Nicker on 4/8/2012 at 22:48
Quote Posted by froghawk
I think Memento, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight demonstrate that the Nolan brothers are better writers than almost everyone else in Hollywood. I don't know what they've been doing lately.
Too much at once perhaps. Victims of their own success, as in who is going to tell them their script sucks?
It was like watching a second draft at best.
froghawk on 4/8/2012 at 23:18
Very true. Inception was the least coherent Nolan film yet prior to TDKR, but I think its shortcomings were excusable in its context. It was very much a spectacle film. But TDKR, while still enjoyable, definitely did feel like a draft rather than a final script - you're absolutely right about that.
SubJeff on 5/8/2012 at 00:14
What was incoherent about Inception?
Sg3 on 5/8/2012 at 04:28
Just saw the movie yesterday. It was good, but not great. As others here noted, some of the characters weren't fleshed out enough (Bane, the Catwoman, and the crazy one whose name I can't remember). Yeah, her death scene was laughably bad acting. Yeah, the nuke blast was surprisingly poorly-done effects. And the recuperation wasn't believable. At this point I guess I'm just agreeing with various things people have already written in this thread, but, to my credit, I came to the conclusions independently.
But I have one really big problem with the movie--the message. Incredibly hypocritical. A large part of the theme seemed to be "it isn't right for those super-rich people to be living high while everyone else suffers," which I rather agree with--but who made the movie? Super-rich people who are living high while everyone else suffers ...
SubJeff on 5/8/2012 at 07:27
I've seen a lot of people complaining about the recuperation. What was wrong with it? How long do people think it took?
Nicker on 5/8/2012 at 10:06
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
I've seen a lot of people complaining about the recuperation. What was wrong with it? How long do people think it took?
You mean besides... "Your back is broken. Let me punch it better for you." and bulking up like a prize fighter on boiled cabbage?
IIRC his timeline was between two and three months - miraculous even modern interventions.
Scots Taffer on 5/8/2012 at 11:13
Also, let's skim over the two or three most potentially interesting months in the whole conceit of the plot ... as Gotham "falls".
Bane: Oh and if anyone comes in or out of Gotham then...
Recuperated & Penniless Bruce Wayne: sup :cool:
Bane: ... for fuck's sake.
SubJeff on 5/8/2012 at 12:01
This is why I asked; I knew it was something else people would have missed. I wonder if some people even pay attention. I don't mean to be insulting but it's not like these things are secrets.
It was 5 months.
And surely you can suspend disbelieve about his recovery. Everyone faps over TDK yet no one questions the crazy acrobatics Batman pulls off in that, much more than in TDKR.
Looks like his back wasn't broken ("breaking" the Bat is surely a metaphor) but just injured. Yeah, a punch probably isn't the best physiotherapy/chiropractic technique but it's Batman. Come on. There is a goddamn fusion reactor in this!
Kuuso on 5/8/2012 at 13:13
Hokay, me and my gf watched the two new bat films before seeing the Dark Knight Rises and I feel that the newest one fits somewhere just above Batman Begins, but far below the Dark Knight.
There's lots to nitpick in the newest film as much as there's in the first one, but there's some bigger things that make it one of Nolan's worst films (still being fairly good, mind you!). After the "pit" sequence, the film turns into a typical swarchenegger movie with the [spoiler]"10 seconds till the bomb goes off amg".[/spoiler] It felt cheap and dull, something from a b-class action movie. That ties to the general problem of the movie: the last half of the movie didn't deliver what the first build up on. It kind of crumbled on it's own weight, managing just about tying all the loose ends, for better or worse (Robin stuff was quite awesome, but he didn't get enough meaningful stuff to do). Wayne's ending was a horrible cop-out so typical to american cinema that it almost ruined the movie. Maybe it's my expectations on Nolan that I thought he could dodge such horribly cliched endings.
I liked Bane a lot and Tom Hardy did all he could with it. I think I'm in the minority that loved his voice, albeit his mask was completely unnecessary and weird, it only seemed to be included because he wouldn't be close enough to the comic's bane without it. The problem with Bane's character is connected to [spoiler]Talia[/spoiler], who is horribly underdeveloped, doesn't have enough meaningful screentime and has a bad actress (I laughed out loud at her final scene). I did like Catwoman and albeit she did develop as character, there was a problem of her being a bit dull - not much reason to care about her. Hathaway's ass was magnificent.
A general problem with the movie was that it concentrated on spectacle (batbike, batplane, warfare etc.) that wasn't justified by the actual content. In The Dark Knight, every action scene seemed justified by the plot even if some stuff was overblown, everything was part of joker's plan, in the newest there was moments where it seemed to be too much about "HURR BATBIKE'S TIRES ROLL HORIZONTALLY".
I guess my biggest problem is that the newest one is a spectacle movie akin to a typical action flick and concerned more about tying up the loose ends and explosions than dealing with meaningful characters or themes. It's good for an action movie, but The Dark Knight especially was a bit more than that, it dealed with batman's character tremendously well. This continued in the first part of Dark Knight Rises, where Wayne is just a shadow of his former self and tries to be what he once was and pays for it. It just fails hard afterwards.
froghawk on 5/8/2012 at 13:51
Quote Posted by Sg3
But I have one really big problem with the movie--the message. Incredibly hypocritical. A large part of the theme seemed to be "it isn't right for those super-rich people to be living high while everyone else suffers," which I rather agree with--but who made the movie? Super-rich people who are living high while everyone else suffers ...
It's funny - the liberals are all claiming that the movie has a conservative agenda while the conservatives are claiming a liberal agenda. I disagree with both, and I think your take is an extreme oversimplification. Only the villains espoused the message you think of. Selina Kyle seemed representative of the Occupy movement, but she was hypocritical, living in a huge apartment which would be VERY expensive in NY. Then when Bane brought the storm she thought she wanted, she was horrified and was able to see the error in her thought.
Now, Bane/Kyle don't correspond exactly to the occupy movement, since said movement is nonviolent and also does not condone stealing. They act more as warnings against the more extreme manifestations of it and the damage they can cause. The film is topical, but its message doesn't really fall firmly on either side of the fence, and if anything, I would say it leans somewhat right (which is unsurprising, since the idea of Batman is a rather conservative one in the first place). But realistically, I think the script was thematically confused to an extent that it didn't even know what it was trying to say, which is why people are accusing it of being both simplistically in favor of the occupy movements and vehemently against them. The script truly lacks the thematic clarity of the previous two films, despite exploring many of the same themes - and for me, that places it at the bottom of the ranking. BB really gets you emotionally involved with Bruce Wayne. TDK gets you enthralled with the Joker. What does TDKR do? It puts on a rather incoherent show which is very exciting and even moving at times, but there is no big picture that I can discern.
This is all part of a trend of Nolan's films continuing to get bigger, louder, and more crammed with plot. The intimacy of his earlier films is long gone. This worked quite well for TDK, but Inception's creativity was limited by its action sequences. Whose dreams look like James Bond movies? The snow sequence simply wasn't as exciting as it should have been given the incredible stuff that preceded it - it was just another stereotypical action sequence. And Nolan repeats the same mistake in TDKR - a lot of excitement to lead to just another deactivate-the-bomb chase sequence. There was only one chase sequence each in BB and TDK, and they were both very well done... in TDKR, both sequences seem superfluous, only present because that's how he's begun to define his Batman franchise.
