mean streets, Mr. Nolan ends by taking him somewhere new. That’s precisely the point of a late sequence in which he shifts between a multitude of characters and as many locations without losing you, his narrative thread or momentum. His playfulness with the scenes-within-scenes in his last movie, “Inception,” has paid off here. The action interludes are more visually coherent than in his previous Batman films and, as in “Inception,” the controlled fragmentation works on a pleasurable, purely cinematic level.”
This is from the Manohla Dargis review. I can’t think of any way to better sum up this movie. When Nolan put a bunch of different characters and plot lines and situations all over the map and then cuts between them it’s just awesome. It’s like fucking Intolerance.
@ JACOB
Intolerance, eh? I saw that last month and loved it! I really want to see this badly now, on a screen, in a theater!
Overambitious is a good way to describe It. It suffers from an issue of escalation. Increasing expectations and the desire to deliver on those. His focus was spread too thin over too many characters, as opposed to Begins’ focus on Wayne and Dark Knight’s on Joker.
Batman Begins 7/10, Dark Knight 6/10, Dark Knight Rises 5/10
I mean, still best films of it’s genre, no doubt
As thematically cohesive and laser-focused as the screenplay for “The Dark Knight” felt is about how sprawling and unwieldy this sequel is. Yet I particularly enjoyed the middle portion of the film, which hones in on the character of Bruce Wayne when he is at his lowpoint.
that photo is hilarious
Dark Knight Rises was pretty much exactly what I expected.
I have to praise the technical and visual quality of the film.
It did come off as a little more pompous than its predecessors.
Overall I prefer the Arkham video games for my Batman fix.
LOL@picture Matt.
“But people (and film snobs in particular) love to hate certain films, so I’m imagining many will see it simply for that reason.”
Actually Tak, you will notice that the consensus around here about Nolan from the ‘snobs’(a group i’m proudly associated with btw hehe) is that he is a decent/competent/ambitious film maker that bites off more than he can chew and is extremely overrated. That is not the same as claiming he is bad.
Having said that, new Batman looks like more of the same so i guess if you didn’t love the previous installments this won’t change your mind. I liked Dark Knight and thought Begins was dull. I’ll check it out on blu-ray
Takkaawesome gets me and DiB confused. Hear that, Polaris? You lucky dog.
I heard they have been showing the new Superman trailer at the start of Dark Knight Rises. Does it look any good hehe
That photo makes him look kind of like Richard Burton.
Thinking about it more, I realize my main gripe with the second and third films.
They never justify their villains having access to the resources they do. Joker’s massive loyal army and inexhaustible resources are only explained by a one off line ‘These kinds of people are attracted to leaders like Joker!’, which doesn’t really do it for me, and it’s the same deal with Bane. I think they’re just leaning on the viewers’ prior knowledge of Batman mythology: Bane has access to all these things because he’s bane, and he just does.
And it’s the same thing they did with Two Face. Does it make sense that somebody would go from pure good to pure evil that quickly and easily because he lost somebody he loved? Absolutely not. But the fans accept it, because they know the mythology from the first time they hear his name that he is going to become Two Face.
These stories do not hold up half as well if you take out the presumption of familiarity with the mythology.
@ JIRIN
SPOILERS
It was just my train of logic on the Joker taking a sort of stranglehold on the criminal element of Gotham the more he imposed himself on the heavies (from the first meeting with that basic syndicate, to the “aggressive expansion” scene where it is implied he kills Gamble and assimilates his men in a might-makes-right fashion (having “tryouts”, making them fight to the death it would seem) and I just assumed he continued doing this, unseen by the audience, with other crews in Gotham until he gained enough influence to infiltrate even the police, which by that point I figured the unexplained and Kafkaesque infiltration was supposed symbolic, and the Joker himself is not meant to be taken as a literal being though he is presented as though he is grounded in reality. He, Batman and Dent are in my opinion meant to represent differing aspects of the psyche.
Dent’s transformation is also symbolic in my opinion. At the beginning, it is obvious what influences were put upon the character (the ideal Kennedy brother John and Robert never had), and the trauma of losing the one he loves – considering that it was based on a “choice” presented by the Joker that Batman ultimately made, we see Dent would rather be dead than having to suffer the injury he bore in losing his “other half”. Thus he does a turnaround in personality and the trauma of this loss of his other half (both in Rachel Dawes and in what she meant to him internally) afflicts him to the point where he is beginning to see the “split” in things (already represented in the duality between Batman becoming desperate for control as the Joker does all he can to make the pieces swirl further into a blurring flux), and allows himself to be defined by this division from extreme idealism (also upheld in Batman) to determinism and perhaps even fatalism and in partly being aware of that, what remains of his former self tries to maintain a degree of control in the use of “chance”, by way of the coin that he used to use to, as Rachel said, “make [his] own luck”, wherein now it too is divided between two possibilities. It parallels in Batman’s failing attempt in controlling something that cannot be controlled, which is represented in the extremity that is the Joker, who is all about fucking everything up in a very convoluted and orchestrated fashion. He is meant to complement the complex degrees of order in his complex methods of disorder. I think of the George W. Bush-ism, “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
To me anyway, Jirin, though I’ve never religiously followed the comics despite having a love of Batman (indeed the cartoon and Adam West series, plus Keaton and Kilmer variations) as a child followed by a great disinterest in him from my late pubesence to late adolesence, Nolan’s film of The Dark Knight is mainly about self-destruction by way of self-deception, the ego inevitably failing to override the unconscious and eventually paying the price for its desire at controlling what naturally cannot be controlled. That is basically what I saw in it, anyway.
END OF SPOLIERS
Actually Tak, you will notice that the consensus around here about Nolan from the ‘snobs’(a group i’m proudly associated with btw hehe) is that he is a decent/competent/ambitious film maker that bites off more than he can chew and is extremely overrated. That is not the same as claiming he is bad.
SPOILERS
That’s pretty accurate to how I feel about his films. This one in particular was just so greedy. He wanted it all, he wanted to play up Bane like he was big bad Joker 2.0, he wanted this Catwoman subplot, he wanted this catwoman romance between her and bruce, he wanted romance between bruce and this “miranda investor”, he wanted all these throwbacks to his previous batman films (scarecrow, liam neeson, the pit, ect.) He wanted his robin subplot, he wanted his commissioner gordon / new commissioner (wtf) subplot, he wanted his “Talia twist”, he wanted his “self-sacrfice batman dies J/K”, He wanted this massive scope of “city-wide military panic” that had to trump The Dark Knight, He wanted this “war” between the police and these carbon copy “bad guys”, I mean how the fuck would you expect to cram all that nonsense into one film and expect it to have any focus whatsoever. I would’ve picked maybe two of all those things, and made the film about that.
Again, I say… Greedy.
I also felt like he was trying to make some kind of ‘Babel’ statement about Western excess, but that statement was extremely unfocused.
Not to say I didn’t enjoy the movie, it just didn’t accomplish what it set out to.
I wonder if Heath Ledger were alive, if Bane would have also liberated Arkham Asylum.
Spoilers
That’s another example of relying on the fans’ knowledge of the comics. Now, I’ve never read the comics. A majority of what I know about Batman mythology is from the video game Arkham City. So just a month ago, I learned that Raj al Gul has a daughter named Talia and that she’s an ‘enemy love interest’ for Batman. If I didn’t know that, would I have found that reveal believable? I don’t know. I didn’t know Two Face’s name was Harvey Dent.
@Axelumog
One man’s greedy is another man’s ambitious?
http://fablog.ehrensteinland.com/2012/07/20/colorado-quest-ce-que-cest/
http://fablog.ehrensteinland.com/2012/07/21/fait-diver-theres-nothing-quite-like-money-2/
Spoilers
The Robin thing I suspected pretty early in the film, if only because they chose an actor who looks strikingly like Chris O’Donnell and whose hairline is exactly the same shape as Adam West’s Robin.
Being ambitious and taking risks has a lot of merit, but don’t underestimate the power of intimate focus in cinema!
I would like ask to excuse me, but there is too much bad buzz about the director who has so much great potential and has already achieved more than any of young filmmakers would even think of.
Most of the statements above, in my opinion, just make no sense to me and are rather biased look, based on Nolan’s rising prominence in Hollywood.
As for being ambitious, I believe it is one of the main characteristics of any director. It has to flow in blood of every filmmaker, who strives to achieve something. There is nothing negative about it. Your all-time favorite directors like Kubrick, Welles and many others were all disliked for their great and ambitious works. This is natural to filmmakers, who want to have their works as achievements.
As long as Nolan does not make anything close to Cameron’s Avatar, I say he stands right above many filmmakers of his generation.
I have to agree with Billy. I find the more successful a film is with the general public and box office on here, it immediately seems to be denied recognition of any intellectual, philosophical or emotional merit. It seems rather polarizing and quick to judge but then again everyone is entitled to their opinion and I don’t want to seem as if I’m saying it’s not okay to have your own view, but rather to not fall into hasty generalization unless those are your true feelings about it.
Of course, before I accidentally open a can of worms upon myself that I didn’t want, some box office triumphs and crowd pleasing pieces are more obvious than most in their lack of credibility. In my opinion, at least Nolan has put in ways to make your mind work, whether or not you like it. I don’t feel he’s telling me how to think, he’s showing me this piece of work he’s put together (imagine a folded paper crane, for lack of a better analogy) and how it can form into other things. What those things inspire in me I guess is between the film and the way I interpret it. I have to say, in a strange and roundabout way, if it weren’t for the Hollywood successes of Nolan and people like Scorsese, Oliver Stone, and the Wachowski Brothers to name a few, I wouldn’t have ventured on to people like Ozu, Tarkovsky, or Pasolini among others. Then again that’s the course I took based on internal fixations.
jupiter41
Just got back from the premiere. Thoughts? Right now I’d say (inevitably we must compare the two) that it doesn’t match its predecessor. I’d still definitely recommend seeing it.
In gauging my friends’ reactions, everyone seemed to agree that they weren’t expecting, or much liking, just how super serious it was.
I felt that it’s biggest weaknesses were cohesion and over-ambition, on all levels. Many more thoughts, but I’m exhausted, will return.