I think that we’re supposed to dislike/distrust him because:
a) he tried to wreck Fox (who we like)'s career by kicking him off the board and sending him down to a dead end department.
b) he moved Wayne Enterprises into developing weapons, which is something that Thomas Wayne would have opposed
c) he’s the one who moved to have Bruce declared legally dead
On the whole, I agree that they didn’t make him seem particularly evil.
I think he was also trying to cover up the fact that Wayne Industries had lost the microwave weapon. He tells Morgan Freeman to deliver all the information on the weapon, including backups, to Hauer’s desk right before Hauer fires him. Sounds like he was trying to cover up the fact that the weapon ever exsisted. Evil? Maybe not exactly, but still corrupt. And a jerk.
Not to mention setting up a carry-over bad guy for the sequel. Someone the Joker can get to for money, equipment, etc. The Joker will kill him by Act 3, of course, but Rutger doesn’t know that! 
There’s a strong implication that he was a stooge for Ra’s Al Ghul and the League of Shadows.
We really only got a sketch of Thomas Wayne’s character, but we know that he was a philanthropist who was doing everything he could for the betterment of Gotham. The main symbol of his philanthropy was the monorail system, which was intended to serve all of Gotham, designed in a spokes-on-a-wheel arrangement connecting every part of the city to the center. Not very practical, but an easily-readable symbol. Wayne Station, fittingly, was located in the most economically depressed area – the Narrows. It was architecturally magnificent, and would inspire awe in any transit station enthusiast, even a jaded, seen-the-best sort like matt_mcl.
Ra’s Al Ghul told Bruce that the economic devastation that Gotham endured when Thomas was young was the result of the League of Shadows attempts to destroy the city by economic means, which failed largely due to Thomas Wayne and Wayne Enterprises. He also says that they had lately managed to infiltrate every aspect of the city’s infrastructure – and Wayne Enterprises is intimately connected to that infrastructure.
When Bruce returns to Gotham, one of the first things that he sees is the ruin that Wayne Station has become. It’s not being maintained at all, and service is reduced to only “token” runs, as a gesture to the memory of Thomas Wayne – but of no use to the residents of the Narrows. Having no practical connection to the rest of the city limits their opportunities for employment. Result: increased poverty, homelessness, crime, and dependence on welfare. Urban decay.
The timing of his move to have Wayne declared dead (and to make WE a public company) wasn’t coincidental. He was hurrying that along because he knew that Wayne was making his way back – and that he was now, like his daddy, all fired up about “saving” the city – a little bird told him. He had to make sure that Wayne Jr. had no control over the company.
Earle was working against Gotham – and the implication was that it wasn’t simple market forces behind the direction the company was taking – it was the unseen hand of Ra’s Al Ghul.
…Oh my God, you may be right! Rutger! Look out!
In hindsight, it does make sense that he was trying to cover up the loss of the microwave gadget by firing Lucius. That didn’t seem immediately obvious to me, although the request for all the backup information does seem suspicious. I don’t see how this would have concealed the loss, since presumably the military contractors had information about the device as well (to say nothing of the ship full of dead crew and exploded steam pipes, which would seem to be something of a giveaway).
It must be pointed out that Lucius doesn’t come across very well in this scene, either, which probably distracted me from its true significance. Since Earle (thanks to Larry Mudd, I now know the character’s name–I probably heard it repeatedly during the movie, but just kept thinking of him as “Rutger”) went to him directly for all the files, I got the impression that the microwave device was the responsibility of his department, such as it was. This makes sense, since it’s been established that he’s the curator of all the military contract prototypes. Yet his response to the CEO’s request for the files on the unique microwave weapon prototype designed by Wayne Enterprises is, “Why, have we misplaced one?”
I would have fired him.
$10 says the new love interest is named Selena.
Naw, Catwoman’s been done too often… Talia would be better.
No! I swear! I had nothing to do with it! :eek:
Really nice work, but I did detect one small problem with it. The center of the rail station, Wayne Station, is not located in the Narrows. The League started the microwave generator in the Narrows, after luring the entire GCPD there (Not a very smart command structure in that force.) to get them out of the picture. They then had to take the generator to the Wayne building in the center of the rail system, quite a distance away, in order to have it affect the entire water system.
Also, I don’t think Earle was in league (so to speak) with Ras. He just decided he knew best about how to make money and run the company, and forget about the ideals of the Wayne family. He removed Fox from the Board of Directors and placed him in charge of a dead end division of the company so Fox would not be at meetings to make waves about what was going on.
He was in charge of the prototypes that they had given up on. All the stuff he had was simply being stored, no more testing or anything else. The generator was coming back from testing, so it would not have been his responsibility yet. And since there were only a couple of people in the company that knew it was missing, and Earle was doing his best to keep it secret, it is hardly fair to think he should have known about it.
And I think this is the point when Earle goes from being a dick to being a bad guy. He tries covering up the theft and how dangerous the weapon could be, because it would have a bad effect on the Wayne Industries IPO, instead of warning the authorities and working with them to fix things.
I love playing the “explaining what the movie would have told us were it not for time considerations” game.
The released the microwave thingy in the Narrows because that is where it was brought in (remember it was on a boat or ship of some kind, and the Narrows is surrounded by water). I also have the impression that the Narrows is the worst part of town, which means it is the best place to flout the law with the least chance of a problem with the law. So the Narrows is where they brought in the machine, and setting it off there created the start of a panic and law enforcement problem that allows them to transport it to the center of the city with ease, as all the police are now tied up at the Narrows.
See, simple!
I am not sure what question in my post you are answering, since I didn’t ask one. 
But the generator was not brought in at the Narrows. It was on the the same ship as the drugs from the earlier bust. That is why the DA was murdered
The docks are not in the Narrows, it is, as you point out, the bad part of town where the police only go in force. A seaport does not let that happen to the docks that are part of their livelihood.
The generator was set off in the Narrows for a couple of reasons.
[ul]
[li]Location of Arkham Asylum (can stage breakout to draw police)[/li][li]Population of Narrows is downtrodden and paranoid of authority (Fear gas will heighten the feelings they already have)[/li][li]Surrounded by water (can cut off police after luring most of force to island)[/li][/ul]
The third part is the most important. (Some other reason can be devised to draw the police to the island and the gas will make anybody crazy.) Having most of the police bottled up and in the first group of victims means less chance of them interfering with the project. (Of course, the best way to do it would be to fake a delivery in a van to the Wayne building, and set off the generator there in the middle of the afternoon with no warning. It quickly spreads through out the water system, affecting all the business people in the downtown area as well as the local population, and the police can’t interfere because they are spread out and caught by surprise.)
Lok
By golly, you’re right. I was going off the scene where Alfred picks Bruce up, and tells him that the “Red Line” doesn’t run anymore, because Earle thought it wasn’t making enough money – and it’s revealed that the station is in total decay. Figured they just let the slum station go – apparently nobody gets reliable affordable transportation in Gotham. Eeevil.
Having just seen this movie for the first time last night, I have now learned something that I never knew before:
The ancient Roman Empire was destroyed by ninjas.
Who’d have thunk it?
Not by Ninjas, by Sith! Haven’t you read every post in the entire thread yet? Geez!
I tend to agree with this. Maybe I’m not giving this movie enough credit for subtlety, but if I can’t shake the feeling that if Earle were in any way affiliated with Ra’s, there would have been a scene somwhere providing much more overt cinematic payback. If he were knowingly involved in the scheme, then tradition demands that he should have been betrayed and killed by Ra’s as his comeuppance. If he was a dupe, on the other hand, then there should have been a scene where he’s confronted with that fact in order to publically discredit and humiliate him. I guess I’m used to my summer movies hammering their simplistic morality home with the delicacy of a fuel-air explosion. The scene where Earle was fired didn’t go out of its way to provide any obvious closure, or blatantly telegraph that he would become an antagonist for the sequel. Compared to the rest of the movie, it was weirdly anticlimactic and ambiguous.
Perhaps, but if Lucius Fox *wasn’t * in the know, then it doesn’t make any sense that Earle would go to him to retrieve the records on the gadget. Why would Fox know where those records are, or have access to them? Also, if Earle were trying to cover up the existence of the device, then telling a guy who has a grudge against him about its loss, entrusting him to run down all the information on it, and then firing him doesn’t seem like a sound strategy to me. This is part of what confused me about this whole scene, since it really seemed to suggest that Lucius himself was somehow involved in the disappearance of the gadget. But he couldn’t have been! He was being played by Morgan Freeman!
Speaking of possible connections between Earle and Ra’s… The logic behind the League of Shadows’ vendetta against Gotham City is another plot element that it probably doesn’t pay to examine too closely. We are told that the League wants to destroy Gotham because the city has become too corrupt. Fine, I can accept that; I think we’ve all thought about doing that sort of thing at least once. But this justification kind of runs off the rails later in the movie when Ra’s reveals that the primary agent of corruption is actually *the League itself. * This tends to undercut any right they might have to pass judgement on Gotham’s faults, in my opinion. That’s kind of like a health inspector declaring a restaurant unsafe because he was able to sneak poison into the food during a previous inspection.
It would have been cool if Ra’s and Earle had really been in cahoots. Rutger and Liam could have performed a soulful duet as a DVD extra feature:
*As we walk through this world
Nothing can stop Ducard and Earle;
We’ll work to topple Gotham
And a ninja drug we will share,
Aaa-and, oh we’re gonna kill you, uh huh
And nothing can stop us now,
'Cause we’re Ducard and Earle…*
Well, they are evil, you know. Of course it’s not fair. Neither is killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people because the chief of police is taking bribes. I’m sure the way the League sees it, a city that deserved to be spared would immune to thier efforts to corrupt it. However, I also don’t think the League was solely responsible for corrupting the city. The mob boss did some work for Ra’s, and was certainly scared of him, but I don’t think he worked directly for him. He had his own, independent rackets going. I don’t think Earle was directly, or even indirectly working for Ra’s, but he was emblematic of the sort of people who ran Gotham: he was only interested in maximizing profits and covering his ass, and screw anyone who gets hurt in the process. Gotham was rotten to start with, the League just took advantage of that.
What really would have improved the film was when Gordon got out of the batmobile, they could have had the kid from Napolean Dynamite ask him if he took it on any sweet jumps.
This is a little of subject maybe but I don’t want to start a new Batman thread - was there really a charachter called Dr Crane in the comics ?
Did anyone notice that Cillian Murphy bears some to resemblance to this Inspector Crane ? From a Tim Burton film where the heroine is pursued by a diabolical horseman just as Rachel and the boy are after the lunatics have taken over the Narrows ? A horesman whose head she seems to blow off ?
What was going on ? Hommage to Tim Burton’s Gotham City work ?
Dr. Crane as the Scarecrow has been in the Batman comics for many years. Murphy bears a very great resemblance to the comic Scarecrow, and to the Joker as others have mentioned.
Lok
No, just coincidence, I think. Cillian Murphy and Christopher Nolan have both said that he got the part as Scarecrow because his audition as Batman was great, just not as great as Christian Bale’s and Nolan wanted a part for him.
Does anyone else find it somewhat amusing that of all the main characters in Batman only Morgan Freeman and Katie Holmes are American? 
And, and, why oh WHY can’t they bring themselves to make a good Batmask? Sure this one was more mobile than the previous 4 – at least he can sort of turn his head – but it still looked really goofy in the scene where he threw a bomb at a wall and had to pivot his whole torso rather than just his arm.
