The Dark Knight Rises - seen thread *SPOILERS WITHIN* See Mod Warning in first post

Hello all.

I thought i would post my thoughts on TDKR after watching and re-watching it since it's DVD release recently. Having left the cinema a little unsure what to think several months back, i've re watched it a good few times recently and am a bit clearer on what i think. Sorry if i'm re-treading ground that's been covered in here already, 180 pages is a little too much to read back. I'd be interested in hearing anyone's opinions.

So firstly, i should state that I'm a big batman fan, and a bit of a film buff also, and while i was all set to love this film, on repeated watches, i think it's one of Nolan's worst and most muddled films, and certainly the worst of the 3 batman ones. That's not a total indictment, because Nolan is a great film maker, and his worst is still pretty good, but i just couldn't help seeing the flaws in it from a movie making point of view.

It seemed to me, all along, as if the movie was going at breakneck pace, and was missing a lot in terms of exposition, plot development and characterization, and was passing up chances to develop characters all over the place. It was as if Nolan HAD to keep it to 2 hours 48 mins for the imax screening, or had been told to keep it under a certain time by studio execs or something, but was still battling to tell the story he had co-written and wanted to tell it without compromising or cutting it down.

Several times in the movie, most obviously in the prison scene and the ensuing journey back to gotham, there was no exposition, no sense of time passing, and lots of important or interesting character-building opportunities were passed up on. How did he get to the prison after being broken by Bane, how long did he spend there, how did he get back to gotham, etc, etc??? The scene where he comes out of seclusion to see Gordon in the hospital was another example of the same thing. He jumps out of the window in a balaclava, and next thing he's chatting to him by his bedside like they're old mates.

As a lifelong batman fan, i felt robbed by that scene. The first time Gordon has ever met batman outside of a costumed setting, and actually interacted with him on a human level, the on-screen realization of the fact that that he's now just an ordinary guy in an armani suit, the introduction, the "i'm batman...no you're not...yes i am" conversation... I wanted to see and hear all of that, and instead it felt like a huge chunk of the scene had just been chopped out for the sake of making the pace zip along and keep under some arbitrary time limit that Nolan had to adhere to. It would have been a revelation on the same scale as "it's what i do that defines me" in the first movie, but instead it just felt like there was no time so it was chopped out or skipped over.

Other areas of the movie suffered from that too. I thought Hathaway and Cotillard as Catwoman and Miranda Tate were equally wasted, due to lack of screen time for both due to time constraints, and Fox and Alfred were only on screen for the briefest of times to be upset and to develop plot points before they were gone again for large chunks of the film.

The bane/talia storyline was a total rewriting of the comic book canon, which i can forgive in the name of good filmmaking & poetic license, but for the fact that for at least a third of the film before it was revealed, most of the most ardent batman fans in the audience who knew from the canon That Ras Al Ghoul's child was Talia Al Ghoul (not Bane), and were thus aware that a major twist was coming. That's just shoddy, lazy writing for lack of better ideas, and paying reverence to the franchise's biggest fans in a film like this shouldn't be sacrificed in order to develop a mediocre plot device.

I really felt that, despite the already considerable length, it needed a director's cut. Another 20-30 minutes of film would have allowed Nolan to tell the complicated story he wanted to tell and develop it properly without rushing it, and then bring it to a sensible conclusion. It would have come in well over three hours though, and still been a far from epic storyline, so I'm not sure how well that would have been received generally. Hardcore fans would have loved it I'm sure, but ordinary cinema-goers, maybe not so much.

Also, the revelation that Blake "just figured out" who Batman was after Wayne visited his orphanage was utter nonsense, and had no place in a superhero movie which employs suspension of disbelief. As a screenwriter, you can't just suspend suspension of disbelief when it suits you, you either maintain it for the duration of a movie no matter how ridiculous the consequences, or go for realism instead, but you don't get to pick and choose.

If Blake can figure out that Wayne is Batman, just from seeing a look on his face as a kid, then why can't Gordon, a smart, resourceful and well connected police commissioner figure out the same thing? Furthermore, why doesn't an entire city full of lawyers, journalists, media, and presumably Wayne's own employees who BUILT half the batman arsenal as defence department prototypes figure out that one of the city's richest most well resourced bachelors with money to burn, and access to massive amounts of High Tech R&D is doing a bit of moonlighting as a superhero as well?? It was just more lazy writing, and a classic example of Deus Ex Machina, and i feel like if Nolan had had more running time he would have found a better way to engineer the same revelation for Blake's character in a more believable way, instead of sorting it out in one contrived, ill-conceived scene.

Finally, the ending. What's there to say that hasn't been said? There are a few possibilities, but all the best ones I've read center around the theme of "Hope" which was a strong theme in the movie. Does he die or not, who knows? But i think there are plot holes in the ending either way.

Maybe the events at the end of the movie are to be taken literally, in which case he lives. If that's the case there are a bunch of holes like how did he get clear of the blast, how did he swim back with a stab wound, how did they recover the bat, and if it was a different bat that fox was examining afterwards, why was it being built/why did it exist, given that Applied sciences was "all prototypes, not in production, at any level" (from the first movie)???

Maybe the events at the end are not to be taken literally, and he's dead, and has left a series of red herrings such as the autopilot to instill "hope" in those he left behind. Is Alfred's scene in the Cafe a dream or vision of some kind, and if so how does the audience tie that up with the gibbering wreck we see of Alfred in his penultimate scene, at the grave, when he believes he's failed utterly? if the cafe scene is alfred's vision or imagining, how do we as an audience get Alfred from one state (despair) at the graveside, to the other (belief, hope) sometime subsequently, in the absence of some exposition or a bridging scene or revelation of some kind??

It all seemed pretty rushed or last minute to me. Honestly the best excuse i can think of for the ending is that Nolan had shot the footage for the ending he wanted, and was forced to re-edit based on studio pressure, because the suits didn't want to "kill off" batman, but i guess we'll never know. Nolan has always been notoriously tight lipped about his movies, and doesn't give much in the way of deleted scenes or new info once they're done.

Nolan has already gone on record as saying that there will never be a director's cut, that the final release is the best we're ever going to get, so I guess we'll never know, but i think it's a shame. I think he's missed out on the chance to give the fans a really fitting, tightly made end to what could have gone down in history as a really definitive trilogy.

Sad Professor wrote: »

RE: the ending, can we please stop with "the studio forced Nolan to change it" nonsense? Nolan has already spoken about the ending quite a bit lately and how that's exactly how he wanted to end it...

Once again:

Deleted User wrote: »

...Sorry if i'm re-treading ground that's been covered in here already, 180 pages is a little too much to read back...

Thank you for your post, very interesting read. That doesn't address my point about the holes in the ending though.

I think the fact that batman was temporary, a catalyst, etc was clear all the way through, and that wayne didn't want any particular weight to be put on him personally as the hero, rather citing that a hero can be anyone, etc, leaving the means to be a hero to someone else (blake, and the keys to the batcave, etc). That's all fine, my issue is the depiction of how this plays out on screen at the end of the film.

Whether Wayne dies or not, batman, the symbol, certainly does, hence the memorial. Batman has been the catalyst for change that Wayne wanted, and has fulfilled his purpose and isn't needed any longer. That's all clear.

The confusion, for me anyway, is why there is ambiguity on screen over whether Wayne lives or dies, and either way, whether Nolan, as a filmmaker, portrayed it well and without plot holes etc.

Whatever way you read the ending, i don't think he did.