I thought it was interesting that the film cast two prominent Israeli actors in supporting roles: as Dr. Pavel (Alon Aboutboul) and as the blind doctor in the prison (Uri Gabriel). Plus, Tom Conti!
Someone else sent a link on the character, but the actress is the very adorable Juno Temple. Watch the movie Kaboom, and I’ll expect a thank you later.
I did as well.
I really wanted to like it, so I said originally gave it a B, but now I hate it.
1.) Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robin? :rolleyes: First, it was really obvious he was going to be the next Batman/superhero/something. Second, we have enough Robins.
2.) Anne Hathaway as Catwoman was awful. The movie was made even more campy by her and she wasn’t necessary.
3.) I thought Batman/Bruce Wayne was miserable. The first twenty six minutes I wanted to punch him in the face myself…and then he has to sit in the Pit for months? Really? I echo the poster who commented on all the very obvious techniques that could’ve gotten him out there. The World’s Greatest Detective executed a fail.
4.) I thought the Talia thing was stupid. First, the Bruce/Talia love story is a great one in the comics (all of them, really) and it was really disappointing here. I think the movie would’ve been 100x better if that had sincerely been explored. I think Marion Cotillard is very pretty but in this movie she wasn’t doing it for me. I thought she looked old and crumudgy.
5.) I love it when in hand to hand combat, the thugs forget they have guns. And when Batman and Catwoman are surrounded by thugs - like 20 - with guns, they forget they have guns. They also don’t know what to do as they stare and the slutty kitty roundkicking a couple of goons. Also - in a superhero movie, when gunfire is flying, the superhero/s always manage to escape even when there’s 20 armed thugs with laser-beams. Finally, why is it that Batman has a super duper flying monster truck Batmobile but Talia can get through his armor with a little knife?
There’s more, but I pretty much wanted it to be over in the first 20 minutes.
edit: I’m in Denver. We had several police officers.
Just got back from it and I am mixed.
I liked the characterizations and was embarrassed not to have seen the Talia thing coming. I didn't mind the pacing but damn for all the salivating everyone does about Nolan's superhero films being superior he certainly had the baddy monologuing. Just long enough to prevent the detonation. Still the emotional level was there and I think bale did his best Wayne in this film.
Side thiughts: Nolan likes to skip over time and sense when he feels a scene is finished. In the dark knight batman saves the girl leaving a party in the hands of the joker with no indication of what happened next. This time penniless Bruce Wayne escapes a pit in the middle east And magically gets back to Gotham in days. How? Who cares he just needs to be there.
Another truck chase? Really? And how the hell would all that banging and falling from a level not wreck the bomb thing Or kill Gordon?
The whole countdown thing bugged me too.
Did fox not say the explosion was the result of decaying fails aces or something like that? How does that get timed to the second? I mean sure you can say it with fail in six months but this had a timer on it. We’re the safeties designed to shut down in a preformed manner? Reminds me of all the times in star trek when the computer would count down the remaining time till leathal radiation levels would kill the crew as if that was a constant fixed thing
Fails aces should read fail safes.
We re. Should read were
Performed should read predetermined
Dang autocorrect
Many people have pointed out the most obvious flaws, to whit:
How did Wayne get back to the US and into Gotham with no one noticing?
Why the police march on city hall from one direction, in a group (it reminded me more of Pickett’s charge than the redcoats), and why doesn’t the villain’s army use its superior firepower and high ground to oppose them (until, of course, Talia tells them to)?
I would add: Gordon et al., are walking across thin ice, moments from falling through to an icy death, when Batman reveals himself by providing them with a road flare – which, before he gets them off the icy river he tells them to light, setting fire to the fuel he has placed there for no other purpose than to light a beacon that lets the villains know that he is back.
The police are finally convinced that there is a TERRORIST ARMY massing in the city’s underground, so instead of calling in the State militia, the National Guard, the Army, or anyone better prepared to take on an ARMY, they choose to send THE ENTIRE FREAKING POLICE FORCE below the streets to be trapped for months.
When the seizure of the city takes place, the response of the rest of the country, and the world, is to sit back and wait for MONTHS to see what happens (I guess Seal Team 6 was on vacation). Yeah I know there was a whole bit about agents sneaking in, only to be killed, but they went in w/o any plan, and their first move was to run around contacting people in the underground with no idea who might give them up.
One more thing: What is the obsession these League of Shadows villains have with Gotham City? Maybe that’s the answer to the previous question: This group wants to destroy this city, so the rest of the country figures – let them have it, Batman certainly doesn’t go out of his way to help with crime problems in any of America’s other great cities, why should we help him with his?
I disagree with the first three points, but that’s probably more a matter of personal preference. I don’t think there was time for #4, as the movie was almost three hours as it was.
As for #5, recall that Lucius Fox warned him in TDK that his new suit traded defense against knives for increased maneuverability.
Also, knives and bullets are stopped by different sorts of armor. Kevlar, for instance, will stop a bullet easily, but can be penetrated by a sharp enough blade.
Think about mail armor. The chains will stop an ax, but a stiletto will slip through the links. It’s the same thing, on a molecular level - Bullets may be fast, but they aren’t that sharp.
I enjoyed it, but man, it had plot holes big enough to drive the Batmobile through. The spouse and I spent the hour after it was over picking it apart–we touched on several mentioned here, but what about some more:
-
Batman dropped the bomb in the sea, it went off in a big mushroom cloud that was visible from Gotham, and everybody cheered since the threat had been averted. Waitaminnit. This is a *four MEGATON bomb
[/quote]
with a stated blast radius of six miles. It didn’t even look like the bomb was detonated six miles outside the city, but even if it was, is the radiation generated from it just going to harmlessly dissipate away? I remember studying this in my Poli Sci classes in college back in the dark ages. Answer: No, it doesn’t. Everybody in Gotham is going to be sick pretty soon. I’m hoping I just missed the technobabble somewhere explaining why this wasn’t so–I’m willing to accept comic-book physics, but they at least have to be suggested. -
They broke into the Bat-arsenal to grab his toys, including that sand-colored tank thing, which they showed in there. But they had three trucks (two dummies and the one with the bomb) and each of them had an escort of three of these tanks. Did Batman actually keep NINE of them on hand? Either he broke his toys a lot, or holy redundancy, Batman!
-
He flew the Bat out with the bomb attached to it, and used the autopilot to fly it out over the ocean. So presumably he bailed out, even though one shot showed him still in control when the plane was over water. But then later, after the bomb went off and everybody thought Bats was dead, there was a scene with Lucius Fox talking to the engineers, who told him that the autopilot had actually been installed/updated by Bruce Wayne several months back. Okay, cool. Except…THEY WERE INSIDE THE BAT LOOKING AT THE CONTROLS at the time. Buh…nowhere in the movie did they mention that there were two Bats (apparently Bruce’s redundancy is selective). In fact, they had to go find the plane where Batman had left it, covered with a tarp on top of a building, implying that there was just the one. So either this thing is atomic-bomb-proof, of this is a major oopsie.
Laying out some more thoughts:
-
As I said earlier, I thought Catwoman was great. I worried from the previews that she would seem shoehorned in, but they completely avoided any camp with her, thankfully (compared to Batman Returns, it’s like night and day) and she did well in her scenes.
-
The fight scenes were pretty crummy, especially the Bane/Batman hand-to-hand scenes. Batman just goes at him like a drunken brawler. Where’s the cool bat gadgets and intelligent fighting?
-
I liked Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and figured the Robin connection was more of a throwaway in-joke than trying to actually establish him as Robin. I think Nolan will be happy to let this be his last Batman movie, and hopefully DC is smart enough to not try and continue this universe. I will say I don’t think JGL would do it for me as the lead in, say, a Nightwing movie.
-
Agree with others that the Talia subplot was awful. The actress, Marion Cotilliard, had zero chemistry with Bale. In the first part of the movie, she just seems redundant, then there’s the out-of-left-field hookup, and then the reveal of her as the villain. Yes, everyone keeps pointing out that she’s attractive (which she actually isn’t, by movie standards) but there’s no connection, and it just seems forced to suddenly have Batman banging her in his mansion.
-
The Alfred subplot also seemed force and contrived. He’s been sitting around for eight years putting up with Wayne being a recluse, but then suddenly leaves when he starts doing something and being Batman again? Blargh.
-
This kinda leads me into my next point, which is that I think this movie just shows why the ending of The Dark Knight was stupid in the first place. Supposedly Batman needed to take the heat to let Dent be the hero, so the could use his memory to create the (unhelpfully vague) Dent Act - but I don’t really see why they couldn’t accomplish that without making Batman out to be a murderer.
-
I find it a bit beyond the line of credulity that the Gotham mob would be okay with letting all the criminals out because the Dent Act was “based on a lie.” Okay, so he wasn’t a hero - but since when does fake hero worship wipe away the fact that all these guys were criminals and mobsters? Or are we supposed to believe that Blackgate is full of people who really didn’t do anything wrong and victims of a facist state, ala copyright pirates and protestors? I suppose the point is to show a bit of a mini Marxist revolution, that when the people at the bottom actually gain power over the rich, you’d end up with the mob killing people. I don’t buy it, especially after the Joker’s plan with the boats failed miserably in the last movie.
-
Echoing kingpenvin’s point, I really dislike Nolan’s pacing. The cut between scenes can be anywhere between minutes, hours, days, months, anything. Even some simple subtitles (“3 months later”) would’ve drastically helped.
-
What the heck is the villain’s plan? There’s a lot of stuff about “bringing it to the people”, but how does blowing up the entire city - including themselves - play into that? At least Ra’s al Ghul’s plan made some sense, since 1) he wasn’t going to kill himself and 2) Gotham at the time was horribly corrupt. But neither of those apply eight years later.
Overall, I still think it’s worth seeing if you enjoyed the first two films (though not only if you enjoyed Ledger’s Joker, there’s no such great performance here). But man, there certainly are a LOT of holes and flaws in this one.
Sadly agree with many of these criticisms. Bane’s voice, for example: Am I the only one who would not have been surprised to hear him say “Your mother’s a whore, Batman!”. And why did he keep holding the front of his jacket? Did he miss his suspenders
And is police officer training really good enough to let you be Batman?
Given the six mile radius, I figured that “The Bat” would have to fly at more than 360mph towing the bomb to get out of the radius of Gotham in one minute. That was the biggest item that broke my suspension of disbelief, and that includes fixing a spinal injury where the spine is protruding by slamming back into place and having it heal in less than 5 months.
He did. One advantage to shelling out the $$ for the 3-movie marathon–a lot of that stuff was fresher in my mind. Plus, I was woozy enough by the time I got to TDKR to not notice a lot of the other plot holes. 
I really liked it overall. I recognize the plot holes and, yeah, there are tons of them, but in general I didn’t really care. I enjoyed it regardless. The only main issue I had has already been brought up - I really liked Bane and thought he was a decent villain but he just went out so quickly and with such little fan-fair that it annoyed me. At least show his body or something. It played out like a “eh, nevermind that guy” moment. Oh, and Talia’s death was also really cheesy. In spite of it all, I have no regrets - I loved Dark Knight in spite of its issues (and there are plenty in that one, too) and I really liked this one, though not quite as much. I should note that part of my love of Dark Knight comes down to it being basically a love letter to Chicago.
Oh, and man, they didn’t do much to hide that most of this was NYC, did they? I spotted the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Brooklyn Bridge, and the construction site of the Freedom Tower - at least in Dark Knight they CGI’d the most recognizable buildings from Chicago out of the skyline.
Wasn’t that the R&D site of Wayne Enterprises? I thought it was just all the different prototypes and stuff that they had on-hand there, not all the extras that Batman had laying around.
I really liked it. Thought it was as good as the other two installments.
And while there were some plot holes and eyerolling stuff, I thought there were less so then other comic book movies. And some of the “plot holes” people are pointing out aren’t really.
Yea, Fox explicitly says that its where he’s been gathering all the prototypes from Wayne’s defense companies so no one else can get their hands on them. Its not stuff that’s there for Batman to use (though Fox was hoping seeing it would get Bruce into being Batman again)
(of course, no one mentions the biggest plot issue. What was the point of Batman faking his death to his friends. It was kinda dick to make Alfred think he’d killed himself, and there wasn’t really any advantage to making the others think he was dead. It added drama to the end, but it was pretty pointless from the characters point of view).
I never thought Anne Hathaway was particularly pretty. There’s something about a Catwoman outfit though and she’s slimmed down a bit; now I will be having fantasies.
I loved the movie too, BTW.
You guys are right about the knives and armor. I want to add that I hated the Bat-suit in general. I also hated that Batman would go from being THE BAT-MAN slash world’s greatest detective to a total weenie. He just couldn’t decide. I hated the ‘Batman fake dies’ storyline and I wish they would’ve left him dead. When Alfred was talking about his fantasy of seeing Bruce with a family, I knew that was going to come back and I.was already groaning at the idea of Selina.
All in all, Christopher Nolan had great material to work with but it sucked.
Sad face.
Oh and if this hasn’t been mentioned-- how does a plane NOT DETECT ANOTHER PLANE FLYING ABOVE IT?! In the beginning, isn’t this a CIA plane or something? They can’t detect other equipment? Confused but maybe it can be explained.
Nolan’s Batman is not my Batman.
My Batman is first and foremost a detective in the vein of Paul Dini and Denny O’Neil.
My Batman’s mindset is right out of Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. A man so possessed by his demon that he can’t quit without being haunted. A Batman who’s a daring tactician who revels in his moments, and when on the ropes seeks only a good death. He’s a Batman that hasn’t gone soft, but curses himself for going soft anyhow. And he builds his own vehicles, because my Batman is a genius.
My Batman isn’t invincible, but if you best him, it will cost you some serious battle damage. Because my Batman plays the shadows, but he fights dirty. In the final Batman vs Bane fight, when they were grappling, I kept waiting for Batman to just rip the tubing out of his mask with his teeth. I’m cool with him having to lose big in round one for the dramatic arc, but nothing was gained by Batman proving physically ineffectual.
Ultimately, it sure isn’t the Batman movie I’d make. My ideal would be a thriller / detective story ala Seven, but with Batman. And I never liked that Nolan was so caught up in verisimilitude, that everything needs an excuse. Those aren’t cat ears, just goggles. It’s like he’s ashamed of the source material at times. We got so little of the rogues gallery, even in passing.
It’s not bad by any stretch, but I can’t help but prefer the version in my head.
The night that Miranda spends with Bruce, there’s a blatant scene where Bruce runs his hand over Miranda’s tattoo. That’s when I knew that Miranda was with Bane.
Plus, it seemed odd that the army men were shot and found out so soon by Bane’s men unless they had a mole.
And, Bane kept Miranda alive instead of sending her out to walk the ice with Commissioner Gordon and his men.