First thoughts. That’s
what this piece will be. Half-formed, poorly-considered thoughts.
Having maintained my usual exhausting self-imposed media
blackout on this film … I went to see it today as cold as anyone could. I haven’t opened a copy of ‘Empire’ in
months, have avoided some of my favourite websites and found myself sitting in
the cinema with my fingers in my ears going “La-la-la” while the trailer
played. (If you think I’m joking … You
don’t know me that well).
So, I’m not intending to spoil the film, but by merely
talking about it, I’m going to … So, if you have any ambition to watch this
film … Don’t read on.
Give yourself the chance to see the film …
Okay? So, I’ll assume
you have seen it if you’re still here.
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| So when is a trilogy not really a trilogy? |
I was reasonably indifferent to Batman Begins (2005). I
enjoyed it but, y’know, it wasn’t the ‘Batman: Year One’ I’d been hoping
for. And it had Liam Neeson, which, in
his post-Phantom Menace, (1999) pre-Taken (2009) ‘wilderness years’ was
rarely a great thing. Then there were
the unconvincing sets (The Narrows) and dodgy special effects (all that mono-rail
stuff … please). But it did have the
relationship between Wayne and Alfred and Lucius Fox. It had the development of the armour and the
Tumbler. It had some pretty bloody
spectacular location photography (fighting on a frozen lake, etc). It at least attempted to be a grown-up
superhero film. A first for a DC-owned
property, in my humble opinion!
Then The Dark Knight
(2008) arrived. It was a
phenomenon. Everything that I felt was
wrong about Begins was right about
this film. Everything that I had thought
right about Begins was even more
right. Gone were the dodgy sets and
effects … This time it was shot on location and the effects were practical …
where practical.
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| You won't hear any mentions of either The Joker or Arkham in this film. No joke. |
My straw-poll survey made The Dark Knight the second favourite film of the decade and it was
my second favourite too. It remains my absolute
favourite superhero film … And I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Marvelite.
TDK (as its
friends call it) was such a profound leap forward from BB (as, I suspect, no one calls it) it vastly surpassed my
expectation. As such, The Dark Knight Rises was almost bound
to be a disappointment … Simply because it couldn’t possibly exceed the now
stratospheric expectation.
I knew this going in.
As he did with TDK,
he begins by catching us off guard.
Whereas that film’s prologue was a bank heist, this film has a full on
Bond-movie pre-title sequence, complete with jaw-dropping aerial stunts. I don’t suppose Nolan is pitching to direct
the next Bond but, if he were, this audition would doubtless secure him the
job.
Then we go into a lengthy, but necessary process of
catch-up. It’s been eight years since
Bats took the fall for the now-sainted Harvey Dent … Eight years when he has
not once donned the cape and cowl. So
far so very ‘The Dark Knight Returns’.
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| If you felt Bats coming out of retirement rang a few bells ... |
If you’ve never read Frank Miller and Klaus Janson’s definitive vision of The
Batman (the one that effectively made every subsequent story unnecessary) then
treat yourself. The build-up to Bats’
inevitable return is mythical and his arrival is seismic. Sadly, by comparison, Batman’s return in this
film is something of a damp squib.
Anyway, as before, Nolan has lifted elements from a variety
of Batman comic-books, 1993's 'Knightfall' by Doug Moench and Jim Aparo, of
course, Miller’s 'Dark Knight Returns', touches of Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke's revamped version of Catwoman and, as usual, the atmosphere of the Loeb/Sale stories. He also refers back, often in cunningly
subtle ways, to his own previous films (the burning bat symbol, the frozen
river, the circular pit) all of which is mixed together with an awareness of the
world-wide audience’s rage at the elite rich having destroyed our economy in
the years since the last film came out.
There was clearly no plan at the beginning to make a trilogy
– hence the clear visual and tonal difference between the first two films, but,
never-the-less, Nolan (and his fellow script-writer, his brother, Jonathan
Nolan) have woven enough of the thematic fabric of the first film into this third
to create a satisfying conclusion. Very
much in the way the Die Hard With a
Vengeance (1995) ties up the threads of Die
Hard (1988).
Problems there are, certainly. Small problems, such as … Why is Wayne
limping for the film’s first half hour and where does the limp go? How come a punch in the back cures a
shattered spine? Who is in charge of The
Pit and why is it there? And Matthew
Modine … Ehm … Why?
Then there are larger problems … Such as my failure to
connect with Bane. Maybe it is because muscle
is inherently less interesting than cunning.
Where The Joker was an evil genius, expressively performed by Heath
Ledger who was inspired by the opportunities the role afforded him … Tom Hardy
is literally muzzled as Bane.
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| Hardy, no stranger to out-methoding Bale put on two stone of muscle for this. Bale grew a tache. |
His scenes with Batman are perfunctory and largely consist
of them whacking each-other in a, frankly, not very cinematic way. Nolan has never really made a big deal out of
the fight scenes with these films. I’m
not complaining, particularly, since fight scenes hardly constitute the
intellectual high-point of a movie.
Maybe some of the limitation is brought about by Bale’s insistence on
doing most of that sort of stuff himself, maybe some of comes about because the
IMAX screen of which Nolan has become fond, doesn’t lend itself to rapid
editing and whip-pans. Whatever the
reasons, the fights have never been the point of these films … So, to reduce
Batman and Bane’s conflict to a street-brawl seems anti-climactic, as though it
is beneath the dignity of both characters.
And there is some dignity to Hardy’s performance of Bane, even if it is
stifled by that (never fully explained) mask. It is also worth mentioning that the slightly fuzzy vocal effect they have put on Hardy's voice makes some of his dialogue difficult to follow. So, if you have no idea what he's saying, don't worry, you're not alone.
Okay so, unlike, say, Darth Vader, he can at least use his
eyes … Which he does, to great effect. There is some humour here, not least in his Yoda-like dialogue delivery … But times several I found myself
wondering if the dialogue was being added afterwards and Hardy was mere miming. He seemed like the passion and aggression
that his physicality demanded was lacking.
Sadly, Hardy is perfectly cast in this role, but is simply not allowed
to play to his considerable strengths.
Watch Bronson to see him being
uncontrollably physical and truly, disturbingly terrifying. Here, only in his final scene with Batman does he become
a fully rounded character but it is too little too late.
So I was disappointed with Tom Hardy … Not disappointed by him so much as for him.
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| Notice how the eyes seem to follow you round the room ... |
Maybe if this film hadn’t been shackled to its 12A
certificate and, therefore, it’s need to not upset anyone above the age of five,
maybe then we could have seen Bane let off the leash. Maybe characters we are supposed to be
invested in could be allowed to die on screen.
Maybe the realistic vision could be permitted some realistic
blood-letting. But none of that is
directly Nolan’s fault, that is down to the MPAA and the BBFC who censor the
wrong things for the wrong reasons.
But what about the story?
Does it have the multi-layered complexity of TDK? In spades! Lesser film-makers would have made massive
set-pieces, if not entire movies out of sequences which Nolan references in
passing – such as the blowing-up of the bridges, or the trapping of the entire police-force underground. Indeed, the number of plot-threads is
actually too mind-boggling to follow in a single viewing. This is not helped by the way that the film’s
structure seems to fly apart in the third act.
Our hero is lying on his back on the other side of the planet while, in
the space of a montage, three months passes and Commissioner Gordon is leading
a resistance movement in the unruly streets of chaos-riven Gotham and them … It’s
three weeks after that and a few hours till a nuclear bomb is going to turn
Manhattan Island (sorry, Gotham Island) into Hiroshima 2.0.
But, hang on, didn’t The Joker mine the bridges last
time? Well, he said he did … But we didn’t
see any blowing up. Here we do.
Sorry … Did you mention a nuclear bomb? Yep.
Another touch of the old Bond movie!
Mixed-in (had they but known) with a touch of The Avengers. That, I confess,
was a bit of a stretch. For a series
that had striven to be real, to pitch realistic characters with realistic
motivations against each-other in realistic ways … The nuclear stand-off and
its resolution was pushing things a bit.
Okay, so I had problems with the film … Problems which may
evaporate with a second viewing. But
there were also pleasures.
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| What's new, pussy-cat? |
Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle is a pitch-perfect delight. She isn’t there as cheese-cake. I didn’t notice a single lingering shot of
her arse in her tight costume. She doesn’t
need Bruce to come along and rescue her … indeed she does the rescuing … And no
one, at any point, even contemplates calling her ‘Cat Woman’. Oh. Thank.
God.
Joseph Gordon Levitt is spot-on as John Blake a character
who takes up the campaigning reigns of a younger Jim Gordon, who is now
polluted by the lie he has been telling about Harvey Dent all these years. Indeed, as the film proceeds, he evolves from
being a proto-Gordon, to a proto-Bruce Wayne … And there will be much interweb
speculation about where that particular story thread will lead.
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| Rather like Bale before him ... The uncomfortable teenager has all grown -up and is an action movie star in the making. |
Michael Caine succeeds (once again) in bringing a lump to
the throat as Wayne’s Better Angel, constantly telling him the unvarnished
truth … Even if one or two of his exchanges did echo with the recent memory of
Martin Freeman’s astonishing turn as John Watson in the TV version of Sherlock.
I loved the way that this film (inadvertently) turns over
the coin to its scarred side and shows us what a big city is really like. In The Amazing
Spider-Man (as well as in Raimi’s more fantastical versions of the story)
we got New Yorkers pulling together to protect their own. But Gotham, as seen by Nolan (and, before
him, Frank Miller) is a very different kind of New York. Here, when the ‘ordinary Gothamites’ are cut
loose … They just ransack the place, freeing prisoners, setting up kangaroo
courts and hanging ‘the guilty’ from bridges.
This is a city where freedom from the shackles of law-and-order simply
means anarchic self-destruction.
I loved the hectic, dizzying pace of the third act, with its
echoes of Robocop (1987) and Escape From New York (1981). I loved the sheer scale of the visuals … From the size of the sets (the huge,
Goya-esque court-room … The multi-story sewer … The run-off where the police
are trapped … The Pit) as much as the audacious way the locations are shot (as
often as not from the air).
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| Half upside-down insect / half helicopter hybrid ... If I can't have Deckard's Spinner - I want that! |
I love The Bat. I
love the fact that they don’t call it a Bat-Wing and I want one!
I love the ambition of taking a superhero movie and making
it about class-war, terrorism, social group-dynamics, personal-morality and
war!
I love the fact that the last act rambles over five months,
has none of the unities script-writers are trained to observe, and yet still
hangs together as an energetic and epic story.
I love the fact that the film has about four false endings
and I only guessed two of them.
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| I haven't mentioned The Bat Pod ... But Selina Kyle just looks too cool on it to ignore. |
Ultimately, this is not
as satisfying an experience as The Dark
Knight. It strives for so much scale the human element gets
lost. It strives for so many narrative threads that the
coherence gets lost. It lacks the
charismatic heart The Joker gave to the last film and it lacks his
clearly-defined motivation. We never do
really know why Bane is doing what he’s doing.
But it is an experience, a truly
epic experience full of ideas … And
there are precious few of those in most $250 million movies.
If Nolan has failed it is only partially and it is only because
he was too ambitious. And God bless him
for it. That ambition worked in The Dark Knight and gave us the first
IMAX block-buster. It worked in Inception and gave us the most
intelligent block-buster probably ever … And it works here more than it doesn’t.
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| None of that 3D nonsense for our Christopher. |
More than anything else … I love the fact that this is in 2D. And always will be.
I also love the fact that, in a few days, I will be seeing
it again on an IMAX screen! So I might
be back with more …
When you have seen the film you, if you're anything like me, probably like to peek behind the curtain to see how it was done. Well, rather conveniently, this 13-minute-long making-of has been on-line for a while. Just the job.
… Meanwhile, as you may know, there has been a typically
American tragedy at a midnight screening of this film. In a town apparently just fifteen miles from
Columbine, another psychopath starved of publicity has decided to make himself
famous in the wrongest way possible.
The news media, which is whacking itself dry with excitement
over this, is sparing is no lascivious detail of what they are already calling ‘The
Batman Killings’. Indeed, as I type
this, they are telling us that the perpetrator was made up to look like The
Joker. This will, inevitably, re-ignite
the Media effects Debate that rages on year-after-year and which I will, in all
likelihood, be evoking to my Media students at some point in the future.
Over at Zap 2 It, they have noticed that Miller's 'Dark Knight Returns' chillingly dealt with this issue (including the notion of the media's culpability) in its Arnold Crimp tableau:
The message here is that a deranged mind - and let us not forget that no-one chooses to be mentally ill - will take inspiration from any source, will confuse and misinterpret that inspiration and will fit it into a skewed reality. Wiser voices than mine have noted, many times, that you cannot legislate for the infinite variety of human personality. But one thing we can do, is not obsess over the details.
Earlier today, a friend and ex-student reminded me of this … It’s short, it’s pointed and it’s the single most coherent comment I’ve ever heard on this type of atrocity …
Over at Zap 2 It, they have noticed that Miller's 'Dark Knight Returns' chillingly dealt with this issue (including the notion of the media's culpability) in its Arnold Crimp tableau:
The message here is that a deranged mind - and let us not forget that no-one chooses to be mentally ill - will take inspiration from any source, will confuse and misinterpret that inspiration and will fit it into a skewed reality. Wiser voices than mine have noted, many times, that you cannot legislate for the infinite variety of human personality. But one thing we can do, is not obsess over the details.
Earlier today, a friend and ex-student reminded me of this … It’s short, it’s pointed and it’s the single most coherent comment I’ve ever heard on this type of atrocity …
For now, if you were intending to go and see The Dark Knight Rises … or any other
movie … Go. Don’t let the weakness of
one mad individual, or the cumulative weakness of one mad society, dictate your
actions.
If you want to know more about violent crime in American – watch Bowling For Columbine and if you want to understand the irresistible power of the media over our minds … I urge you to look up the name Adam Curtis.
If you want to know more about violent crime in American – watch Bowling For Columbine and if you want to understand the irresistible power of the media over our minds … I urge you to look up the name Adam Curtis.
