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Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched
« on: July 12, 2023, 09:44:46 PM »
The Batshit Odyssey at last reaches a new milestone with the finale of the Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale trilogy!
The Dark Knight Rises (dir. Christopher Nolan)
With Christopher Nolan’s third Batman feature, the twice-failed attempt at a Batman trilogy was finally complete. Previously, Tim Burton stepped away, or was rather forced out, after his first two films were essentially considered to be too dark to merchandise to children (domestic terrorism and a guy with half his face burnt off r totes kool 4 kidz tho, sez WB execz). Joel Schumacher’s tenuously connected neon-drenched apotheoses of confusion and stupidity likewise failed to produce a much vaunted third entry before the executive branch, well, executed it. The trilogy is a strange, arbitrary standard for franchise legitimacy, but one which is predominant, especially in modern blockbuster cinema. Regardless, some credit must be given to Nolan for telling a ‘complete’ Batman story with a beginning, middle, and end. However, the connections between the three, and especially between the first two and the third, often leave me wondering why they needed to form a ‘complete’ story at all. Each one can more or less be read episodically, the only things connecting them (Batman excluded) really being the plot equivalent of Blu Tack, yet there is a third Batman movie and I’m committed to reviewing it for some reason.
It’s surprisingly difficult to talk about the third entry in a series the parts of which display impressive levels of homogeneity. It has the same platitudinous dialogue, the same mediocre action, the same everywhere-and-nowhere present day metropolitan setting of its predecessors, perhaps differing from them only in that the level of embarrassment it displays in its approach to adapting its sources far outstrips theirs. This is compounded by the sense that none of it is bad as such, but that it is remarkably unremarkable in its every detail. For a movie about a wackily voiced roidboi playing football with a nuke, very little of what occurs in its 160 minutes is even slightly arresting or engaging. Here Nolan may have produced the most soporific blockbuster hit imaginable. I specify hit because of course there have been many megabudget snorefests that didn’t really go anywhere numbers-wise. The Dark Knight Rises is not only spectacularly boring, it made over $1bn globally at the box office as well. There’s no accounting for taste, of course, and naturally the sequel to the massively popular The Dark Knight was bound to do good business.
The attempt at a byzantine plot is largely successful insofar as its constituent parts are woven together in a way that more or less flows, but in the main it is incredibly hard to care about anything that happens this time around. The caped crusader is more or less shorn of his connections to anyone and anything, and while the film outwardly states that this is the aftermath of the eight years following the death of Harvey Dent, for which Batman took the rap, the truth is that as soon as Rachel Dawes was killed there was a sudden loss of connection between Batman and the world around him. In this film nothing much seems to matter, and even when Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter Talia is revealed as the true villain near the end, the response is not one of shock, but ‘so what?’ And perhaps, if one is in a charitable mood, ‘why?’ Are we surprised to learn that Ra’s had a child? It’s quite rare for warlords to have no children, many throughout history have had dozens with sometimes as many different mothers, or perhaps even hundreds through a kind of forced adoption by which they owned the children of their conquered foes. The question ‘why?’ is actually appropriate to ask in the following sense: why in the world would Talia, given all that she tells us about her father abandoning her and her mother to rot in what is supposedly the most hellish prison on Earth, want to take up her father’s cause and avenge his death? I guess Hell Prison changes you.
The attempt to tie the series together and come full circle with Talia’s reveal only really serves to lay bare the film’s heaviest issue. While Talia provides the promised twist, that is essentially all she does. She is barely even a character, which is a shame given the long-standing and complicated relationship she shares with Batman in the comics. But she is one quasi-character in a band of several, and her uncompelling nature is hardly out of place. Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s long-suffering butler, is perhaps the closest the film comes to writing a character that doesn’t merely serve as a plot device, but even he is ultimately a doll to be moved about at will for the sake of complicating what little we actually see of Bruce’s emotional life. When he leaves because he can no longer stand to see Bruce destroy himself, what we essentially lose is but one mouthpiece for the Nolan brothers’ hamfisted dialogue. I cannot think of a character in this film who actually speaks to another character rather than to the audience, every line laden as it is with exposition that we need to know to fill in the eight year in-universe gap between the events of The Dark Knight and Batman’s less than triumphant return.
Batman in this film is a worn out husk of a man, in fact he is more or less just Bruce Wayne at this point. His injuries are too severe for him to really do much of anything except hobble about his gigantic house, or the wing of it in which he has sequestered himself. Some parallels can be made to Frank Miller’s grotesque and abysmal The Dark Knight Strikes Again, in which an ageing Batman spends a decent chunk of time recuperating from injuries that would have killed or permanently paralysed anyone else. Previously, the series featured other aspects of this comic, like the Bat-a-like vigilantes from The Dark Knight, who more or less mirror the Sons of Batman militia. The nods are there, but one is left wondering: why doesn’t Bats Bats Baby have a teenage girl sidekick who cosplays as a malformed leopard? This cherry picking will not stand! But Nolan is a man of taste after all, you can’t simply include everything from this one terrible comic he seems to be a wee bit fixated on. Chris, if you’re as embarrassed by comic books as this film would suggest, I highly recommend reading better ones for inspiration next time you decide to do a superhero movie. (Like today’s sponsor, Speedball. He bounces with balls! Smash that like button and hit the bell icon for more!)
Well, there might not be a Catgirl Carrie Kelley but there is a Catwoman Selina Kyle. And boy what a basically kinda sorta character-ish person she is! As was the case in Batman Returns, she is the taunting temptress that seduces both Batman and Bruce Wayne, but here she isn’t a dark mirror of the Bat duality, instead playing the femme fatale master thief role pretty straight. Her plot arc resembles that of Catwoman in Batman: Arkham City, released the previous year, with her plan to leave the crumbling Gotham thwarted at the last moment by her affection for Batman. In this film she is more a mirror of Talia, shadow-bound and mysterious, deadly but with a taste for vengeance that is fundamentally tempered by some sense of self-preservation. Like the eponymous man-eater of Zola’s Nana, her use, abuse, and devaluation of others is a manifestation of a combination of self-interest and class struggle, informed by a background of poverty and with the rich as its primary target. The thematics around Catwoman and her relationship with Bane’s quasi-French revolution form what is very probably the most subtle and interesting part of the film, but it is ultimately a background concern.
The film’s main villain Bane is largely without character, making this the second time he has appeared in a movie that doesn’t seem to care about who he is in the source material. In the comics he is a larger-than-life luchador hopped up on super-roids, while in this film he is a fairly normally proportioned dude with a mask and a silly voice. Much of course has already been said about the voice Tom Hardy employs in this film, a fine addition to his ever-growing portfolio of baffling accent choices, so I will simply repeat that it is silly. His ordinariness is perhaps intended to make a point, that this isn’t a world of superheroes and villains, but one of men, limited by their physicality and bound by not just their own history but the history of the world. There is value and dignity, potentially, in this approach, but Bane, like his predecessors in this and previous Batman series, has a taste for needless theatricality that yet makes him something other than just a man. He is a sort of mythological figure, one known only by name and who seems to shift from shadow to shadow across the world, unseen but for the carnage he leaves in his wake. The film would have him, or he would have himself, before the public, a sort of symbol of opposition to system and order, yet his first act within a ‘liberated’ Gotham is to impose a tyrannical order. A comment on the hypocrisy of revolution? Bane as Robespierre? Perhaps, but this is beside the point. Bane as he exists in this film has no more need of being Bane than Talia has of being Talia, indeed the entire thing is a Batman film in name only.
Batman or no, the greatest insult to the audience’s intelligence and patience is save for the grand finale. Batman flies a nuclear device that is primed to go off in mere seconds far out over the water where it can do no harm to anyone. Anyone, that is, but him! We are led to believe that he has sacrificed himself in order to save the city, and this truly would have been a satisfying conclusion, a final myth-making act of heroism that proved nothing more or less than his belief in his duty as a protector of Gotham, that he was after all a man, but that a man can effect lasting change in the world. Within a couple of minutes the film undoes this in its entirety by showing us that, not only is Bruce Wayne alive and well, he more or less planned everything. Oh Bruce! [audience laughter] Early in the film, Alfred tells Bruce that, once a year during the time that Bruce was gone (see Batman Begins), he went holidaying in Florence, and he would sit outside a certain café and look across the way hoping to see Bruce sat with a woman. With minimal acknowledgement they would briefly glance at each other, and in so doing Alfred would know that Bruce had moved on from the life of torment he had lived from childhood in Gotham, never to return—Alfred’s happy ending to an unhappy story. Cut back to the end, and a close-up of Alfred in tears before Bruce’s grave, blaming himself for Bruce’s death. Two minutes later, here’s Alfred at a certain café in Florence and gee boy howdy, whaddya know, shucks and/or perhaps maybe even possibly a little bit pshaw, who should be sitting across the way but Bruce and his girlfriend Selina Kyle? Oh Bruce! [audience laughter intensifies] And it was then that Alfred knew that everything would be alright.
Fuck. Off.
That about wraps up this pile of horse shit with a neat little bow. There is a great deal that I haven’t touched upon, but so many of The Dark Knight Returns’ issues are mere repetitions of old mistakes, lessons unlearned from prior endeavour, that it seems unnecessary to add however many more thousands of words to detail every single objection. My concluding thoughts rather appropriately return to an old objection. I really do find Christopher Nolan’s constant embarrassment at his source material so very very irritating. Why even bother making it a Batman movie if all you’re really going for is an implausible modern day revolution story, narrowly thwarted by a do-gooder vigilante and the only two intelligent cops who exist? Just imagine, the 2012 Les Misérables movie could have been un film de Christopher Nolan! Just replace Hugh Jackman with Christian Bale and you’re basically there! It’s even got Anne Hathaway! I am approximately two thirds joking. But really, what difference does it make which work of fiction you adapt for the screen if the particulars of character and relationship and time and place and story are totally arbitrary? You might as well have just made up something completely original instead of needlessly fulfilling some duty to finish out the trilogy, as if the word and concept Trilogy came down to this world in the form of divine mandate, never to be gainsaid by mere mortals. For all that I complain and throw shade, as the kids say, hindsight teaches us the valuable lesson that things can always get worse. I would take, Star Wars style, another two trilogies of Nolan’s Batman over the Snyderian tidal wave of shit that is the DCEU. So you know, swings and roundabouts. Normally I end these things with a joke, but not this time. That’s it. Go away.
The Dark Knight Rises (dir. Christopher Nolan)
With Christopher Nolan’s third Batman feature, the twice-failed attempt at a Batman trilogy was finally complete. Previously, Tim Burton stepped away, or was rather forced out, after his first two films were essentially considered to be too dark to merchandise to children (domestic terrorism and a guy with half his face burnt off r totes kool 4 kidz tho, sez WB execz). Joel Schumacher’s tenuously connected neon-drenched apotheoses of confusion and stupidity likewise failed to produce a much vaunted third entry before the executive branch, well, executed it. The trilogy is a strange, arbitrary standard for franchise legitimacy, but one which is predominant, especially in modern blockbuster cinema. Regardless, some credit must be given to Nolan for telling a ‘complete’ Batman story with a beginning, middle, and end. However, the connections between the three, and especially between the first two and the third, often leave me wondering why they needed to form a ‘complete’ story at all. Each one can more or less be read episodically, the only things connecting them (Batman excluded) really being the plot equivalent of Blu Tack, yet there is a third Batman movie and I’m committed to reviewing it for some reason.
It’s surprisingly difficult to talk about the third entry in a series the parts of which display impressive levels of homogeneity. It has the same platitudinous dialogue, the same mediocre action, the same everywhere-and-nowhere present day metropolitan setting of its predecessors, perhaps differing from them only in that the level of embarrassment it displays in its approach to adapting its sources far outstrips theirs. This is compounded by the sense that none of it is bad as such, but that it is remarkably unremarkable in its every detail. For a movie about a wackily voiced roidboi playing football with a nuke, very little of what occurs in its 160 minutes is even slightly arresting or engaging. Here Nolan may have produced the most soporific blockbuster hit imaginable. I specify hit because of course there have been many megabudget snorefests that didn’t really go anywhere numbers-wise. The Dark Knight Rises is not only spectacularly boring, it made over $1bn globally at the box office as well. There’s no accounting for taste, of course, and naturally the sequel to the massively popular The Dark Knight was bound to do good business.
The attempt at a byzantine plot is largely successful insofar as its constituent parts are woven together in a way that more or less flows, but in the main it is incredibly hard to care about anything that happens this time around. The caped crusader is more or less shorn of his connections to anyone and anything, and while the film outwardly states that this is the aftermath of the eight years following the death of Harvey Dent, for which Batman took the rap, the truth is that as soon as Rachel Dawes was killed there was a sudden loss of connection between Batman and the world around him. In this film nothing much seems to matter, and even when Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter Talia is revealed as the true villain near the end, the response is not one of shock, but ‘so what?’ And perhaps, if one is in a charitable mood, ‘why?’ Are we surprised to learn that Ra’s had a child? It’s quite rare for warlords to have no children, many throughout history have had dozens with sometimes as many different mothers, or perhaps even hundreds through a kind of forced adoption by which they owned the children of their conquered foes. The question ‘why?’ is actually appropriate to ask in the following sense: why in the world would Talia, given all that she tells us about her father abandoning her and her mother to rot in what is supposedly the most hellish prison on Earth, want to take up her father’s cause and avenge his death? I guess Hell Prison changes you.
The attempt to tie the series together and come full circle with Talia’s reveal only really serves to lay bare the film’s heaviest issue. While Talia provides the promised twist, that is essentially all she does. She is barely even a character, which is a shame given the long-standing and complicated relationship she shares with Batman in the comics. But she is one quasi-character in a band of several, and her uncompelling nature is hardly out of place. Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s long-suffering butler, is perhaps the closest the film comes to writing a character that doesn’t merely serve as a plot device, but even he is ultimately a doll to be moved about at will for the sake of complicating what little we actually see of Bruce’s emotional life. When he leaves because he can no longer stand to see Bruce destroy himself, what we essentially lose is but one mouthpiece for the Nolan brothers’ hamfisted dialogue. I cannot think of a character in this film who actually speaks to another character rather than to the audience, every line laden as it is with exposition that we need to know to fill in the eight year in-universe gap between the events of The Dark Knight and Batman’s less than triumphant return.
Batman in this film is a worn out husk of a man, in fact he is more or less just Bruce Wayne at this point. His injuries are too severe for him to really do much of anything except hobble about his gigantic house, or the wing of it in which he has sequestered himself. Some parallels can be made to Frank Miller’s grotesque and abysmal The Dark Knight Strikes Again, in which an ageing Batman spends a decent chunk of time recuperating from injuries that would have killed or permanently paralysed anyone else. Previously, the series featured other aspects of this comic, like the Bat-a-like vigilantes from The Dark Knight, who more or less mirror the Sons of Batman militia. The nods are there, but one is left wondering: why doesn’t Bats Bats Baby have a teenage girl sidekick who cosplays as a malformed leopard? This cherry picking will not stand! But Nolan is a man of taste after all, you can’t simply include everything from this one terrible comic he seems to be a wee bit fixated on. Chris, if you’re as embarrassed by comic books as this film would suggest, I highly recommend reading better ones for inspiration next time you decide to do a superhero movie. (Like today’s sponsor, Speedball. He bounces with balls! Smash that like button and hit the bell icon for more!)
Well, there might not be a Catgirl Carrie Kelley but there is a Catwoman Selina Kyle. And boy what a basically kinda sorta character-ish person she is! As was the case in Batman Returns, she is the taunting temptress that seduces both Batman and Bruce Wayne, but here she isn’t a dark mirror of the Bat duality, instead playing the femme fatale master thief role pretty straight. Her plot arc resembles that of Catwoman in Batman: Arkham City, released the previous year, with her plan to leave the crumbling Gotham thwarted at the last moment by her affection for Batman. In this film she is more a mirror of Talia, shadow-bound and mysterious, deadly but with a taste for vengeance that is fundamentally tempered by some sense of self-preservation. Like the eponymous man-eater of Zola’s Nana, her use, abuse, and devaluation of others is a manifestation of a combination of self-interest and class struggle, informed by a background of poverty and with the rich as its primary target. The thematics around Catwoman and her relationship with Bane’s quasi-French revolution form what is very probably the most subtle and interesting part of the film, but it is ultimately a background concern.
The film’s main villain Bane is largely without character, making this the second time he has appeared in a movie that doesn’t seem to care about who he is in the source material. In the comics he is a larger-than-life luchador hopped up on super-roids, while in this film he is a fairly normally proportioned dude with a mask and a silly voice. Much of course has already been said about the voice Tom Hardy employs in this film, a fine addition to his ever-growing portfolio of baffling accent choices, so I will simply repeat that it is silly. His ordinariness is perhaps intended to make a point, that this isn’t a world of superheroes and villains, but one of men, limited by their physicality and bound by not just their own history but the history of the world. There is value and dignity, potentially, in this approach, but Bane, like his predecessors in this and previous Batman series, has a taste for needless theatricality that yet makes him something other than just a man. He is a sort of mythological figure, one known only by name and who seems to shift from shadow to shadow across the world, unseen but for the carnage he leaves in his wake. The film would have him, or he would have himself, before the public, a sort of symbol of opposition to system and order, yet his first act within a ‘liberated’ Gotham is to impose a tyrannical order. A comment on the hypocrisy of revolution? Bane as Robespierre? Perhaps, but this is beside the point. Bane as he exists in this film has no more need of being Bane than Talia has of being Talia, indeed the entire thing is a Batman film in name only.
Batman or no, the greatest insult to the audience’s intelligence and patience is save for the grand finale. Batman flies a nuclear device that is primed to go off in mere seconds far out over the water where it can do no harm to anyone. Anyone, that is, but him! We are led to believe that he has sacrificed himself in order to save the city, and this truly would have been a satisfying conclusion, a final myth-making act of heroism that proved nothing more or less than his belief in his duty as a protector of Gotham, that he was after all a man, but that a man can effect lasting change in the world. Within a couple of minutes the film undoes this in its entirety by showing us that, not only is Bruce Wayne alive and well, he more or less planned everything. Oh Bruce! [audience laughter] Early in the film, Alfred tells Bruce that, once a year during the time that Bruce was gone (see Batman Begins), he went holidaying in Florence, and he would sit outside a certain café and look across the way hoping to see Bruce sat with a woman. With minimal acknowledgement they would briefly glance at each other, and in so doing Alfred would know that Bruce had moved on from the life of torment he had lived from childhood in Gotham, never to return—Alfred’s happy ending to an unhappy story. Cut back to the end, and a close-up of Alfred in tears before Bruce’s grave, blaming himself for Bruce’s death. Two minutes later, here’s Alfred at a certain café in Florence and gee boy howdy, whaddya know, shucks and/or perhaps maybe even possibly a little bit pshaw, who should be sitting across the way but Bruce and his girlfriend Selina Kyle? Oh Bruce! [audience laughter intensifies] And it was then that Alfred knew that everything would be alright.
Fuck. Off.
That about wraps up this pile of horse shit with a neat little bow. There is a great deal that I haven’t touched upon, but so many of The Dark Knight Returns’ issues are mere repetitions of old mistakes, lessons unlearned from prior endeavour, that it seems unnecessary to add however many more thousands of words to detail every single objection. My concluding thoughts rather appropriately return to an old objection. I really do find Christopher Nolan’s constant embarrassment at his source material so very very irritating. Why even bother making it a Batman movie if all you’re really going for is an implausible modern day revolution story, narrowly thwarted by a do-gooder vigilante and the only two intelligent cops who exist? Just imagine, the 2012 Les Misérables movie could have been un film de Christopher Nolan! Just replace Hugh Jackman with Christian Bale and you’re basically there! It’s even got Anne Hathaway! I am approximately two thirds joking. But really, what difference does it make which work of fiction you adapt for the screen if the particulars of character and relationship and time and place and story are totally arbitrary? You might as well have just made up something completely original instead of needlessly fulfilling some duty to finish out the trilogy, as if the word and concept Trilogy came down to this world in the form of divine mandate, never to be gainsaid by mere mortals. For all that I complain and throw shade, as the kids say, hindsight teaches us the valuable lesson that things can always get worse. I would take, Star Wars style, another two trilogies of Nolan’s Batman over the Snyderian tidal wave of shit that is the DCEU. So you know, swings and roundabouts. Normally I end these things with a joke, but not this time. That’s it. Go away.
