Batman!

I’m sick of waiting, so I’ll start this thread myself!

This film is NOT a masterpiece, it is not amazing, it is not 10/10 as so many infantile post-pubescent boys make it out to be, and girls yes. That’s how entrenched the disease is! It is a mere action film. Anything real i.e. emotinally real is absent in favour of…violence. Take the moment where the real daughter of Raul Ghoul, or however its spelt, is revealed. It’s a major moment of decipt, treachery, but it falls flat because its completely out of the blue and we also don’t give a shit because the no real time has been spent developing an emotional relationship between the two characters so basically, we don’t give a fuck, next!!
Bane’s a real softie! We hear about how the brute protected this girl, saved her from being gang-raped to death by the inmates of some hole-in-the-ground, Awww, that’s cute, he even sheds a tear, but that scene is like 2 minutes long, and again, considering we’ve only been introduced to the sociopathatic side of this guy, we again, don’t give a fuck. But no worries because before that tear has even travelled his cheek he’s blown up by a fucking tank cannon.

And then the rest of the film basically falls into the typical patter of…p-r-e-d-i-c-t-a-b-l-e bullshit. Meh. That’s my rating. Fucking-meh! This film is entirely devoid of any substance. BUT, it’s a comic-book film. I suspect this lack-of-substance is an inherent part of this Marvel/DC tripe.

WARNING - SPOILERS

Curious how the only places outside of the US that are depicted in this trilogy are even worse than Gotham. I can’t imagine what the not very subtle message behind that could be.

My major problem with the film, aside from the completely screwed up efforts to make us emotionally care about what’s going on that Trevor has rightly observed, is the sheer implausibility of the thing. Batman confronts Bane, gets the shit kicked out of him and his back broken. He is then dragged, with his back still broken, halfway round the world to this mystery prison/sinkhole. The mystery prison/sinkhole that no one can get out of, and yet everyone in there is relatively well fed, clean, not at all thirsty. They even have an HD TV and satellite news. Despite being in a hole in the ground.

Batman’s back remains broken for months without treatment, yet he does not die. His back in then fixed by a ‘doctor’ who uses his hand to shove a couple of vertebrae back into place. Even if this was plausible, which it isn’t, Batman would suffer from frequent nerve/muscle issues throughout his entire body for the rest of his life. Despite this crippling injury he manages to escape the sinkhole prison. Despite having no money, no idea where he is, and having just escaped from a big hole in the ground he then magically gets back to Gotham, pretty much instantly. He then fights Bane again, and even though by rights Batman should be far weaker than the first time round when Bane kicked the crap out of him, he defeats Bane simply by punching him in the face quite a lot. If that’s all it took to overcome this devilish, sadistic terrorist mastermind then why did everyone wait around for five months until an hour before the nuke was due to explode?

To cap it all off, at the climax of the film Batman attaches a cable to a nuclear bomb that is about to go off, and flies it out to sea to save the city. Even if this were plausible, which it isn’t, Batman somehow survives the explosion even though we see him in the cockpit of the flying Bat-craft only seconds before the bomb explodes, and we’re told it has an impact radius of six miles. Even if he had ejector-seated his way out of the Bat-craft just after we last see him in the cockpit, and even if the craft somehow managed to fly another six miles in about 10 seconds so he could survive the blast, he would still be stuck, miles out at sea, in a heavy, armoured body suit. Put simply, he would have drowned.

Seriously, this film is a load of crap. In the first couple of films the insistence on using stunts and models to present the action meant that it retained a degree of plausibility, and allowed for some extent of emotional development of story and characters. As per usual, as soon as the lazy option of just CGI-ing your way to grandiose scale action was chosen, the film died on its arse.

Do not pay to see this movie, or if you do, demand a refund.

I don’t really get what the buzz is all about.

I hated the Dark Night and the sequel is probably going to be an average film.

And Nolan is an average director.

In fact, I don’t get the whole super hero come back. I haven’t seen a good super hero film in a long, long time.

Yeah, had been looking forward to seeing this film for a month or two. Saw it this afternoon. Expectations were high.

I suppose the chances were high that after Dark Knight any third film was going to be a toughie, still, I lived in hope.

What did I like…? Quite liked the laterally spinning tires on the batbike to explain how it would ever go round a corner on those big fat rubbery lumps it has. And I’m racking my brain now… Nope, nothing else springs to mind - so much for my attempts to be positive.

What didn’t I like…? Unfortunately lots of things. In no particular order:

Casting for catwoman. I hate that woman - she’s about as sexy as cold puke in a bus stop, and should have been left to rot in those teenage angsty princess movies she usually makes. What were they thinking…? She even made skin-tight black latex look boring. No build-up to her character, and as others have said - I didn’t care about her.

Bane. Big guy with a silly lamprey mask and a kinda surprise Mike Tyson voice. No real back-story beyond what’s been mentioned. “Hi, I’m the bad guy, I must be, look at my lamprey mask. Ooh. Brrr.” Kinda anarchistic maybe. Hmm. Trendy.

That Bat-gyrocopter thing. With those big, oh-so-vunerable naked blades underneath. A kid could disable it with a well-thrown brick.

The fact that the damn film was nearly three hours long, and still seemed rushed, jumpy and I dunno, attention-span-deficit target audienced. Was there a scene over a couple of minutes long…? The dialogue was symbolistic and preachy, particularly Alfred - I mean for fuck’s sake, he was a walking set of Aesop’s fables and morality plays throughout the film.

As someone else mentioned - all through the film there was a sense of inevitability. Wasn’t a case of “Is he gonna win…?” but just “Well, how’s he gonna win…?” and after 2 hours “Jesus Christ, when’s he gonna win…?” But to be fair, that was always going to be the trouble. It would have been better - as it was in the Dark Knight - if they’d played the “Okay - he’s going to win, of course he is… But at what cost to his soul…?”

This time there were very few moral dilemas, or even moral hiccups - everything was black and white. Catwoman’s a thief for fuck’s sake, Batman should have punched her in the face within minutes of the film starting - and she nicked his mother’s pearls - those same pearls that were blasted off his mother’s throat by the guy with the gun when he was a kid - a symbol right at the heart of the whole batman creation myth. And Bruce doesn’t bat (ha-ha) a single fucking eyelash. That’s like I dunno, someone stealing the turin shroud, with the Pope in the room, and the Pope just sitting back and going “Hey man, like, er that doesn’t really belong to you but… Ah fuck it, just wash it before you give it back k…?”

He should have gone apeshit, beaten her to death with his cane - and I dunno, had a few flashbacks over her corpse or something.

Endless list.

Pity. Prometheus, and now this. 2012 - disappointment so far film-wise.

Tab,

You’re right, on every point, and yes 2012 has been a terrible year for movies.

Just don’t watch LOL (the Miley Cyrus movie). It’s very bad, but not so bad it’s actually quite amusing. It’s just really, really bad. Worse than Batman 3. Worse even than the Matrix 3.

The original LOL wasn’t so bad though.

I thought the voice was one of the best bits. Turns out that Mr. Kipling not only bakes exceedingly good cakes, but he’s a psychotic Stalinist bodybuilder with a strap-on asthma inhaler, too. Who knew?

I thought they were going somewhere with a capitalist critique at the beginning of the film, but it ended up that Catwoman was a petulant sulk and the supervillains were only in it for shits and giggles.

Agreed that this was very disappointing. Going by the end of The Dark Knight, this was supposed to be a film about Batman as outlaw - homer sacer - a trope as old as the movies themselves, but what we got instead was an empty-headed lightshow with Anne Hathaway and Matthew Modine. Do me a favour…

Yeah it sucked. Actually I still kind of enjoyed it, just because it was Batman, and I like the character, but as a film it was poor, esp. compared to the dark knight.

Obviously it was predictable. All action movies are predictable - as are all Shakespearean comedies. Predictability isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because a well done film/book/play can still keep you on edge. The best is when they have you thinking - I know the good guy is going to win, but how? Terminator, for example. Or Lord of the rings.

And especially when you’re not even sure why the good guy is the good guy, except that you like him. I’m thinking of The Shield right now - I’ve never seen such a relentless series of effective suspense-action plots.

Has anyone seen “Hot Rod”? In absence of spaghetti-western or terminator like grandeur, I prefer deliberately insignificant movies to the pretentious blockbusters.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seBpXt8_6xs[/youtube]

And, in turn, how The Dark Knight Rises should have ended:
funnyordie.com/videos/a68048 … ing-leaked

(warning, very NSFW)

Personally I thought the kick at the end was a bit much.

So not the teabagging, decapitation or skull-fucking?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLyoog562x4[/youtube]

Recently my faith in the cinematic media has been much restored by the surprisingly good remake of Total Recall, and tonight’s viewing of the “holy shit where did this come from” Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Hats off to the motion picture industry. =D>