Okay, well, I finally got around to seeing this movie and since I am rather late to the discussion I am going to assume that most everyone has seen it so I will be discussing my thoughts on the film without any regard to "spoiler" talk.
So...in case that wasn't clear...there will be full plot details discussed below...SPOILER ALERT...
Ready?
Not too late to skip what I am going to write...
Okay...
Here it is:
First, what I liked:
One of the things that I appreciated about this film (and upon reflection, the previous two films) was the lack of a backstory for the villains. This tends to be commonplace in other comic book movie adaptations. For instance, we saw the complete backstory on all of the Spiderman villains. I find the lack of a villain backstory in this latest Batman series to be very refreshing. We don't get to find out how the Joker came to be. He just shows up and he's very, very evil and mysterious. Catwoman just shows up and starts doing her cat burglar thing and we don't know what her motivations are and we don't care. She's bad. Sort of. Bane is very bad. No explanation (not a narrative anyway) of why he is bad or how he got the mask, etc. He just hits the scene and he's evil. The lack of a backstory, I think, is great because it doesn't interrupt the flow of the real narrative (i.e. what's happening now). The story starts, progresses and ends without flashbacks or other goofy cinematic tricks to explain to us why the bad guy is bad. I liked that. A lot.
Another thing that was interesting was the aforementioned political statement. This movie seems to make a very real object lesson out of what the OWS movement would devolve into if it were to somehow be allowed to reach its logical conclusion...that being anarchy and then dictatorial terrorism. Bane uses anarchy to conceal his real purpose which is the total destruction of Gotham by way of a nuclear detonation. First he destroys much of the infrastructure with coordinated and widespread explosions and then he allows the prisoners to escape incarceration and rule the city. He could have simply detonated the nuke but apparently there was some unknown purpose in allowing the citizens to be slowly and ever increasingly tormented by the anarchy. And because of that the movie audience got to be treated to what the OWS hippies would do with everyone if they were given half a chance. We did get to see (in real life) how they treated themselves (rapes, thefts, killings, living in filth, etc.) in their squalid encampments and the movie merely extrapolates those real life scenes into a mega-city wide mess. Instructive to those who are capable of learning.
It was also good to see Batman confronted with an enemy that he simply could not physically defeat. Round one went to Bane when he broke Batman's back. Round two also went to Bane when he stood over Batman holding a gun to his head. Only when Catwoman shot Bane with the big guns on the Batcycle thingy was the bad guy defeated. Again, this is where art and life got a bit too close for comfort. I thought of the Aurora movie theater victims who were powerless to stop that asshole. One gun was all that was needed. So, Batman had his face rubbed in the fact that when it came right down to it, all it took to defeat the bad guy was a gun. He could have killed him fifteen minutes into the movie but didn't for some stupid ass reason that was never fully explained. So I liked that the bad guy was killed (maybe) with a gun. A BFG, in fact.
The action sequences were over the top excellent. The special effects were spectacular. The script (outside of issues listed below) was engaging. All good.
Now, about what I didn't like...
There were some pretty ridiculous moments throughout the movie that really tested the whole "suspension of disbelief" concept. Okay, I get that it's a comic book and that billionaires don't really ever fight crime and stuff. That's a given. It's a comic book. Got it. Still...lots and lots of people have had knee injuries or known someone close to them who has had a serious knee injury. The movie starts out with Bruce Wayne walking with a cane because his knee is so severely damaged that he can't walk without it. They cut to a doctor telling him that he has no cartilage in his knee. Plus his shoulders aren't so great either. Then, a few minutes later BW has some real basic looking brace on his leg and he's kicking apart brick walls or columns or something. This is patently absurd. It's also ridiculous to think that someone with billions in assets wouldn't have had that knee thing taken care of (if possible) sometime in the previous eight years. Let me tell you, if I had pain and mobility issues and several billion bucks in the bank then that knee would get taken care of. Yesterday.
And if the miraculous knee recovery were not pushing the envelope of credulity enough there is the whole broken back thing. Batman gets his back broken and isn't paralyzed forever. Okay, that's pretty miraculous. Then he is thrown into a deep cavernous prison somewhere near Tibet and essentially left to die at the hands of several other psychotic prisoners. Except that one of them is a sort of a medieval orthopedic therapist or something who slams one of his protruding vertebrae back into place, slings him up with a rope and "poof" his back is fixed and it's on to a vigorous calisthenics program to get back into shape, escape from the escape-proof prison in Nepal, find our way back to Gotham so we can duke it out with Bane again. I'm sorry but that is ridiculous beyond any reasonable sense of expectation. I've had swollen back muscles that merely pushed on nerves to the point where I couldn't move until the chiropractor popped me a few times. I can only imagine what having one's back actually broken would be like and I'm thinking that there is no way I'd be getting it fixed in an underground prison. A bad back sucks. A broken back is not the same thing.
But the worst part is that after all of that happens Batman still thinks that the best way to deal with this Bane guy is to get into yet another fist fight with him. Me? I'm thinking that I'm gonna shoot the asshole with a really big gun like, say, a 44 magnum the instant I lay eyes on him. A 50 caliber Barrett from across the street would be even better. Boom. No more Bane. Likewise, Bane sees Batman coming for him, he has guys with guns all around him and he doesn't bother grabbing one and killing Batman either. Now this just isn't practical or realistic. Batman has this interesting little grenade that he uses to free the police and it never occurs to him to use it on Bane? Well, fortunately for Batman he gets saved by Catwoman and her BFG. All the way to practically the end of the movie and someone finally puts a slug in the bad guy. Heck, Alfred even implores BW to not go after Bane. He should have just given him a twelve gauge shotgun and told him to go ventilate Bane and be done with it. Okay, so maybe the reason he doesn't just waste his ass is because he thinks that he needs to find the nuke detonator and only Bane has it. I think I'd maybe slap a load of C4 to his hairy back with super glue and then tell him to cough it up or you're gonna do a little back surgery on him via explosive ordnance. That would make me talk. Or shoot his fingers and toes off one at a time. Or drill holes in his teeth like Laurence Olivier did to Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man. Those things do work, you know.
And speaking of the police...they somehow get lured into the city sewer system (every last one of them) at just the precise moment when Bane blows up the city. Pretty damned convenient. So then the sewers all get blown up in a way that traps them down there but doesn't kill them. Bane knows that they are alive and doesn't seem to care. Me? If I were a big huge evil guy who had just trapped all of the police in the sewers I wouldn't think twice about just killing them all in place. Flood the sewers. Blow the sewers up more. Poison gas. Send in a few hundred carnivores from the Gotham zoo or something. Anything but leave a whole bunch of pissed off and fully armed cops just a few feet beneath my feet. That seems like kind of a big loose end to not take care of.
And then when the police finally get out of the sewers what do they do? They line up in a huge column like you might have seen during the Civil War and charge armored vehicles while brandishing small arms. This seems strategically flawed to me. A few well placed machine guns in the high rises on either side of the street and it's a slaughter house. Luckily the bad guys forget that they have firepower superiority and decide to duke it out instead.
The movie ends with a nuke being detonated nearby a completely devastated Gotham. All of the roads, bridges and tunnels and almost all of the buildings are completely shot to sh*t. The citizens are free to leave but I guess no one does because, hey, Gotham.
Oh, and all of those criminals who have been running amuck, terrorizing and murdering the citizens, holding mock trials and executing people every hour on the hour...they just sit on the courthouse steps with their hands on their heads apparently waiting to go back to prison. I'd shoot everyone of the assholes and push their miserable carcasses into the river. What reasonable person wouldn't?
So there is quite a lot here that the film makers ask you to ignore so that the story just moves along unimpeded by reality or audience experience.
After I have bitched and moaned about this issue and that, though, I was still pretty impressed with the movie on balance. I would like to see it a second time so that I can analyze it a bit further. And the overall series was good, too. Quite an improvement from the Tim Burton series...the first one being good and the others being a form of slow torture to watch. I think that Christopher Nolan pulled off the three film effort much better than, say, the Wachowski brothers did with The Matrix trilogy which started out ungodly strong and then just kind of unravelled into meaningless drivel.
So that's it for now. Until I can see it a second time.
EDIT: Okay, it would have been considerably better if Morgan Freeman
had been tortured, forced to walk across the thin ice of the river while carrying an anvil or hung
by the neck by an ankle from one of the bridges while crows ate him alive. They could have chased him around for a while with one of the big tumbler cars, too, like Deathrace 2000. That would have been cool. A cage match with Alfred where Alfred kicks his ass all over the place using butler kung fu. Or he gets swept away when the tunnel gets flooded at the end...his eyes wide with terror as his fingers lose their tenuous hold on the escape ladder. Catwoman kicking the sh*t out of him for no reason other than she was premenstrual and just felt like it after he smarted off to her one time too many. Trampled to death by penguins. Or have the orphans push him out a window onto a spikey wrought iron fence. Bane could have ripped his fingers off and fed them to him one at a time. He could have been attacked by an angry mob of deranged PBS documentary viewers. He could have been put in a sack with a dozen weasels and rolled down a hill. In fact, there was the whole scene where BW confronts him about losing most of the Wayne fortune and MF tells BW that's it BW's fault...BW just loses it and pulls a gun out and shoots his ass right there and shoves his body into a dumpster. There are any number of ways that Morgan Freeman could have been made to buy the farm or at least be severely tortured which would have brought a much needed comic relief element to the film and given the younger viewers something to talk about. This was a missed opportunity and there is simply no denying it.
And while we're at it can we also take out a few other Hollywood creeps? I can't tell you how much fun it was seeing at least a dozen members of the Film Actors Guild Society (FAGS) get wasted at the end of Team America. That movie should have gotten a special Academy Award for (fantasy) service to humanity...
