patriam deserimus casei gratia

New Batflick: meh.

The problem is that it was too serious to be fun, and too ridiculous to take seriously. There are some things I liked about it, but overall, the movie was trying so hard to be Important that it forgot to be entertaining. It was also too slow-going for me to overlook its flaws. I don’t mind bleakness in a movie if it isn’t heavy-handed, and I don’t mind impossible or unbelievable things if a film allows for them in setting or tone or, on the other hand, if the pace makes them easy to overlook. The Dark Knight Rises, however, wallows in "realistic" darkness for nearly three hours and then cheats with an unlikely happy ending.


Why so... oh, whatever.



Good things:
- Individual performances, especially Anne Hathaway as Catwoman. I was skeptical, but she got the character just right. Her scenes hint at the fun movie we could have had.

- Cinematography and set design. Impressive.

Tedious things
- Talk, talk, talk. So many monologues. As thefreak pointed out, one of Alfred’s was so long it contained flashbacks. Bane had a lot of fairly pointless speeches – his grandstanding at the stadium at least contained important plot points, but the speech about Harvey Dent and the police outside the police station had absolutely zero effect on anything, except for making it impossible for Gordon to make any sort of public appeal. Which wouldn’t have changed anything even if he had, I think.

- Bleakness FAIL. Despite what I said about wallowing, I would have respected this film more if it hadn’t ultimately cheated at being bleak. The iconic Bane-breaks-the-Bat moment turned out to be fixable by prison guards with a rope. (Do they fix him up because it gives him hope, and thus potentially heightens his despair? I guess.) Worse, the whole movie, both with plot and heavy-handed dialogue, is setting up Batman to make the ultimate sacrifice for an undeserving Gotham. But then he survives the nuke (apparently in addition to fixing the autopilot in his Batplane, he also installed a man-sized fridge) and goes into retirement with Selina. They then hang out at an Italian café a lot so that Alfred can come by some day and nod at them.

- Alfred. Michael Caine blubbers and tough-loves his way through several interminable scenes. “I just want you to go outside! Oh, but not as Batman, so I quit. If you have to answer your own doorbell, perhaps you’ll decide not to get yourself killed.” But Caine’s a good actor; it’s not his fault.

Ludicrous things
- The opening sequence. “We brought you some unexpected terrorists!” “Hooray! We shall put them on our plane without further examination.”

- Harvey Dent Day. Really?

- Batman's alleged no-kill rule.


Indiscriminate missile-fire in heavily populated areas is just fine, though.

- The bomb. Can one really do a countdown to the minute with an unstable nuclear device? Also: Wayne's afraid the reactor can be weaponized, and he can destroy it at any time by flooding the chamber, but he decides to hold on to it until... what? Until humans learn not to kill? – Plus: unstable nukes apparently don’t explode when bounced at high speeds on the street. Fair enough. – Finally: If a nuke with a six-mile blast radius exploded offshore, it would likely still be a problem for Gotham, right? Shockwaves, radiation, that kind of thing?

- Underground cops. The police get trapped underground, because apparently they didn’t hear or heed the order to get out of there. (They are shown continuing to advance cautiously deeper in after the order was given, so it’s not just that they couldn’t get out in time.) Then, Gordon and other resistance fighters are able somehow in a city gone mad to keep not only themselves but also the trapped police fed and healthy for several months (including winter). Bane’s anarchists are actively hunting police throughout the city, but they either don’t know or don’t care about the thousands of police trapped right where they’d trapped them. When the police ultimately escape, they have apparently kept up with personal grooming and laundry.

- Street battle. And then the cops charge into machine-gun fire, but it’s a few cutaway scenes until we see any of them get hit. Also, Batman helps by taking out only one of several large vehicle-mounted weapons; I guess that’s so demoralizing for the bad guys that they can’t use any of the other ones.

- Let’s wait until it’s climactic. Gordon’s uprising and Batman’s escape all happen on the last possible day.

- The leap to freedom. When you have your fear of death back, Mr. Wayne, you can be as physically capable as a little girl.

- Chuck-style transglobal teleportation. You can have gritty realism, or you can travel at the speed of plot, but not both. Bruce Wayne escapes and finds his way from Foreign Desert Prison to Gotham in, like, eight hours, so that he has plenty of time to gather up his stuff and make a…

- Bat of fire. This bothered xerlia and also shows up in thefreak's review (mentioned above). An OMG NUKE is set to blow that day, but Batman takes the time to set up a gasoline bat signal on the bridge and then apparently waits around on dangerously thin ice on the off-chance that Gordon or somebody might come along to pick up a flare and light it. Fortunately, that’s how it happens. And then some other characters see the fire bat and think, “huh.”


To be fair, the marketing department probably helped.

- Secret Identity FAIL. “We both has the Orphan-Rage, so you must be Batman!” In fact, everybody seems to know Batman’s secret identity except Gordon, that guy he spends a lot of time with in both identities. Yeah, I know; this is standard comic-bookery.

- Stock market. So the bad guys have l33t hacker-powers, Bruce Wayne’s fingerprints, and inside men everywhere. But the only way to fake a stock transaction is by charging in with guns. Oh, and, hey, high-profile billionaire’s fortune is ruined with risky trades at the same time as terrorists storm the stock market and hook up their iPads. Probably no connection.

- Bane’s demagoguery. Are we meant to understand that people are convinced by this? “I’ve just blown up half the city to give it back to the people. Go back to your homes. Well, unless I’ve blown them up.”

- “We don’t negotiate with terrorists; we just let them take over a major city for five months.” The government is powerless; if only they had the counter-terrorism expertise, military hardware, and financial resources of a single reclusive job-creator. Must have been a failed debt ceiling vote or something.


We sent a special-forces guy who looks vaguely like Obama to help.
What else do you want from us?

I found myself wondering, too, why fighter-jet reconaissance and captured special forces infiltrators didn’t count as “outside interference” for triggering the bomb. Also: that five-month period is the strongest evidence for an impending Batman reboot, if they’re going to tie the character in with a potential Justice League film. No way that Bane’s takeover of Gotham lasts that long in a world that includes any other superheroes, even if we imagine that Superman hasn’t heroed up yet because his film comes later.

- Talia and her motivations. On the one hand, hooray, didn’t see that coming, and nice to tie things together with Batman Begins (even though I actively disliked it, but that’s another story), but it was a surprise mainly because the film kept her from behaving like the Big Bad until the Big Reveal. I guess I can see why she didn’t openly side with Bane so as to hide her identity as the Trigger, and I guess it was good to keep tabs on the resistance, but she seems to go the extra mile. And sure, families are messed up and people react in different ways to grief, but “my dad rejected Bane and so I hated my dad, but once you killed him, Batman, Bane and I teamed up to avenge him and carry out his holy work (and also I made sure to sleep with you)” – really? Also: on Bomb Day, she develops plot-powered teleportation around the city.

- Robin. It was clear to the internet that this would be the last Bale Batman, and that Gordon-Levitt’s character would take up the mantle, presumably (it was surmised incorrectly) after a broken or dead Bruce Wayne could no longer continue. And good that it mostly went down like that. But the fact that he was Robin was just another cheap, throwaway surprise created by changing the character’s backstory. (Clarification: simply changing a backstory is not itself necessarily bad.)

- The Bat Voice. Actually, this didn’t bother me so much; some people mock the idea that he uses it even when alone, but I could easily believe that Christian Bale does that in real life.