I am blanking on which of the two previous films contained the exchange but wasn’t it implied that Nolan’s Alfred was a former British intelligence officer?
Alfred mentions that he’s a former MI6 agent in The Dark Knight (which is consistent with the comics) and he also has access to the Batcomputer, which presumably collects this kind of information.
My only problem with the film was NOT ENOUGH CATWOMAN, I mean ANNE HATHAWAY.
Third movie. According to the Chicago Tribune, this movie was filmed for three weeks in Pittsburgh, two days in Newark, and two and a half weeks in NYC (with other places such as LA, Scotland, and India thrown in, as well). Cite.
Finally got to see this yesterday, and I quite enjoyed it. Not as good as TDK for me, but I think this will stick with me longer than Batman Begins. I thought Hathaway played her character very well, and Michael Caine was phenomenal.
A couple of points from earlier in the thread that I can comment on:
When Lucius first shows the (grayish metal) Bat to Bruce Wayne, he does say, “And yes, it does come in black.” This was enough, to me, to indicate there were at least two Bats in existence, even if the first was a prototype. At least it helps explain why there’s still a Bat for the engineers to be examining at the end. Now, why Wayne would have fixed the autopilot in both his Bat and the prototype, I will give you THAT plot hole …
After the first Wayne-Alfred conversation about Bane, doesn’t Bruce tell Alfred to keep looking for more information? So it seems not only does Alfred have access to the Batcomputer, he is also assigned the task of digging up intel on Bane.
Crap, yeah, I meant the third movie.
Again I totally agree if we are talking about every Batman but this one. Nolan’s Bruce Wayne got over his anger and doesn’t need to be Batman anymore. Gotham still needs one so the Mantle was passed on but Bruce Wayne doesn’t want it anymore.
Just got back from seeing it. Had I been seeing the movie along, I would have walked out halfway through. Saw it with my wife, mentioned it to her afterwards, and she said the only reason she didn’t feel the same was that she wanted to watch to the end in the hopes that it might get better.
Really, this movie left me wishing that I had gone to see the Avengers again instead. This was probably the dullest and most dreary superhero movie I’ve seen in years.
Catwoman was by far the best part of the movie. I cheered when she finally shot Bane, because it meant I wouldn’t have to try and figure out what he was saying anymore.
I just rewatched Begins and there’s a couple scenes where he’s Batman and doesn’t use the Batman voice, which makes it seem even more ridiculous in the sequels.
Just saw it. Have to admit, I kept one eye on the behavior of the other movie goers and got a little nervous during scenes where there was a lot of flash bang.
Over all, it felt like a good conclusion to the trilogy, and I was impressed by its epicness - definitely was worth seeing in IMAX. I was expecting to hate Hathaway as Catwoman but she worked for me. I knew about Talia, but was still surprised about the boy in the pit. I loved Scarecrow as the judge. And I got quite teared up during both the scenes where Alfred says goodbye.
There were some flaws, and a few sections of uneveness, but they didn’t detract from the film. There was only one scene where I had to slap the screen for stupidity (when Bruce didn’t even make the slightest effort to defend himself to the board). I did find Bane’s voice a bit grating at first but eventually got over it.
I saw it yesterday and took some extra time checking the emergency exits and things. It wasn’t very crowded, so that helped. In any case I was a little disappointed with the movie: the last segment was the best and they did a good job resolving many of the themes of the series, but there was just too much monologing from Bane and much of it didn’t add up to anything. I suppose if you interpret all these speeches as a comment on phony populism rather than actual populism, it works a lot better - that reduces the Occupy-related topicality but it beats the alternative, which is that all of those speeches added up to nothing since the city was going to be destroyed no matter what happened. But still, it was a LOT of talking and the Batman in the Pit sequence felt like a separate movie in the middle of a movie that was already long. Most of the rest of it did work for me- Gordon-Levitt was good and Anne Hathaway was very good, and as distracting as the flaws were, it remains a very strong and very well conceived series of superhero movies.
Heh Marley, my brother felt like this was the severely abridged version of some longer nine hour work.
Wasn’t that the point, though? That was the point of Bane’s story to Bruce about the presence of hope making imprisonment that much more torturous. He said he was going to give Gotham hope before the bomb went off. That hope came in the guise of a populist uprising, taking back society for the people. But they’ve been had, there was never any chance that anyone would get out alive.
But he was also trying to show Bruce that the people of Gotham were so horrible that they were not worth saving. He was doing that through bullshit, and while some people went for the mob rule thing whole-hog, the worst actions appeared to have been undertaken by Bane, Thalia, and Scarecrow. I am not sure any of that would have proved Bane’s point.
I actually didn’t get that. Did he say it at some point?
I thought he wanted Bruce to see Gotham fall in both the physical and moral sense, but I didn’t get that he wanted him thereby to see that Gotham “isn’t worth saving.” I didn’t think Bane had any illusions as to whether he’d convince Bruce of that.
Just say it and thought it was great!! A superhero movie with a bit more than just action scene after action scene (though I did think the Avengers, for instance, was pretty good).
It seemed like he had this view that Bruce was going to come back to his League of Shadows approved views (he seemed to be implying that in their first fight when he broke Bruce’s back). That’s also why he left the TV in Bruce’s cell. See just how depraved and horrible Gotham would go and realized that he could help it in any way and he had failed - that Bruce would realize that Gotham wasn’t worth saving and then he could die.
Oh, and I took the Joseph Gordon Levitt being named Robin as a nod to all those people who were scared Robin was going to be in the films and ruin it - Nolan basically saying, HA, Robin is in it ;).
I thought he did. I can’t remember exactly what he said since Bane made more speeches than Hamlet, but I thought he said something along those lines to Bruce when he was leaving him in the Pit.
I saw it a second time today and still loved it but did notice one mess up I had missed (this may have already been mentioned, I’m not sure): When the robbery at the stock exchange begins, it is mid afternoon with bright sunshine. The bikes go into an underground area and when they emerge, it is the middle of the night suddenly and the rest of the chase takes place at night. There is no way that much time passed. It didn’t look even close to twilight.
I just saw the movie and I’m a little confused about something. Didn’t I see a clip somewhere where a doctor is listing all of Bruce Wayne’s assorted injuries? I don’t recall seeing that scene in the movie.