re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

Yeah, Gotham Central was great. It was by Ed Brubaker right? He did an amazing piece of work on Daredevil btw. LOVED his "Devil in Cell Block D" arc.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

Official. No other details.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

Makes sense. GL in 2011, Batman 2012, Superman 2013.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

Good spot for Batman 3 - enough space after the Spider-Man reboot.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

Summer 2012 already looks 100x more promising than this Summer.

Batman 3, Spider-man reboot, Star Trek 2, and Avengers are 4 mega blockbusters that will rake in serious coin.

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That is going to be one crowded summer. Glad I don't work at a movie theater.

Oh wait...

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

Batman 3, Spider-Man 4, Avengers, Star Trek 2 (or 12, w/e)... it's 1989 all over again!

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

I'm a fan of Gotham Central, and thought it would make for good television. But after thinking about it, and seeing The Wire it seems like it would be a low rent Law and Order. The glimpses of the police room from TDK that we saw (where they had the bulletin board of candidates for Batman) were promising though. I like the fact that Batman does not play a major role. However, it could end up going down a corny promo path, such as the promos for TDK invovling Anthony Michael Hall as the reporter doing that talk show with Gordon, Dent. Or...that fake Fox news special on Mutants for the first X-Men which only featured the guy who played the Senator and no other main actors.

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Let's see if we can get Ghostbusters 3 in there to seal the deal.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

2012 is gonna' kick ass.

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Solid summer of sequels to see before the world ends in Dec!

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

Plus whatever Pixar has to offer for 2012.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

Yeah, 2012 is gonna kick ass. I think Batman 3 will definitely be the best film out of all of them though.

Pixar is supposed to release two films in 2012. "Brave", and "Monsters Inc. 2".

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

We could also be sitting in the theater watching The Hobbit when it does! A good way to go out. It's always nice to have those really big ones a few yrs out to look forward to.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

How so? The bulletin board seemed to imply the detectives in this city were all either lazy (which would not be completely out of line with the corruption theme from the first film- if you accept a more liberal use of the phrase corrupt) but more likely utterly clueless and incompetent.
Especially since this directly follows the sequence where we see an un-deputized vigilante destroying public/private property (along with using explosives in an urban area) and depriving people of their civil rights (both the 'criminals' and off duty police). And of course this is in the wake of him trashing a few squad cars and imperiling a whole squad of patrolmen in the first film.
Seems kind of odd to me the way the cops shrug stuff like this off. You would think they would have a major hard on to prove who wields the power/authority in this city. But then I guess their timidity makes perfect sense in a world where two mobs of people in a life or death situation, including a group of hardened criminals, would both behave in the most altruistic, selfless fashion*.
If you can swallow that last bit, then the idea that the cops in this situation would not be putting forth a highly concentrated effort to find this guy and put him out of business, seems perfectly reasonable I guess.



*and apparently it doesn't bother people that the film tries to sell the idea that the people of the city need to have this illusion that this one politician was incorruptible because they would lose hope or meaning or...i don't know what. Yet, just a few hours earlier the Jokers social experiment seemed to imply that the entire populace (including the criminal element) had reached an advanced humanistic state.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

I'm sure the rest of the GCPD wanted to nail Batman. The cops of the Major Crimes Unit, who were tasked with bringing him in, were the ones aiding Batman. I wish they'd've explored that given I doubt an undercover couldn't have gotten into the MCU and exposed them all to IAB.

That was just sloppy writing. Batman should have been meeting with Gordon alone and the Bat-Signal should have been atop an abandoned building and rarely used if it was to fit into the plausible world Nolan was trying to create. Having it atop the MCU building was retarded. And unnecessary given Batman and Gordon were text message buddies. I'm sure Fox could have whipped up a cellphone mod for untraceable two-way texting. If he could make one into a sonar and another into a remote jamming system, why not add untraceable two-way texting?

This is why I wish the civilians would have turned the key and ended up blowing themselves up.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

Yeah. I was just thinking about this recently too.
The gaping logic holes in TDK have been bugging me for a while, but it's only been in the last few days that I realized the real genesis of the problem is back in the last scene of BB.

I agree with you that having the Bat signal set up like that implies it is institutionalized which is simply not logical in this universe. It would have been much more appropriate if- when Batman shows up and taps on the bat shaped metal plate, Gordon walks over and starts to immediately disassemble it from surface as he says "I didn't have any crime bosses". That would have shown that it was something Gordon had improvised on the fly. And showing that it could easily be taken apart would make it seem more of a secret signal between the two. I thought the original genesis of the signal was a flat out brilliant idea, but it's poorly, and illogically, implemented after that.

The second big problem in that last scene is the basic content of the conversation.
the whole "you really started something" is waaaaay off base.
The only thing Batmans actions in that first film should have jump started was a massive man-hunt for his ass. Evading arrest, putting law enforcement officers in harms way if not out right injuring them, destroying public and private property- including a massive terrorist assault on the city's monorail system- this character would have city, state, and likely federal agencies gunning for him. Instead, the end scene has Gordon practically giving him the key to the city. Gordon's little conference should have been to say "look, I know what you're trying to do, but I'm don't know how much I'll be able to cover for you in the future. You'll be getting it from all sides."
People easily forget that we as an audience are privy to information that most of the people in the film are not.
Even Gordon didn't know the back story of Ras, or the details of his evil plan, when he took out the monorail. None of these characters, especially the rank and file police, know this or even Batmans true allegiences. For all anyone knows, he could be an agent of one crime boss who is trying to take out all the competition. Given his actions throughout the film(s), there is absolutely no basis for anyone beyond Gordon to trust him. And this makes sequences like the interrogation room scene in TDK, come off as completely ridiculous. And that's just the basic concept. Add in the goofy costume seen in full light, and Bales inane Batman voice, and the whole thing is just painful to watch.

There are a lot of nice little touches sprinkled around, but the larger picture tells me Nolan doesn't really get this character as much as most of us initially thought he did. And people, even the non discerning TDK fans, should be very leary of comments he's making about the third film 'wrapping the story up'.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

Yeah, as much as I prefer BB over TDK, the mishandled microwave emitter was not as glaring a problem as Gordon not having a removable Bat-Signal and his ignoring the fact that Batman quite nearly killed some cops (not all of them corrupt as Gordon was "one of the few" rather than the only honest cop in Gotham) are glaring issues. Hell, even Alfred chastised him for his freeway antics.

Another folly in this franchise was killing off Loeb and promoting Gordon to commissioner after one movie. Here we had an honest commissioner (unlike his comic book counterpart) who had a zero tolerance for vigilantes. That would create for an interesting dynamic and a means of presenting two different moral views regarding Batman. Instead, Loeb is used as the butt of a near-collision gag towards the end off BB and offed unceremoniously in TDK.

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Absolutely in agreement here.

That characters reactions and behavior was one of the more realistic and logical in the two films, so of course he had to go :lol:
A huge missed opportunity there, seemingly just for the purpose of throwing the audience/fanboys a bone they didn't need. That promotion came way too early.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

Because it showed a moment in a police department that seems to ring true. It was just a joke bulletin board, similar to how on The Shield they would take bets on who was Danni's father, or on The Wire where they hang up all the clipped ties of people who fell asleep.

Though I agree with another poster in that it's not smart to have the signal atop the Police Department. Gotham Central had it right, when they claimed that it was a faulty spotlight, and only a non-police officer is allowed to touch it.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

It's Batman. It's fantasy. You might as well pick apart Avatar or King Kong for not being realistic.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

If the object of the investigation were someone who steals women's panties off clotheslines, I could see them making jokes about it. Someone who blew up the city's monorail*, drives an urban assault vehicle in the city, and steamrolled a fleet of cop cruisers with it? Nah, I just don't see it.
Nolan could have chosen to pan across a room full of detectives hard at work and boards full of honest investigative theories and corollaries, but he chose instead to imply that the detectives here were letting it slide because maybe they were probably lazy.
If they were corrupt and on the take, then it is even more likely the people greasing them would want action on that as well since it is impacting their business operations.

The all purpose dismissive when criticism starts to illuminate the emperors wardrobe.
It's a fantasy/kid's movie/comic book etc. (as if fantasy writing doesn't have to be grounded in believable/logical character action reaction. This is what sells a fantasy premise, not the other way around).
And if that's the primary metric, then something like Batman & Robin merits no criticism whatsoever. Nolan, and the fans of the film, want to have their cake and eat it too. It's a great movie because it finally takes the premise of the character seriously- except that when it is pointed out that behavior is not logical or realistic it is suddenly just a fantasy movie ala Burton's stylized take.
And FWIW, while Avatar was unoriginal and telegraphed most of its major beats, I don't find it to have anywhere near the same amount of gaps of basic internal logic as most of TDK and parts of BB. It's not above criticism, but it's also nowhere near as frustrating to re-watch as TDK is for me. Which is a real shame because like I said, there are some legitimately great little pieces of business in there. But they sparkle like diamonds in sacks of manure since so much of it is poorly thought out and sloppy.

*I can't believe Gordon would cop to being the one who pulled the trigger as it would open him up to all kinds of prosecution, let alone losing his job immediately.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

To watch any movie you have to suspend your disbelief. Iron Man, Hulk, Superman, even Kick Ass, none of it could happen or would happen in real life. Nolan's Batman is nothing like Burtons. Nolan's is grounded in a much more realistic environment, its not cartoony like Burtons. The argument for things not being realistic could be made for any and every movie.

I find it odd that you think blue cat people on a moon almost exactly like Earth where spaceships fly with people in Cryo for 6 years is more logical then a bat signal on a roof top. Run on sentence... Whatever.

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I think you guys are getting hung up on the MCU not looking too hard for Batman. For one thing, Batman, as evidenced by the first film, is very good at evading capture, and doesn't have much regard for property while he's at it. So the idea of cornering him probably isn't very attractive to any cop. Secondly, the head of MCU is working directly with Batman, and it seems most of his people know it (Ramirez talks to Gordon about Batman on the roof, and sees Batman in the bank vault; I think she also tells Batman off when he worries about Gordon's people contaminating a crime scene). While some of the cops may be ambivalent about what Batman is doing, they pretty much have standing orders to not dig too deep.

And the fact is, if those cops were all handpicked by Gordon, chances are they're all sympathetic to what Batman is doing anyway.

re: The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan)
 

Yes, I agree that suspension of disbelief is required for any fantasy movie.
But it is required for the basic premise of the story.
That is much different than making allowances for characters that don't behave consistently (without a good reason), or when major actions don't produce a logical reaction that has to be accounted for or dealt with.

No it isn't. What you seem to be keying in on is style, not necessarily content. Burton's style was cartoony. Nolan's isn't- but that is just the veneer.

I could get deep into the minutiae of this one aspect but I was really just giving that as one example of how superficially Nolan has embellished his initial premise. The fact is there are many, many instances, large and small, in the film that ring false for me.
-a major metropolitan hospital can be completely evacuated in under an hour? The logistics of that alone are impossible, but when you factor in that the evac is initiated because of a non specific threat (as opposed to them actually finding rigged explosives on the premises) it's impossible to take seriously. Thankfully not one person gets hurt :rolleyes:
-a father is in a situation begging for the life of his young son from someone gruesomely unhinged, and barely escapes with his life- yet not 10 minutes later he is calmly and soberly pontificating (as his becalmed tow headed offspring stands at his side) on what the city needs. Part this is a criticism of the content (we get a pretentious speech about the films themes, rather than dialogue showing Gordon reacting like a real father would in the situation) and part is the style (the kid would most likely be off being comforted by the mother, not standing around oogling the corpse of the guy who nearly murdered him) but the passage is an epic fail for me in any case. It fails in terms of the films internal logic (as was hashed out in previous posts) and it fails in basic execution.
-the getaway bus disappearing in a sea of slow moving traffic.
and on and on and on....

all of this should illustrate how extensive the 'turn off your brain and go with the flow' nature of this film is. And yet that is the absolute antithesis of the kind of film it's fans so passionately believe it to be.