Sunday, 29 July 2012

The Dark Knight Rises (but in more detail this time because last time I saw it in a terrible theatre with awful picture quality and sound and I wanted to give this movie a second chance before I got into why I think it's good or bad)

So I saw Batman again and I must admit, now that I've had time to consolidate my thoughts, I really like it. It kicks ass! Christian Bale has never been better. Anne Hathaway turned out to be the perfect choice for Cat Woman. Tom Hardy made a great Bane, and the design for Bane was an interesting, gritty take on what is usually just a juggernaut in a wrestling mask with pipes sticking out of his back. Gary Oldman was great. Michael Caine was great for the ten minutes or so he was around. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt also did a good job of playing the guy who's so obviously Robin it's not even funny.

What I would have loved is some mention  of the Joker. I know they wanted to leave him out as a courtesy to Heath Ledger, but I don't see why they had to eliminate any mention of his character. In the end it meant they had to go out of their way to work around his absence. What we do get is a kind of presence through abscence. At the beginning of TDKR, the good guys are still suffering deep psychological problems because of what the Joker did (in short: causing Harvey Dent to be Two-Face and also blowing some stuff up). Because Harvey Dent was like Jesus to the people of Gotham, commissioner Gordon decided to blame his crimes on Batman, who had no choice but to disappear. So at the beginning of this movie, Bruce Wayne is hiding in his mansion with a cane and some classic hermit minge, while Gordon is torn up inside about having to revere the man who tried to kill his family.

Something must be said about the way they write Gordon here. It's such an interesting conflict to explore. Unfortunately we don't get much to time with him because before long he's been worked over by Bane's men and is in hospital for much of the movie. This has come to be something that happens in every Nolan Batman film. Someone, be it the Joker or Bane, will shoot Gordon and he'll disappear for a while, only to suddenly reappear when the opportunity presents itself. In the last movie he was pretending to be a SWAT team member for some weird fucking reason I can't recall. None of this is to say he gets sidelined though. No, the award for shunning a major character entirely from your film goes to Alfred, who is nowhere to be found during the whole Bane taking over Gotham episode and leaves me with the conclusion that he must have been in a coma. That's literally five Alfred-less months of movie time. It's also time he could have spent tracking down Bruce and bringing a rope to help him out of the Earth's asshole.

That brings me to the prison. I loved the whole training montage thing with Bruce bulking up so that he could escape and defeat Bane. But I don't quite buy that this hole in the ground is an inescapable prison. I'm fairly certain the guy from Prisonbreak would have taken one look at that thing and laughed. But without it, we wouldn't have Batman rising from the depths of Siberussiastan or wherever he is, thus giving us a key thematic moment of the movie and also honouring the title.

Catwoman was awesome. They didn't make her a woman who dresses as a cat and hangs out with cats, thank god. Instead they made her a burglar whose goggles give the impression of cat's ears when sitting on top of her head. Nothing about the way they handled her character screams camp, stupid or Halle Berry. It's all done well and in good taste. She also manages to be the one funny character in a film otherwise extremely dark. It's always good to see a male screenwriter pen a good female character. I've always found it rare for us guys to make women appear realistic and engaging on paper. As much as I love Breaking Bad, every single brawd in that show is fucking shocking. The same goes for Lost and about a million other populer shows/films. Even in Nolan's Batman, all we'd ever had until now was Rachel, played by Katie Holmes and Donnie Darko's sister respectively. But she was an awful, whiny damsel-in-distress who gave nothing to the story other than excuses for Bruce to put on the batsuit and jump off buildings (because someone had thrown her off). Now we have Anne Hathaway's Catwoman, who can join Signourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley and Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in the fairly empty Hollywood female character hall of fame.

However I should probably also point out another problem with this movie. A female problem. Chris Nolan has now given us six reimaginings of famous Batman villains. There's Ledger's Joker, Liam Neeson's Ra's Al Ghul, Cillian Murphy's (somewhat underrated) Scarecrow, Aaron Eckhart's Two-Face and Tom Hardy's Bane - all of whom are awesome. Then there's fucking Marion Cotillard's Talia Al Ghul, who is such a corny ass-pull of a character, and shows up so late in the movie, that I've come to hate her almost as much as how they did Venom in Spiderman 3. She exists just long enough for us to not care about her, and her death scene is one of the most hilarious I've seen in a long time. Speaking of villains, I would have loved to see Cillian Murphy do something during the final battle. He appears earlier in the movie, pretending to be a judge as he sentences civilians to death by...walking on ice. But the best thing about his cameo is the scarecrow-like appearance of his gown. It's almost as if Nolan realized how much people hated The Scarecrow's lack of costume in the previous movies and decided to stuff straw into his shirt for this one. I still would have liked him to put that piece of burlap over his head though. Ra's Al Ghul also pops up briefly despite being dead and delivers some exposition while mentioning that there are "other forms of immortality" before literally fading into nothing like the out-of-place ghostly apparition he is. I was almost expecting him to turn up later as a storm cloud sitting in the sky, maybe chatting with Mufasa.

Come to think of it, the plot of this movie is a lot like the Lion King. No really. Batman is exiled and spends time with a couple of odd balls before working up the strength to return. Meanwhile his enemy has turned his home town into an apocalyptic nightmare. It's not exactly verbatim what the Lion King was about, but it definitely tells the same basic story. But what this movie lack in Elton John music, it makes up for with the epic might of Hans Zimmer. The soundtraack does two things simultaneously and flawlessly: it gears you up for some ass-kicking while also filling you with the emotional weight of each scene. When Bane broke Batman's back and swaggered off with a piece of his broken mask, I wasn't thinking "meh, he'll be fine", I was like "OH MY GOD NOOOOO BATMAN'S DEAD WHYYYYYYYYY!!!!". And when he finally climbed out of that hole I was so inspired by the uplifiting roar of every brass instrument imagineable that I forgot there was absolutely no way he was going to be able to return to Gotham. What with every road in and out of the city either destroyed or blocked by the military.

Seriously, what the fuck is with that? How did Bruce get back into the city? Can someone explain that to me? If you can give me a decent explanation I will give you money. I'm serious, I'm that confused. Was there a secret underground tunnel that only he knew about? Did he teleport? I guess I'll just have to file that one away with the question of what happened after Batman rescued Rachel from The Joker at his penthouse party in the last movie. Remember that? Heath Ledger shows up at his place, threatens his guests and then throws his girlfriend out the window. Batman follows suit and manages to save her. But then it's the next scene and all of that happened last night. So what? Did the Joker just leave? Did Batman decide he'd had enough for the night and wouldn't go upstairs to follow up on the crazy clown breaking shit in his house? What?!

Finally, it seems like I can't finish this post without at least mentioning Bane's voice. As much as I loved Bane's character, particularly his design, I hated his voice. It was like a combination of Darth Vader and Sean Connery, only muffled. A lot of the time I couldn't understand a thing he was saying. I think all those who criticized the Batman voice from the Dark Knight will probably have fun tearing into Bane, because even I was annoyed at this, and I love the Batman voice. I don't care how cheesy it sounds to other people - to me it's the epitomy of awesome.

HOOCCCKKEEYYY PAAAADDDSSSSSS!!!

That is all.

No comments:

Post a Comment