I assumed that the real LoS was mostly gone, and mos of Talia/Bane's goons were people from the margins of society, given hope through Bane's "hope" message. They went under the name of the LoS, but that was it.

Yeah, this pretty much sums up my feelings as well. The movie was entertaining, but the actual events that occurred on the screen often seemed more symbolic than anything logical or organic. The whole Pit sequence seemed so surreal, I wasn't even sure if it was actually happening or if it was just a symbolic representation of Bruce's inner struggle to regain his confidence after losing to Bane. The fact that it's in some faraway country, (and seemingly in another century), and the fact that Bruce just appears back in Gotham after escaping from the Pit with no explanation of how he travelled or got back into the city, makes the whole thing seem more like a symbolic state of mind than an actual physical location.

As for Bane, I think that aesthetically, at least, he was an amazing villain. The Nolan films always present really incredible takes on the classic rogues gallery. However, I don't think Catwoman worked out work very well, not because of Anne Hathaway, but because Christian Bale just isn't the right sort of Batman. He's just not capable of the playfully deadpan, witty delivery that Michael Keaton was, and I think the Batman/Catwoman sexual tension kind of requires that.

Now that the trilogy is finished, I'm left with the impression that while these movies are all pretty entertaining, I think they're kind of overrated. TDK was probably the best one, because (1) it felt like an actual Batman movie since it concentrated primarily on the criminal element in Gotham, as opposed to the Dr. Evil/League of Shadows armageddon Bond-villain nonsense, and (2) Heath Ledger just did a really amazing job as the Joker.

The Tim Burton / Keaton Batman movies are IMO far and away superior to this Nolan trilogy. The Nolan movies take themselves way too seriously - particularly Dark Knight and Dark Knight Rises - when combined with the ludicrously overcomplicated Rube Goldberg plots that these films have, it simply doesn't work. Both Bane and the Joker are surrounded my Incompetence Shielding that turns everyone around them into gibbering retards.

Keaton was a better Bruce Wayne and a better Batman IMO, and both films had a sense of humor - there were shades of that in Batman Begins (the best film of the trilogy, period, IMO) but by TDK and DKR that sense of fun was pretty much entirely gone.

Ledger's Joker was fine, but he wasn't a particularly impressive character. He didn't seem like any sort of real person. He's shallow as a puddle.

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That sort of surprises me. I mean, it's not like Nicholson's Joker was particularly deep. Both Nicholson's and Ledger's Joker were basically just theatrical terrorists with no real goal other than "cause chaos". The difference is that Ledger's Joker had the extra dimension of trying to prove a social point: that civilization is a total facade, and human beings are basically just wild animals. Plus, Ledger's performance was just really mesmerizing somehow.

Then again, I suppose that vandalizing a museum while blasting Prince > zero-sum game social experiment.

Or the real LoS doesn't want to have anything to do with them, but can't be bothered to do anything about them.

I got the impression that Bane's crew were from his recent mercenary exploits.

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I don't even think that the Joker was supposed to have that deep a character, and it's been a while since I watched the older Batman movies but I think it was the same there. His goal is simple and his motivations clear. I think he was basically supposed to be a force of nature, the true emotional depth and feeling was supposed to be with Harvey and Bruce as the Joker kept flinging enough shit at them to push them down a certain road.

Nolan mentioned that the focus on TDK is on Harvey Dent, as opposed to the Joker. TDK on paper is very much a story about the rise and fall of Harvey.

The only reason why people think that the focus is on the Joker is because Heath Ledger's acting and charisma that stole the show.

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Yeah, basically. I don't know much about the original comics, but for some reason I've always taken it for granted that the Joker's canonical origin story was more or less what happened in the Tim Burton films: he was a regular crime boss or something who went insane after falling into a vat of chemicals. After that, he causes chaos and destruction because, well, he's just actually clinically insane. So, he was never supposed to really be much of a deep character - just a symbol of chaos juxtaposed with Batman as a symbol of justice and order.

Given the Joker's (Heath Ledger) ability to pull off the various paramilitary stunts he did, I couldn't help but think if he was a former military or law enforcement type who finally had a really bad day to push him off the edge.

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The Christian fundies don't like Muslim Anti Zionism and the Arab nationalists resent the Israeli presence in the Occupied Territories because no one likes to see someone else beat the living shyte out of one's red headed step sibling.

"I am General Grevious, and I am NOT a sock puppet!"

Complete with cable TV, always the most entertaining feature of earlier centuries.



Anyone who's seen BB and TDK should be able to come up with an explanation pretty easily. For one thing, as TDK makes clear, Bruce has a lot of rich friends ( despite pissing some of them off in BB ). It seems unlikely that they were all confined to Gotham. Let's not forget that Bruce and Alfred were able to scare up a Korean smuggler plane for the Hong Kong mission without too much apparent difficulty. And there's also the time Wayne had spent exploring the criminal underworld; he most likely still had usable connections. So that covers travel.

On the issue of getting into the city, TDK seems to suggest that some of the Wayne property may be outside the city proper. It's not outside the realm of possibility to assume that the Bat was in such a location and that Bruce got access to it and then just flew it into the city. It's also been suggested that he simply snuck in with one of the food shipments.

Of course you can come up with any number of scenarios to explain it. I'm not saying it's impossible to explain, I'm just saying that for me, the whole Pit sequence seemed so visually disconnected from the rest of the movie, it almost felt like some sort of allegory rather than a real event. The fact that Bruce just appears back in Gotham within a few minutes of screentime (with no explanation) after leaving the pit just added to that sense.

I realize that if we're talking strictly in-Universe, then we can of course come up with any number of guesses as to how he travelled thousands of miles with no money and no ID (apparently in less than a day, IIRC), and then snuck back into a locked-down city, but obviously Nolan didn't think it was important enough to explain. Nolan was only interested in the symbolism of Bruce "rising" out of the Pit - which is my whole point. The Pit was SO symbolic - it felt more like an obstacle for Bruce to overcome rather than an actual prison facility that houses real prisoners. It even comes with a helpful "rope guy" who allows anyone to attempt an escape.

I got the sense that some time passed between Bruce getting out of the pit and arriving back in Gotham. IIRC the bomb timer went down from a couple of weeks to a couple of days.

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From my recollection of the timer on the bomb, there was like a month between him leaving the pit and arriving in Gotham. I want to say 2x days.

What do you think that Nicholson's Joker was doing? Terrorizing the city, challenging Batman to take off his mask, showing that the city's population sucked just like he did (he used money and greed to show it instead of fear and chaos). The characters are very similar actually. The split comes from the previous "Jack" personality coming through with the first incarnation, whereas there is nothing but "The Joker" with Ledger.

I never really got that from Nicholson's Joker, but I haven't seen the Burton film for a while, so maybe you're right. I recall that the Joker was mostly just interested in murdering people and causing general chaos. His original plan was to sell beauty products with fatal side effects; so he was basically just a terrorist. Except unlike most actual terrorists, he had no political agenda - he just liked killing people. He only arranged the money parade because Batman put a stop to his line of beauty products, and he probably figured giving away free money would maximize casualties.

I suppose we could look at this as the Joker trying to expose people's vanity and greed, but I don't really remember that being emphasized explicitly in the film. (Unlike Ledger's Joker, who monologues about this philosophy quite a bit.) To me, it seemed like Nicholson's Joker just plain liked killing people.

It was an enjoyable movie, for sure, but it is definitely the weakest of the Nolan trilogy. For me, "Batman Begins" and the first Burton "Batman" are the best Batman movies, period (I also put the The Animated Series here, but not a movie so not technically going to count it). After that (still good but on a lower tier of good) are "The Dark Knight" and "Batman Returns." I put "The Dark Knight Rises" below those movies, but above the Schumacher films. [Full disclosure: I don't hate the Schumacher films. Seriously. I appreciate them in their own way, while still recognizing they are inferior next to the other Batman films].

Just random notes off the top of my head:

-Selina Kyle/Catwoman was well done, and Ann Hathaway was great. But the character didn't really serve a purpose in the movie ... they didn't make the relationship between her and Batman substantial enough, they just randomly had them decide to kinda like each other without any rhyme or reason. Really, the only thing they needed to do was have some line of dialogue at the beginning that shows us that, at some point in the past 8 years, Bruce Wayne has become aware of her and is keeping track of her. So the whole thing with the pearls and the tracking device was as part of some larger plan to keep track of Kyle. As it was in the movie, it made no fucking sense why he had magical tracking device pearls and becomes buddies with Catwoman. There should have been hints of previous Catwoman/Batman run ins where she managed to escape, which would have made the pearl thing less unimportant.

-Miranda Tate/Talia. Bleh. I know some of the fanboys thought this was awesome, but I don't get it. She was a completely pointless character up until the reveal as Talia, and that reveal was really lazy and followed by one of the worst movie villain deaths ever (she wasn't even visibly injured in the truck crash, dammit). Her character was really pointless ... they should have done a better job of painting her as an important friend/colleague/lover/whatever of Bruce Wayne during the previous 8 years, to make her continual inclusion in important events meaningful (as it was, her election to the board of governors of Wayne Enterprises or whatever the hell happened in that stupid scene made no sense; she was just some random bitch that Bruce Wayne didn't seem to want to talk to up until that point), and her betrayal more poignant. As it was, her only point in the movie was to add a twist to the end, which wasn't even terribly well done.

-Bane was awesome. His dialogue during the first fight scene with Batman in the sewer was great. I really liked the entire segment with the prison, even if it made the timeline of everything happening in Gotham a little shaky (they were pretty inconsistent with how much time passed). I wish when Batman first appeared they had more dialogue with each other as opposed to a clumsy fight in the middle of an OH SO EPIC SHOWDOWN IN THE STREETS WITH COPS AND GANGSTERS OMG (the police charging the prison was easily my least favorite part of the movie). I liked Bane's surprise that he escaped, but I wish they had built that more ... like Bane is inside in a protected building while the fighting is going on outside, and Batman just appears there and they have some dialogue that reveals that, since Bane couldn't escape from that prison himself, he cannot fathom Batman having the strength to do it (especially after "breaking him"). Easy way to show a different side of Bane, he would be in almost existential crisis at seeing Batman again. And then they should have a fight where Batman actually defeats him in a clever way, as opposed to doing the SAME EXACT THING he did in the sewer but somehow winning. Seriously, clumsy haymakers? That's all you've got?

-"Robin." First of all, I don't get why people are even calling him Robin, even if Nolan used the name of a former Robin. The way the movie is set up makes it pretty explicit that he is going to be the next Batman. Having him become Robin would completely defeat the entire thematic purpose of the movie. So that's first. Second of all, I really like Gordon-Levitt, and thought he did a good job, but I feel like they did a really terrible job of making his character important. They should have had some scene where he figures something out by being a good detective or something, to set him up as an intellectual successor to Bruce Wayne. As it was, he spent a large portion of the movie doing things that ended up being pointless (didn't stop the cops from going in the sewer, didn't find Bane, didn't get the cops out of the sewer - Batman did that, etc.). I liked the idea of his character, but again they missed an opportunity to actually make his existence meaningful beyond "I somehow figured out you are Batman, because of ... orphan powers. Now I will run around irrelevantly for a while and spend the entire climax on a school bus."

-Why the fuck is Commissioner Gordon carrying around his incriminating speech in his pocket while going out into the streets? I mean, I liked him jumping into the sewer, because it shows what kind of a cop he is and works into the whole "war hero in time of peace" theme they started with (and promptly abandoned). But why the fuck did he bring the speech with him? And the movie was pretty clear about it not being so soon after the podium that he would accidentally still have it on him.

-Why did Alfred wait 8 years before making his big emotional speech to Bruce? I mean, that moment seriously couldn't have been the first time in 8 years that he had seen Bruce looking insanely depressed, or that Rachel had come up in conversation.

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"Spare me your space age technobabble, Atilla the Hun." -Zap Brannagan

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See, the idea is that her character wasn't pointless, because she was Talia the whole time. Thus saying she was pointless up until the reveal doesn't really make sense. I don't think it can really be argued that her posing as Miranda had no point to it.



He didn't.

edit: Huh, i swear I was in OotS thread. Anyway TDKR...

Yeah Robin's called Robin because that's his real christian name. Robin Blake or whatever. He's not a Robin from the comic books.


I though the same thing about the two Bane fights. There was no appreciable difference in tactics except Batman aimed his punches at Bane's weakspot for massive damage.

Unlike the fights with the mutant leader in Dark Knight Returns. Which it seems to be in part based on.

People seem to want him to have some comic book name but I'm pretty sure he's not one of the comic book characters-well, not completely anyway.

As for Bane, we had this discussion on another forum and people there were convinced that by leaving the pit Batman proved himself stronger. That makes no sense, if anything he should be weaker. The only possible explanation is that Batman's newfound fear of death made him more cautious than before, where he fought like a young man. Well, that and he knew Bane's weakness. Otherwise it was really the same fight and we're supposed to buy the ridiculous "levelling up" plot point.

Saw it today.

I agree with most of the posters here - it was a bit confused and wasn't as slick in it's storytelling as BB or even TDK.



Yeah, that was pretty silly. I can only imagne it was a Three Musketeers moment - the majority of those people were civvies swept up by the Gotham Spring, and didn't really want to mow down cops. It would have been nice of them to show that, of course.



Well yeah. He now knows Bane doesn't feel much pain except when he's without his painkillers in which case he's in constant agony. So no point just punching him - punch his masky-dispensor type thing.

I quite liked the idea in The Pit (the black pit of Calcutta maybe?) that Bruce had to rediscover his fear of dying in order to escape. We hear the "A man with nothing left to lose - the most dangerous foe" line a lot, but if you have no fear of death then where's the fear of failure? That's what the rope symbolises. He's not trying his hardest because if he fails? The rope catches him and he'll be ok.

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I saw this too (who hasn't?), thought it was pretty cool; couple of notes about the prison scene:
1) I noticed Batman threw down the rope at the top while Talia just left it there. Wonder if that'll ever come up again?
2) For some reason, it seemed to me like the safety rope was actually just too short to make the Big Jump. It's probably not; I've not got the best eyesight in the world, but it would fit the whole motif a little better than if people were physically able to make the Jump with the rope.

Also, while I've been trying to keep in mind that the whole film was highly symbolic, the scene with the police marching down the avenue still bugged me a little. Mainly because they went in to the tunnels with full battlegear and assault rifles, and come out in normal uniforms with batons. I'm probably missing something, though.

Yeah, he's kind of a composite of various comic book Robins. Like Dick Grayson and Jason Todd, he's an orphan; like Todd he grew up on the streets; he's a cop, just as Grayson eventually became a cop; he figured out Batman's identity much like Tim Drake; and his name "John Blake" sounds a little like "Tim Drake".

She was pointless because the movie would be 99.999% the same without her in it. The reveal wasn't a huge surprise, because I had been given no reason to give a flying fuck about her character before that moment. It made no sense that Bruce put her on the Board of Directors, we were just told that it made sense without being shown why he trusted her at all (at the beginning of the movie it seemed like he barely knew who she was). And after the reveal ... she still served basically no purpose, except for that chase scene where she dies. Everything about her character was pointless as she was portrayed in the movie.

It seemed like complete fan service, or like some crucial scenes setting up her character as more than a 2-dimensional plot twist device.



Meh, I was going off of what other people were saying earlier in this thread. I guess I misunderstood someone.

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"Spare me your space age technobabble, Atilla the Hun." -Zap Brannagan

"It means they could've done some freaky human/demon hybrid thing." -Nightstalker, on Nazis

No. I think you need to check your math.



Just all the power that was placed in her hands. You know, the thing that supposedly made no sense. But how can anyone make you give a flying fuck about a character if you're determined not to?



It made sense from Bruce's POV, which I believe was adequately explained here; it made sense from Talia's POV. But this is a separate issue: whether plot points in the film made sense. Not whether they had a point.



So why say she was pointless until the reveal? If she was pointless both before and after the reveal, if everything about her was pointless, isn't it strange to say that she was pointless until the reveal? It looks like you're changing your position because the original one didn't work out. Her significance wasn't revealed until near the end of the film, and this informs the significance of her role earlier. Get over it. If you watched the film, you know as well as I do that there was a point to the character. So when you use the term "pointless", you just mean "didn't like it". Why indeed would a film dare to do something that you didn't approve of? What would be the point?

The "point" of her character was to throw in a twist at the end, and also to more firmly connect Bane with Ras Al Gul. Without Miranda, Bane's reasons for trying to nuke Gotham make even less sense.

What Ziggy Stardust is trying to say, I think, is that the film didn't do much with her character that would make the reveal interesting or meaningful to the audience. She's sort of just there, Bruce sleeps with her, and then it turns out she's the bad guy. Miranda Tate actually illustrates one of the major weaknesses in the Nolan films: they simply have too much going on. Even TDK, which is otherwise an excellent film, felt a little too rushed at the end. There was never really enough time to appreciate Harvey Dent's two-face persona. And in TDKR, Miranda simply suffers from being one more character with not enough screen time to establish a meaningful connection with the audience.