How I Ruined The Dark Knight Rises

I saw The Dark Knight Rises on opening weekend.  I thought it was great.  I saw it again yesterday.  I ruined it.

I am not a huge Batman fan.  I remember when The Dark Knight came out and everyone was all...

Did you guys know Ledger died?!  Death makes it so much better!

I had seen Batman Begins and thought it was a respectable cinematic adventure; mostly because of Liam Neeson’s awesomeness.  Prior to that my only real exposure to the goddamn Batman had been Justice League, where I always found it funny that the super-powerless billionaire was saving the League of Pricks with Powers all the time.  Except black Green Lantern.  He got Hawk girl.   That was cool.  I was also overall impressed with Yes, Heath Ledger Died the movie; minus the whole China-diplomatic-crap thing.  So I did actually get a little excited for The Dark Knight Rises; but only like, “Hey, I’m not out of Cinnamon Toast Crunch yet” excited.

I walked out of the first showing of Nolan’s last Batman fairly stoked.  Bane’s voice was ear-cake.  The Bat is the coolest thing this side of Iron Man.  Anne Hathaway looks great in leather.  And the ending was full of sunshine and rainbows.  It wasn’t quite the diamond-encrusted Aston Martin driven by Kate Beckinsale from Heaven we were promised; but it was pretty darn good.

Walking out of the second showing my first thought was, “That movie was more full of holes than Gotham’s infrastructure.”

The Plot Holes

It's like it's supposed to be mean something.

How did Bruce Wayne get back into Gotham after his stay in a sink hole?  Bane blew half the city up with exploding concrete (which I’m not even sure is chemically possible) minus one bridge that was carefully protected against people by the entire national guard.  And one dick police officer.  It was specifically said that if anyone so much as sneezed on that bridge the terrorists would recreate Hiroshima.  The only other way into Gotham would be walking over the river ice, but we saw that didn’t work out too well for anyone.  On top of that, Bruce isn’t exactly a member of the Ice Capades...

Through some skates in there and you've got a kick-ass new winter sport.

The counter-argument to all of this is:  He’s Batman, he knows Gotham and all its secrets.  What, like the underground tunnel network that’s completely blocked off with three thousand hobo-policeman trapped in it?  Yeah, no.  The bigger mystery is actually how Wayne got back to America in the first place without money, identification, or good hygiene.

How has no one figured out Bruce Wayne is Batman by now?  At least at the end of the movie everyone would’ve figured out that; hey, the eccentric billionaire Batman died at the same time.  Coincidence?  Not allowed to believe in those; Gordon told us so.  Heck, how did everyone in Gotham not figure it out during the eight years the Batman disappeared and Bruce Wayne simultaneously hermited away into house archery and creepy facial hair?  Or when Bruce is taken out of the country by Bane’s men and Batman doesn’t reappear until Wayne publically shows up at a trial obviously meant to be judged by the Joker but had to be Scarecrow because the actor was still alive?  Or when Bane’s men show up in Batmobile’s they stole from Wayne Enterprises.  Or when the engineers see Bruce Wayne fixed the Bat’s autopilot?  Seriously.  No one makes the connection?

Hey, that looks familiar...does it come in black?

Oh wait, people did.  For stupid reasons.  Like staring deeply into Christian Bale’s soulless eyes.

How did the ending even work?  I understand that Batman ejected from the Bat and then Michael Phelped to shore somewhere; but when and how did he fix the Bat-signal, leave a bag in his will for a cop, meet up with Catwoman, rock over to Italy, find a café that Alfred mentioned briefly and sit there every day until he showed up to let him know he was totally boning Selina?  Sure, we can assume they both dropped off the map entirely with the clean-slate program; but one stray photograph and sober memory and the FBI are going to have some questions for a very recognizable dead billionaire and master thief who happen to not exist in their database anymore.

Batman and Bane are Idiots

There are supposed to be some seriously smart people in The Dark Knight Rises.  We know the general populace of Gotham are borderline retarded, but at least the hero and villain know what’s up, right?  Wrong.  Very, idiotically, wrong.

Bruce Wayne/Batman

You know how most of the issues in this movie could have been avoided?  Turning on the freaking fusion reactor.  It works.  We’re very clearly told it works.  It would provide clean, efficient energy for all Gotham and beyond; which would help out Gotham’s struggling lower class and give Bruce and Wayne Enterprises more money than god for them to use on more cool monorail trains.  Yet Bruce Wayne won’t turn the Poke’ball of Destiny on because ONE crazy Russian figured out how to turn it into a nuclear weapon.  You know what also has that same problem?  Nuclear power plants.  I worked at one.  Know how they stop Libyans and Delorean enthusiasts from stealing uranium and turning it into nukes/time travel fuel?  An ass-ton of security.  Had Bruce decided to flip the switch, cackling like a mad genius, the government would have gone:  That’s awesome!  By the way, you need to surround that thing with about thirteen hundred miles of concrete, a few thousand armed guards, barbed wire fences, and airport style security checkpoints.  Lucius Fox also gets a stupid badge for this one for not figuring out this either, despite being Tony Stark as played by Morgan Freeman.

(We're also ignoring the whole, “guns would solve all Batman’s problems”, as adequately displayed by Catwoman.)

Bane

Bane is supposed to be as intelligent, if not more-so, than Batman.  And at first Bane shows his smarts.  He has that elaborate plane-airlift-crash thing, turns Gotham into swiss-cheese, figures out Bruce and Batman are one dude (as mentioned above though, not difficult) and he takes the schizophrenic chain smoker out of Gotham and throws him down a well halfway around the world. 

Then he takes a stupid pill.

Take the blue pill and the story ends.  The red pill adds two hours to the movie.

Bruce’s total downer cell-mate informs him Bane runs the pit-prison.  But there are no guards.  Only a very climbable wall with one Ninja Warrior leap of faith at the end.  Yeah, sure, that’ll stop the goddamn Batman.  Later, Bane acts all surprised that Batman’s back:  “I broke you.”  No you didn’t Bane.  Bruce could still move his legs.  You didn’t paralyze him.  He can recover from that and magically teleport back to punch you in the face.  Why did Bane even give him the chance anyway?  Why didn't he just detonate the poorly defended fusion bomb as soon as he got it?  Bane's goal is to destroy Gotham.  Sure, the whole “anarchy fear thing” is cool, but the bomb is going to go off anyway and have the same effect in five months that it would in five seconds.  Why not just get out of there, set it off, and go enjoy mojitos through a twisty straw in the Caribbean?  Nope, have to give Batman and the cops a chance to rebel and screw up your plan.

The Matinee After Syndrome

Any movie you go see a second time while it’s still in theaters is not going to be as good as the first time you feast your virgin eyes on it.  Those who assert a movie was “better the second time” are trying to justify spending enough money to buy the DVD without doing so.  The problem is not enough time has passed for the unexpected moments to be even remotely unanticipated again.

I’ve seen The Avengers four times.  Are the scenes where the Hulk punches Thor and tosses Loki around still hilarious?  Yes.  Is the Mark VII bracelet suit-up thing still engineer-gasm fantasticness?  Yes.  But I didn’t laugh or openly gape the second, third, or fourth time I saw it.  The problem with those types of scenes is they only ever have a significant impact on you the first time you see them.  If you let enough time pass between seeing the movie you may be able to scrape up some semblance of that glorious first time again, but it will never be the same.  This is what plagues The Dark Knight.  Badly.

I would never stop paying to see this.

So many points of the movie rely on “sudden reveal” or perfect cinematic timing that when you’re expecting it the second time through just lose their weight entirely.  Just a few examples are:  When Catwoman betrays Bruce, when the Batwing flies out of that alley, when Talia stabs Bruce, etc.  The biggest one though, is the ending itself.  Knowing that Bruce lives ruins the entire end sequence.   As soon as Batman hooks up the nuke, the statue, the Robin, the fixed autopilot, the Alfred crying just doesn't hold any weight.  In fact, it makes it worse.  Bruce lets everyone close to him think he’s dead and only lets Alfred know he’s alive in a highly chance dependent event.  He also goes off to live the good life while leaving Gotham’s incompetent police department to deal with an under-trained new Batman.

The Dark Knight Rises is a good movie; just try to avoid seeing it again before you boot up BitTorrent at the DVD release.

> Wander On