I realize that this movie came out over a month ago, but I finally saw the Dark Knight Rises this weekend. As I was sitting in the theater, throughout the movie, I found myself thinking, “This isn’t very good…Actually, this is pretty stupid..”
I understood that the movie wasn’t going to be realistic. It’s an action movie. But even if the movie is unrealistic, I still expect people to do things that seem somewhat logical. Throughout this movie, characters continually did things that made no sense and this really ruined the film for me. There were some areas where it was just too difficult to suspend belief.
SPOILER ALERT
Take the first fight scene between Bane and Batman. Bane has won. Does he do the logical thing and kill Batman? A person who he knows is a highly trained martial artist who’s faught his way through the intensive training of the League of Shadows? No. He decides to put him into an open and unguarded pit that Bane already knows a person can escape from.
The fact that they put Bruce Wayne where they put him almost seemed like a parody. It was like the scene from Austin Powers where they’re about to dunk Austin into the tank and Dr. Evil exclaims: “Begin the unnecessarily slow-dipping mechanism.”
Meanwhile, in Gotham, Commissioner Gordon and some of the other officers are being exiled across the frozen lake which is certain death as the ice is too thin. Miraculously, Batman (and his extremely heavy costume) shows up on the ice, and everyone is fine. Despite the fact that they have only hours to stop a NUCLEAR BOMB from going off, Batman reveals the bat signal that he made on the bridge tower, which had to have taken at least several hours (that observation I picked up from Cracked.)
The cops are freed and then have a street war with Bane’s gang of freed prisoners…
That’s something else that makes no sense. So Bane frees the prisoners of Gotham and they’re all in his army despite the fact that they’re going to be killed in the nuclear attack too.
But Bane freed them!
So?! I’d rather be alive and in prison than dying in a nuclear explosion..
So Batman gets in past all of the fighting and despite the fact that Bane has already dominated Batman once and has been completely invencible against everyone else he’s faught, Batman easily and anticlimactically defeats Bane.
It almost seems to easy, and then…
Stab.
Batman is stabbed by Miranda Tate who’s actually the daughter of R’as al Ghul. The whole movie has led us to believe that Bane was his son, but we find out that it was actually a daughter who grew up in the pit (which hardcore Batman fans already knew.) So al Ghul has a daughter, who despite having no formal education in her formative years has managed to escape and then have the savy to earn an MBA (probably) and make it onto the board of directors for Wayne Enterprises, a multi-billion dollar corporation.
We find out that Miranda Tate is really the evil mastermind who’s helping to lead to the bombing of Gotham to finish up what her father couldn’t do. They’re purging the world of moral decadence. And they’re going to kill themselves in the process?
Apparently.
Skipping ahead, with only a few seconds before the bomb is set to detonate and kill everyone in Gotham, Batman attaches the nuke to his aircraft and flys it out over the ocean. The bomb explodes, and no one is harmed.
Sigh of relief.
So…
The nuclear bomb was going to explode and kill everyone, but since it exploded a few miles away, everything is fine? Also, how did Batman fly so many miles in a few seconds? He had to have been flying like 3,500 mph (roughly 5 times the speed of sound).
In the process of taking the nuclear bomb away, Batman “dies,” his name has been cleared and everyone knows he’s a hero. Alfred visits a cafe in Italy that he had referenced earlier in the movie in the hopes that he would one day see BruceWayne married and sitting across the cafe. Well, his wish comes true and we see Bruce Wayne at the cafe with Selina Kyle.
Once again, this made no sense to me. Bruce Wayne knows that she’s a burglar and that she almost led him to his death when she betrayed him. She’s also apparently not very smart because earlier in the film when Bruce Wayne dances with her at a gala after he had been living as a recluse for eight years, she also is saved by Batman who also hasn’t been seen publicly in….eight years. And then Bruce Wayne sets up meetings with her and Batman and she never thinks, “Oh. I bet Bruce Wayne IS Batman.”
I mean, isn’t part of the ethos of Bruce Wayne that he’s dark and has trust issues, yet he’s perfectly cool with moving to Italy with a woman he barely knows. I mean, that couldn’t possibly go wrong. He’s always had such a great luck with w…. Although there was Miranda Tate who he seemed interested in and she ended up stabbing him and almost blowing up Gotham.
I just felt that this movie was so ridiculous. Batman Begins was a good setup for the trilogy and I liked how it established background. The Dark Knight is fantastic, suspensful, and action packed. Dark Knight Rises was a disappointment for me.
jrb
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