Ok, before I get this show on the road let me make make 3 things clear:
First there will be some pretty major spoilers about the movie. If you haven't seen it yet and don't want anything ruined:
DO NOT READ THIS
Second, this is still my personal opinion of the movie. If you enjoyed it that is completely and totally fine. Every has their own personal preferences and I do not wish anyone to feel that I have negative feelings for them because their opinions on the film do not coincide with mine
Third, this is going to a pretty long post, so you might want to grab a snack or something if you really want to read it all the way through.
There that's out of the way, lets get started.
Last night I went to the midnight showing of Dark Knight Rises with some of my friends. Now just you give you guys an idea of what kind of person I am, I'm a pretty literal person, so I tend to take things a bit more factually than most, though so long as things stay within their own setting logic I usually have no issue with fantastical things.
Dark Knight Rises though.........is an absolute mess, even within it's own stated canon.
Prior to this movie, I have never willing walked out half way through a movie. In this case though I had to just to get some brief respite from the sheer stupidity that was constantly being thrown in my face before I went back in.
From a technical standpoint, the movie did have some cool things. The gritty feel from the previous movies is still there, and the Bat flight vehicle is a highlight that I admit I'll probably do a lot of digging on to see the actual design of. Unfortunately though, the whole film is rife with time and location disjoints. Scenes swap around with very little connection to where/when they are and what is happening. Three particular highlights of this were:
1)A part where the police are fighting the antagonist forces where a cop fires a pistol in one scene, cuts to the enemy firing, cuts back to him firing an assault rifle he got from nowhere, cuts to the enemy again, then cuts back to him dead with no weapon of any kind in sight, all in the span of something like 15 seconds. It's a cohesive nightmare of direction.
2) another part is where Batman and Catwoman are going to Bane's "lair" (for lack of a better word), and they take out enemies in what is probably one of the most confusing mook ambushing scenes I've ever seen. They literally come from every angle imaginable, despite the fact that many of those angles are almost impossible. The best example of this was a mook who was walking down a pretty cramped corridor, only to have Catwoman step up behind him, tap his shoulder, point behind him saying something along the lines of "he's behind you" after he turns around. The mook does one last turn and suddenly Batman is one foot away from him hanging from the ceiling. Last time I checked, Batman did not have a teleporter on his utility belt. This kind of stuff is just silly, especially considering how well grounded the previous two movies were in "believable" portrayal of his capabilities.
3)The creme de la creme of these disjoints though is the amount of time passing between some pretty major scenes. When bane does his takover of the city, we cut to Bruce Wayne stuck a prison and something like 83 days have suddenly passed with nearly no indication of it whatsoever. Aside from maybe 30 seconds of a captured batmobile driving over snow, there is absolutely no indication of how much time has passed until the film literally tells you by showing a news feed from television in the prison saying "Day 83", and even that was in some very small and blurry print, so one would not have been remiss if they didn't see that the first time around. This is by no means the only time when this happens, as most of the film skips time like they borrowed the Tardis from the Doctor.
Disjoints aside, a lot of the action felt very forced and artifically stretched out to increase the tension. Enemy heavy weapons that seconds previously were devastating things suddenly could not hit a target the size of a helicopter not 20 feet away from them, and men armed with assault rifle were losing against cops with a couple of pistols and nightsticks. Even the fights between Bane and Batman was literally a sluggish punch up with no usable amount of flow or dynamic. It felt like I was watching one of those youtube videos of a couple teenagers flailing at each other.
And then of course there is the mother of all bad screenwriting: Contrivance.
The movie has contrivance popping out of every orifice. For one, Bane is portayed at the start as evidently clairvoyant, because despite having only a few hundred men in Gotham, all of which are your average run-of-the-mill fanatic mercenaries, they somehow manage to know exactly where Bruce Wayne's armory is despite it being completely off the record, turn an entire city and its population into his ***** with some high explosive, whilst simultaneously capturing 99% of the police force underground. He manages at every turn to outwit and outmaneuver all the attempts by by anyone against him with a level of precision and strategy that Lord Castellan Creed wouldn't be able to pull off if he were channeling MacGuyver. He seems to literally be everywhere at all times, not helped at all by aforementioned disjointedness of the movie, and it gets downright ridiculous how much this happnes. It's not narratively realistic, it makes a very large chunk of the film redundant, and it generally sets the tone that everyone in the film is a raging idiot, even characters who were previously established as quite clever (though even this of suddenly falls apart right at the final climax in a friggin' lazy bit of writing)
And this is made even more ridiculous by how badly Bane's character was butchered. The general setting of Bane is that he is an assassin-type character who was given great strength by a compound called Venom. Though the constant need for Venom is a major hindrance in some cases, whilst using it he both an intellectual equal to Batman and far more physically capable. In Dark Knight rises however, his character has been boiled down to just a strong guy who needs the mask because of massive damage he suffered as a result of being in the prison. There's no concoction that makes him more capable, and the mask is actually keeping him doped up to the eyes to numb the pain he's in (which most likely could have been fixed at any number of hospitals), and if you've ever heard of [a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_analgia"]Congential Analgia[/a] you'll know is actually a pretty major disadvantage in a combat situation. Ignoring the fact that that amount of drugs in his system would make him more slow that sloth on Nyquil, all that Batman would have needed to do it nick an artery or break a bone and Bane would do the rest for him. He's not even portrayed as that bright at the end, as the real villain of the movie has been the one pulling the planning strings.
And now we come to Talia Al Ghul, the daughter of Ras Al Ghul and the real villain of the film. The only reason she's the villain is so they could pull of a twist that M Night Shyamalan would "What the hell!" at. Quite literally they make her and Bruce get into a romance (despite not having said 150 between them prior to it, over 75% of which was veiled disdain and philosophical argument) just so she can betray him and reveal herself as the real antagonist with the trigger to the bomb.
Oh yes, the bomb. The big reason Talia via Bane could take over the city is because she has the primary trigger to a Wayne Enterprise clean energy Reactor, which is a regular nuclear reactor with a technobabble varnish. And the weird thing is that this is supposed to be some secret new danger. Um Nolan? Hate to break it to you, but nuclear reactors have been around for decades. This concept isn't even anything particularly new to media (especially in the last two decades. we've nuked quite a few things. It's kinda lost it's impact)
And here's the crazy thing: Somehow (don't ask me how I don't know) they managed to turn it into a 4 megaton nuclear bomb with nothing but a bit of coding. THAT'S NOT HOW NUCLEAR REACTORS WORK!!!!!!!! A nuclear bomb requires a very precise detonation sequence in order to explode properly, while the only way nuclear reactors can catastrophically fail is via a total core meltdown, which is a very localized affair (it's why only local Chernobyl was rendered uninhabitable via radiation rather the the entire region). The two simply don't work the same way, and no nuclear engineer would be remotely dumb enough to make a reactor that could blow up like we expect most nukes to (mostly because it would actually require some explosives to do so). And here's another weird fact about it. For some reason the reactor core/bomb has a "time limit" where it will explode after 5 months of being disconnected from the rest of the machine. That wouldn't work. Nuclear reactors go critical if they go a few hours without the necessary cooling system. Quite frankly no part of this idea would work with any semblance of realism, which is something the previous films at least tried to stay within.
But say we assume that they did find a way to do it, then a whole new problem arises from this. In the final climax of the film, Batman uses the Bat flyer to move the bomb out from the city over the bay when there was a minute left on the timer (if I remember rightly) to boomsday. Now the fastest speed that helicopters in this day an age is 200 nautical miles per hour. Even if Batman's vehicle could pull that sort of speed whilst carrying a 4 megaton nuke, he would only reach 3.3 miles, which was not enough not have gotten Gotham free of a 1 megaton bomb's primary blast radius (which is fours miles approximately). And here's the thing, despite the fact that they say in the movie that a four megaton bomb's primary blast radius is 6 miles (Which already is too much for Batman's vehicle to fly in one minute), they're wrong even there. The approximate primary blast radius ends at about 7PSI overpressure, which on a 4 Megaton bomb is actually 7.65 miles. Even at twice the speed of the fastest unladen heli in the world, the Bomb would still have obliterated most of Gotham and killed pretty much everyone in it whether it be by the sheer concussive force of the blast, which would frappe'd all their internal organs, or by the resulting nuclear fallout, which woulds stretch out for another 11 miles or so.
Now you may think I may be nit-picking this final point, but the thing is that all this data on nukes and heli speeds came from about 5 minutes of research via Google and Wikipedia, and yet an entire team of writers with months of time to make the script somehow did not check these details. That is inexcusable. It's simple research people, so do it! The terrible thing is if they had done some basic calculation they could have made it work (4eg make the bomb a 1 megaton, establish the the bat flyer could go supersonic. Very simple stuff really)
Now there are several more issues that I've had with Dark Knight Rises, but I feel I've laid out enough examples and spent more than enough of the reader's time. From stem to stern this movie was a terrible watch for me. What few interesting scenes and good performances from the actors (one of the few saving graces for the film) might do to mitigate the damage, it's still a shoddy piece of work. It doesn't follow the set-up that the previous films established, the plot was not thought out at all, and there are so many rookie mistakes in trying to up the ante, introduce twists, or even simply establish a clear timeline that I'm frankly disgusted with the whole thing.
It's a contrived, cohesiveness mess of a film, and I honestly regret having paid money for it.
First there will be some pretty major spoilers about the movie. If you haven't seen it yet and don't want anything ruined:
DO NOT READ THIS
Second, this is still my personal opinion of the movie. If you enjoyed it that is completely and totally fine. Every has their own personal preferences and I do not wish anyone to feel that I have negative feelings for them because their opinions on the film do not coincide with mine
Third, this is going to a pretty long post, so you might want to grab a snack or something if you really want to read it all the way through.
There that's out of the way, lets get started.
Last night I went to the midnight showing of Dark Knight Rises with some of my friends. Now just you give you guys an idea of what kind of person I am, I'm a pretty literal person, so I tend to take things a bit more factually than most, though so long as things stay within their own setting logic I usually have no issue with fantastical things.
Dark Knight Rises though.........is an absolute mess, even within it's own stated canon.
Prior to this movie, I have never willing walked out half way through a movie. In this case though I had to just to get some brief respite from the sheer stupidity that was constantly being thrown in my face before I went back in.
From a technical standpoint, the movie did have some cool things. The gritty feel from the previous movies is still there, and the Bat flight vehicle is a highlight that I admit I'll probably do a lot of digging on to see the actual design of. Unfortunately though, the whole film is rife with time and location disjoints. Scenes swap around with very little connection to where/when they are and what is happening. Three particular highlights of this were:
1)A part where the police are fighting the antagonist forces where a cop fires a pistol in one scene, cuts to the enemy firing, cuts back to him firing an assault rifle he got from nowhere, cuts to the enemy again, then cuts back to him dead with no weapon of any kind in sight, all in the span of something like 15 seconds. It's a cohesive nightmare of direction.
2) another part is where Batman and Catwoman are going to Bane's "lair" (for lack of a better word), and they take out enemies in what is probably one of the most confusing mook ambushing scenes I've ever seen. They literally come from every angle imaginable, despite the fact that many of those angles are almost impossible. The best example of this was a mook who was walking down a pretty cramped corridor, only to have Catwoman step up behind him, tap his shoulder, point behind him saying something along the lines of "he's behind you" after he turns around. The mook does one last turn and suddenly Batman is one foot away from him hanging from the ceiling. Last time I checked, Batman did not have a teleporter on his utility belt. This kind of stuff is just silly, especially considering how well grounded the previous two movies were in "believable" portrayal of his capabilities.
3)The creme de la creme of these disjoints though is the amount of time passing between some pretty major scenes. When bane does his takover of the city, we cut to Bruce Wayne stuck a prison and something like 83 days have suddenly passed with nearly no indication of it whatsoever. Aside from maybe 30 seconds of a captured batmobile driving over snow, there is absolutely no indication of how much time has passed until the film literally tells you by showing a news feed from television in the prison saying "Day 83", and even that was in some very small and blurry print, so one would not have been remiss if they didn't see that the first time around. This is by no means the only time when this happens, as most of the film skips time like they borrowed the Tardis from the Doctor.
Disjoints aside, a lot of the action felt very forced and artifically stretched out to increase the tension. Enemy heavy weapons that seconds previously were devastating things suddenly could not hit a target the size of a helicopter not 20 feet away from them, and men armed with assault rifle were losing against cops with a couple of pistols and nightsticks. Even the fights between Bane and Batman was literally a sluggish punch up with no usable amount of flow or dynamic. It felt like I was watching one of those youtube videos of a couple teenagers flailing at each other.
And then of course there is the mother of all bad screenwriting: Contrivance.
The movie has contrivance popping out of every orifice. For one, Bane is portayed at the start as evidently clairvoyant, because despite having only a few hundred men in Gotham, all of which are your average run-of-the-mill fanatic mercenaries, they somehow manage to know exactly where Bruce Wayne's armory is despite it being completely off the record, turn an entire city and its population into his ***** with some high explosive, whilst simultaneously capturing 99% of the police force underground. He manages at every turn to outwit and outmaneuver all the attempts by by anyone against him with a level of precision and strategy that Lord Castellan Creed wouldn't be able to pull off if he were channeling MacGuyver. He seems to literally be everywhere at all times, not helped at all by aforementioned disjointedness of the movie, and it gets downright ridiculous how much this happnes. It's not narratively realistic, it makes a very large chunk of the film redundant, and it generally sets the tone that everyone in the film is a raging idiot, even characters who were previously established as quite clever (though even this of suddenly falls apart right at the final climax in a friggin' lazy bit of writing)
And this is made even more ridiculous by how badly Bane's character was butchered. The general setting of Bane is that he is an assassin-type character who was given great strength by a compound called Venom. Though the constant need for Venom is a major hindrance in some cases, whilst using it he both an intellectual equal to Batman and far more physically capable. In Dark Knight rises however, his character has been boiled down to just a strong guy who needs the mask because of massive damage he suffered as a result of being in the prison. There's no concoction that makes him more capable, and the mask is actually keeping him doped up to the eyes to numb the pain he's in (which most likely could have been fixed at any number of hospitals), and if you've ever heard of [a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_analgia"]Congential Analgia[/a] you'll know is actually a pretty major disadvantage in a combat situation. Ignoring the fact that that amount of drugs in his system would make him more slow that sloth on Nyquil, all that Batman would have needed to do it nick an artery or break a bone and Bane would do the rest for him. He's not even portrayed as that bright at the end, as the real villain of the movie has been the one pulling the planning strings.
And now we come to Talia Al Ghul, the daughter of Ras Al Ghul and the real villain of the film. The only reason she's the villain is so they could pull of a twist that M Night Shyamalan would "What the hell!" at. Quite literally they make her and Bruce get into a romance (despite not having said 150 between them prior to it, over 75% of which was veiled disdain and philosophical argument) just so she can betray him and reveal herself as the real antagonist with the trigger to the bomb.
Oh yes, the bomb. The big reason Talia via Bane could take over the city is because she has the primary trigger to a Wayne Enterprise clean energy Reactor, which is a regular nuclear reactor with a technobabble varnish. And the weird thing is that this is supposed to be some secret new danger. Um Nolan? Hate to break it to you, but nuclear reactors have been around for decades. This concept isn't even anything particularly new to media (especially in the last two decades. we've nuked quite a few things. It's kinda lost it's impact)
And here's the crazy thing: Somehow (don't ask me how I don't know) they managed to turn it into a 4 megaton nuclear bomb with nothing but a bit of coding. THAT'S NOT HOW NUCLEAR REACTORS WORK!!!!!!!! A nuclear bomb requires a very precise detonation sequence in order to explode properly, while the only way nuclear reactors can catastrophically fail is via a total core meltdown, which is a very localized affair (it's why only local Chernobyl was rendered uninhabitable via radiation rather the the entire region). The two simply don't work the same way, and no nuclear engineer would be remotely dumb enough to make a reactor that could blow up like we expect most nukes to (mostly because it would actually require some explosives to do so). And here's another weird fact about it. For some reason the reactor core/bomb has a "time limit" where it will explode after 5 months of being disconnected from the rest of the machine. That wouldn't work. Nuclear reactors go critical if they go a few hours without the necessary cooling system. Quite frankly no part of this idea would work with any semblance of realism, which is something the previous films at least tried to stay within.
But say we assume that they did find a way to do it, then a whole new problem arises from this. In the final climax of the film, Batman uses the Bat flyer to move the bomb out from the city over the bay when there was a minute left on the timer (if I remember rightly) to boomsday. Now the fastest speed that helicopters in this day an age is 200 nautical miles per hour. Even if Batman's vehicle could pull that sort of speed whilst carrying a 4 megaton nuke, he would only reach 3.3 miles, which was not enough not have gotten Gotham free of a 1 megaton bomb's primary blast radius (which is fours miles approximately). And here's the thing, despite the fact that they say in the movie that a four megaton bomb's primary blast radius is 6 miles (Which already is too much for Batman's vehicle to fly in one minute), they're wrong even there. The approximate primary blast radius ends at about 7PSI overpressure, which on a 4 Megaton bomb is actually 7.65 miles. Even at twice the speed of the fastest unladen heli in the world, the Bomb would still have obliterated most of Gotham and killed pretty much everyone in it whether it be by the sheer concussive force of the blast, which would frappe'd all their internal organs, or by the resulting nuclear fallout, which woulds stretch out for another 11 miles or so.
Now you may think I may be nit-picking this final point, but the thing is that all this data on nukes and heli speeds came from about 5 minutes of research via Google and Wikipedia, and yet an entire team of writers with months of time to make the script somehow did not check these details. That is inexcusable. It's simple research people, so do it! The terrible thing is if they had done some basic calculation they could have made it work (4eg make the bomb a 1 megaton, establish the the bat flyer could go supersonic. Very simple stuff really)
Now there are several more issues that I've had with Dark Knight Rises, but I feel I've laid out enough examples and spent more than enough of the reader's time. From stem to stern this movie was a terrible watch for me. What few interesting scenes and good performances from the actors (one of the few saving graces for the film) might do to mitigate the damage, it's still a shoddy piece of work. It doesn't follow the set-up that the previous films established, the plot was not thought out at all, and there are so many rookie mistakes in trying to up the ante, introduce twists, or even simply establish a clear timeline that I'm frankly disgusted with the whole thing.
It's a contrived, cohesiveness mess of a film, and I honestly regret having paid money for it.
