I’m few days out of Dark Knight Rises … anyone want to talk about it?
A few non-spoilery thoughts … spoilers go in the comments.
1. I was pretty blown away. There are definitely things I didn’t like about it, but I thought it was amazing. I’m still thinking through it, a few days later. I’m reading lots of reviews. I’m still engaged.
2. I was comparing it to a Russian novel, but apparently it’s more Dickens.
3. I found myself thinking of Hancock. Hancock starts out as a parody of the superhero genre, which I hate. Then it fills in its own backstory and becomes its own thing. I really liked Hancock, even if it’s not a great movie. At least it showed me something I hadn’t seen before.
4. I guess Dark Knight Rises borrows a lot from Knightfall and No Man’s Land, which I never read. I stopped reading Batman right around then.
5. If you want to chew on a lot of Dark Knight Rises commentary, here’s the ComicsAlliance Dark Knight Rises roundup. My thoughts were more similar to the Pajiba Dark Knight review.
6. These days, you can push a button and get a million Orcs out of a CGI rendering engine. So it’s kind of amazing to see just a horde of real people. It gives the piece some real solidity.
Sorry to Batman up the blog this week. No, excuse me. I don’t apologize for that at all.
Anyway, here’s the spoilery part.
There’s a phenomenon for nerd art where something can be “good” but “wrong.” I thought it was a really good movie, but I often thought “Batman would never do that.”
In fact, there’s really not much Batman. And Batman fucks up a lot.
Any move that starts with Batman quitting, and then Alfred quitting, has dug a pretty big hole with me.
The first act is straight-up bad. Nolan has to lay a lot of pipe to set up the story he wants to tell.
Am I the only one who thought “Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb?” at the end?
One of good friends was part of the “horde of real people” and was thrilled that her scene didn’t get cut, so she’s actually visible somewhere for a couple seconds in the background.
I posted my thoughts over on my tumblr yesterday(warning there might be a lot of spoilers)… http://drawrobotdesigns.tumblr.com/post/27867703932/why-do-we-fall
In short yeah, it’s a movie where Batman doesn’t really behave like Batman. But it’s this alternative spin on the Batman mythos that Nolan’s come as close as anybody will to getting right. In spirit anyway, not literally. I enjoyed it on those terms.