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

Handsome Bob

I actually saw that moment as Talia teasingly suggesting that she knows who Bruce is. The dig is easily applicable to Bruce's original intentions and ultimate failure as Batman.

Mickeroo

S. De Sousa wrote: »

I actually saw that moment as Talia teasingly suggesting that she knows who Bruce is. The dig is easily applicable to Bruce's original intentions and ultimate failure as Batman.

That's what I took from that part too.

Andy!!

jaykhunter wrote: »

Em...how come Bane wants to destroy Gotham then? Is it more out of spite or because the LoS said they would before?

Fair point; things have changed drastically since, the law finally turned Gotham around, and still Bane comes? Its slightly unbelievable. As for it being Talias desire for revenge (for a father she hated!) nuking a whole city to hurt one guy seems a tad excessive.

More I talk about this movie the less I like it.

Andy!!

corcaigh07 wrote: »

don't agree plus he wasn't the main threat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCELYhYlLtU

Exactly, he was just a crow-nie.

Handsome Bob

Andy!! wrote: »

More I talk about this movie the less I like it.

And yet it doesn't stop you from being one of the most active posters in the thread.

cloud493

Its such a great film isn't it :pac: might watch it again tonight.

Andy!!

S. De Sousa wrote: »

And yet it doesn't stop you from being one of the most active posters in the thread.

Firstly that is no way true, and secondly people like to talk about what they like and dont like, it all depends on whether they're getting any interesting conversation out of it. Which I am.

Not from you, obviously.

Andy!!

Is Banes sleepy eyed sidekick with the sniper shells on his chest an Irish fella? He sounds like he is.

roanoke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkMPZ7WeDck

krudler

^ 2.40 nearly made me choke on a mouthful of tea :pac:

Penn

Andy!! wrote: »

Is Banes sleepy eyed sidekick with the sniper shells on his chest an Irish fella? He sounds like he is.

No, American. Josh Stewart. Sounds a bit more like a South African accent to me.

Does anyone know if the music from this trailer is on the soundtrack?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9DlV9qwtF0

Sad Professor

Penn wrote: »

No, American. Josh Stewart. Sounds a bit more like a South African accent to me.

Does anyone know if the music from this trailer is on the soundtrack?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9DlV9qwtF0

No. That track still hadn't been released anywhere the last time I checked. It was an unused track that doesn't appear in the film.

Penn

Sad Professor wrote: »

No. That track still hadn't been released anywhere the last time checked. It was an unused track that doesn't appear in the film.

I watched it again over the weekend and I thought I'd heard a small snippet of it, but not the full version like in that trailer. Shame, that score is amazing.

Andy!!

krudler wrote: »

^ 2.40 nearly made me choke on a mouthful of tea :pac:

Aye 2.40 to 4.00 was hilarious, the rest was retarded. Especially the beginning. 2.40 actually made me almost spill my coffee haha.

krudler

Andy!! wrote: »

Aye 2.40 to 4.00 was hilarious, the rest was retarded. Especially the beginning. 2.40 actually made me almost spill my coffee haha.

"This isn't a cuhhhrrrrrrrrrr!"

Its a pity they havent released the full score yet, one of the best pieces of music in the film isnt on the soundtrack, its just after the cops arrive in the bar with Selina trying to escape and the SWAT guys are all in the alley being taken out with the sniper rifle, its a cool little theme and isnt anywhere on the score, bah.

Snake Plisken

Andy!! wrote: »

Aye 2.40 to 4.00 was hilarious, the rest was retarded. Especially the beginning. 2.40 actually made me almost spill my coffee haha.

The whole lot was brilliant including the Bane Freestyle rap! "I'm Bane yes that's my name", I find myself going around singing that to myself all day lol:cool:

Tinie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEwUwslyaEQ

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

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.

The ending is controversial to many, but in retrospect, there are myriad threads planted throughout that reinforce the idea that Bruce Wayne is looking to get out of the game as soon as he can. This isn’t a long term plan and he’s been planning to quit all along.

Very much. I mean everything in the trilogy comes back to the scene of the jet in “Batman Begins” between Bruce and Alfred. It’s a short scene and it’s simple, but it’s got a couple of little nods to this idea. It flies by, but it’s crucial to the trilogy because not all Batman fans agree with this. This is my interpretation of the character.

This is David [Goyer] and my take on it, and Christian [Bale] as well having his input. We said, “Okay, when you look at how you make the incredible extraordinary actions of an individual, who’s going to reinvent themselves in a theatrical persona in order to right the wrongs of the world and exorcise demons”….

The only way to me that made sense was in a more realistic tone, and taking on the idea of symbolism. The take on the idea that [Bruce Wayne] would see himself as a symbol who would motivate the good of Gotham to actually start working on their own, so he would be a catalyst for change, and tip the scales. And that’s always going to be a temporary process. To me it only made sense if you were looking at going okay, “I’m going to do this until the point where it’s not needed. So we followed it through very much into “The Dark Knight.”

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/the-playlist-interview-christopher-nolan-talks-the-controversial-ending-the-dark-knight-rises-more-20121205

Dempsey

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.

Watch Batman Begins again, when Wayne first approaches Gordon, he's not in a Batman suit just a balaclava and spelunking equipment. Gordon wouldnt need much convincing there imo

I agree completely with the rest of your post, couldn't have written it better myself

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.

You really think Nolan is going to bite the hand that feeds him? If thats exactly how Nolan wanted to do the film then I think we are seeing his 1st steps into decline.

Turtyturd

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.



http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/the-playlist-interview-christopher-nolan-talks-the-controversial-ending-the-dark-knight-rises-more-20121205

Prior to the release of the movie Nolan said that when the story was conceived, it began at the end and worked it's way back. And the ending fits in perfectly with the rest of the trilogy....and while we are at it can we stop with the "How did he get back to Gotham" nonsense?:pac:

Sad Professor

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.

indough

There is no ambiguity whatsoever, the film clearly shows you that he survived. In fact, it actually shows you this in several ways just so that there could/should be no ambiguity

Turtyturd

indough wrote: »

There is no ambiguity whatsoever, the film clearly shows you that he survived. In fact, t actually shows you this in several ways just so that there could/should be no ambiguity

Don't think it could be any clearer...as much love as there iss for Inception it has a lot to answer for in relation people not being able to grasp the end of The Dark Knight Rises.

johnny_ultimate

One of Batman's defining characteristics over decades of comics has been his intelligence and forward planning. How he spent years developing artificial Kyrptonite in one of the most known well examples. More than anything else in the trilogy, the ending is indicative of a Bruce Wayne who has a masterplan, who is smarter than his adversaries. Who - despite inevitable unforeseen consequences - knows the ending in advance.

If that's not an apt conclusion for the definitive cinematic potrayal of the caped crusader, I don't know what is.

Andy!!

indough wrote: »

There is no ambiguity whatsoever, the film clearly shows you that he survived. In fact, it actually shows you this in several ways just so that there could/should be no ambiguity

Despite Alfred being genuinely devastated at his parents graves (no onlookers to fool) and the fact that there was a shot of him in the bat one second before detonation.

Yep, no ambiguity whatsoever.

johnny_ultimate

Andy!! wrote: »

Yep, no ambiguity whatsoever.

Remove the sarcasm from your comment and you'd be dead right!

There really is no ambiguity whatsoever. And despite Nolan's insistence of the same in the film and interviews, it's amazing people are still doubting that.

indough

Andy!! wrote: »

Despite Alfred being genuinely devastated at his parents graves (no onlookers to fool) and the fact that there was a shot of him in the bat one second before detonation.

Yep, no ambiguity whatsoever.

the scene at the grave occurs before alfred meets bruce

so yeah there is zero ambiguity

Andy!!

indough wrote: »

the scene at the grave occurs before alfred meets bruce

so yeah there is zero ambiguity

You're telling me Alfred didn't know? He seemed very unsurprised to see a dead man sitting in a cafe then!

And the fact that Bats was in the cockpit a second before a nuke went off 20feet under him?

Turtyturd

Andy!! wrote: »

You're telling me Alfred didn't know? He seemed very unsurprised to see a dead man sitting in a cafe then!

And the fact that Bats was in the cockpit a second before a nuke went off 20feet under him?

The last scene where Batman is shown is a couple of seconds before the timer on the bomb is shown, and the timer reads 5 seconds.