Amph THE DARK KNIGHT RISES(now also general Batman discussion)

Arawarawarawarararawan won't answer you Wockinator, as there is no answer. Just be gracious in victory. Even though it's like beating up a school kid.

Which reminds me.... I saw this billionarie. Had a look in his eyes, like he was an orphan. And the Batman. I knew.

"The blackest eyes...The Devil's eyes."

There, there. You wanted to see a movie about Batman; you got a movie about Bruce Wayne.

It's just that nobody ever explained to you that those two comprise all of one character.

And I hate to break this to you, but Father Christmas is your mom.

"catwoman, i know you know that bruce wains is the batman, because i am all seeing all knowing robin, so i will ask you - did they kill him?"

This one is actually explained in the film, though it does rely on some amount of conjecture on Blake's part. After Wayne's car was repossessed, Blake dropped him off at Selina's apartment, and that was the last place Blake saw Wayne. Also, Blake presumably recognizes Selina from the incident in the bar the night Gordon was shot.

OR he is an all seeing all knowing robin.

Fun fact: the name "Stryver" is taken from a character in A Tale of Two Cities.

Yeah so I saw this guy driving in this fancy car the other day and he had a look in his eye. Obviously the Batman. I tried telling him this, but he punched me in the face, stole my moneys, and filed a restraining order against me.

I was a billionaire playboy and masked vigilante until an all knowing Robin shot me in the knee with an arrow.

NOLEN

OK, except the alter ego of Batman is Bruce Wayne, the billionaire playboy. We didn't get a film about Bruce Wayne, we got a film about Batman out of costume.

So again, you clearly know nothing about Batman beyond what you saw in the Nolan films.

Let's not bring Batman Beyond into this.

*eyeroll*

I would much rather watch Batman Beyond than the end of Nolan's trilogy.

Yeah at least Paul Dini had input to Batman Beyond. He knows Batman. Unlike, say.... Arawn?

The flashback scene from Return of the Joker is better than the entirety of the The Dark Knight Rises.

The only true Batman fans are Kevin Smith groupies. It's scientific fact!

It's also possible Smith knows good Batman when he sees it; not everyone's Batman journey began and ended with the Nolanverse.

My two cents here.

First I have read quite a few of the Batman comics, watched the films, the animated series and many of the animated movies. So I know a bit about Batman.
Is Nolans Batman a bit different from some of these other Batmans? Yes. But to me, condeming a film as garbage just becasue Batman isn't exactly as he is in the comics isn't much of a criticism.

People here and elsewhere have complained that Bruce Wayne stopped being Batman, arguing that Bruce Wayne would NEVER do this.
Ok but if that is your stance then you must also condem BB and TDK as that concept is introduced in the first film.

Batman Begins have Bruce say words to the effect that he would become Batman for as long as it takes. Did he mean until the day that there was NO crime at all in Gotham? Highly unlikely. He wanted to fight the organised crime and take back the city from the corrupt. This idea continues in TDK where Bruce sees Harvey Dent as someone that can take over for him. A person that do in the light what Batman does in the dark. And several times the notion is brought up that Batman wants to quit. If Bruce saw that the organised crime was defeated and the poice could do it's job, then he would hang up his costume.
Secondly, the injuries. After his first night as Batman, Bruce has some rather nasty looking bruises and Alfred comments on them. In TDK, we see Bruce trying to stitch himself up and now he looks rather beat up and again Alfred comments. Alfred says "Know your limits" and Bruce says that Batman has no limits but Bruce does. So the wounds, both physical and emotional finally catch up with him.

So the idea that Bruce stopped being Batman some time after TDK makes sense and follows from what was established in the first two films. Organised crime had been severly weakened and the police were finally able to make a difference. And Bruce had been badly beat up. In all, it makes all the sense in the world that he stopped.

Nolan made a choice very early on to make his Batman films a bit more grounded in reality. This was apparent in the first film. So his Batman was a batman that got injured a lot but didn't just walk them off. His Batman was one who got really hurt by his injuries and didn't just shrug off deep emotional pain.

I find all three films really good and they work very well together, events are set up in one film, is built upon in the second and pays off in the third.

Bye for now.
The Guarding Dark

I think you miss the points that have been raised.

Firstly; Bruce Wayne doesn't become Batman. This is where so many iterations got it wrong. Batman is the man; he puts on the mask of a civilian businessman/billionaire playboy. So when he's "serious" in the films and not wearing the costume, he's still 110% Batman. It's when he's playing at being the rich jerk that it's not.

(I.e. when he runs into the attractive Rachel in Batman Begins, caught with the two models).

Secondly - the issue with the film is that the character of Batman has been established and clearly influenced by the comics. You only have to look at, say, the Dent/Gordon/Batman exchange which is lifted almost perfectly from the Long Halloween. They get the history, the mythos, and what makes the Batman, the Batman.

Rises throws much of this out and sacrifices what made the Joker's campaign so effective for a serious of cheap thrills which sacrifice cohesion and logic for a "a ha!" moment, as if Nolan viewed a "gotcha" on the audience as a worthy pay-off. That's what is annoying about it.

I actually don't put much stock in the whole "Bruce Wayne is the disguise" idea. It's an interesting one, but I'm certainly not wedded to it. A less mentally disturbed Bruce Wayne is actually pretty interesting. However, the version we got in Nolan's final film was emphatically not that figure. Most supporters of the movie argued that in within the film trilogy's chronology, his first (intra-film) and second (epilogue) retirements made sense. They sort of do, but not for the reasons you are giving. Nolan gives very little support to the notion that Wayne thought he had succeeded after TDK. Instead, they highlight a bizarrely depressive figure that we don't have a lot of explanation for.

Look at Wayne in the opening of the film. He hasn't just stopped becoming Batman. He's stopped making any public appearances at all. He doesn't even move about freely in his own home, despite the fact that largely no one is present. He is crippled and unkempt. Apparently his knee hasn't received formal medical attention in some time. One doesn't get that way simply from the toll of being Batman. Nor is the victorious retirement after vanquishing organized crime. These are signs of the quotidian mental illnesses: agoraphobia, depression. You can probably throw in some random anxiety disorder. If he's put down the cowl of Batman, the monomaniacal avenger, he's put on the mantle of the middle-aged, middle-management, slightly overweight American that is on Prozac. For ten years. And for what, exactly? What event in his life could possibly have spurred this? The death of the girl he never even dated, and had twice before explicitly chose as less important than his mission against organized crime? The human failings of a political candidate whom he met in person two times, worked with on one operation, and believed the campaign literature of. Really? Even though he'd already seen that the guy had darker tendencies (the interrogation of the Arkham prisoner?)?

Conversely, even if one justifies Wayne's deep mental spiral and torpor, you create a new problem. All he needed to shake out of it was have Catwoman attempt a burglary. There was no attempt to deal with deeper mental health issues, nor any nod to the fact that he may have had any. He simple decided to start being active in life again. So we are left with a bizarre situation. Either Batman's inter-film behavior is bizarre (eg Why does retiring from Batman mean you don't go to the doctor and look into knee replacement surgery or physical therapy or something?) or his mental recovery at the beginning of TDKR is miraculous and stupid. Far moreso, in fact, than his spine healing by hanging from a rope. At least that acknowledged he was hurt in the first place, and gave a treatment of some kind, nonsensically medieval though it was. In what sense was this well thought out?

In summary, then, I don't have a problem with what Nolan was trying to do. A Wayne that wants to lead a normal life is a great narrative choice. He just didn't carry through with that character concept with any sort of rational character motivation. You can get credit for succeeding at doing something different, but a failure with a new take on the character is just as bad as a failure with a more traditional one.

Again, no. Batman is not the cape and cowl. When we meet Bruce in the first one, he's learning how to form cohesion and how to focus his anger and his impulse to do something into the end result which is Batman. It's not that he creates the character of Batman; he hones his edges until they're sharp. Batman Begins has nothing to do with the cape and the suit; it's about Batman the whole way through. He just doesn't name it "Batman" until his first appearance in the suit.

You have to understand - Batman is Batman no matter what he wears. When he's wearing a suit and going by the name Bruce, he's still 100% switched on and assessing things, remember facts to check up on later, sussing out who is lying and who is telling the truth. There's more to being Batman than a cowl. If you don't get this, you don't get Batman and that's why you'll love Rises.

EDIT: Wocky, you don't need to buy into it. It's established in the comics and has been for some time, so your deciding to opt in or our is like opting in or out of a round earth "theory".

A number of my favorite Batman tales are the one's that highlight the idea you're describing. But it's irrelevant to the larger point I was making in that post, which is that what/whoever the character in Rises was supposed to be, his motivations didn't make any sense. At all.