I Hated the Batman Movie
Ok, here goes.
1) Batman wasn't interesting: The movie is supposed to be about Batman. He's supposed to be the main character. We're supposed to be involved with the character, worry about him, care about the things he cares about, etc. He's supposed to be likable. He's not. He's not at all.
The problem is manyfold, but for starters, Christian Bale cannot act as Batman. Can he really be faulted for this? I don't think so. You wouldn't be able to act if you couldn't move your neck or see, either. Or hell, how about move his body at all? Batman is trained by ninjas. In fact, he's the best out of the ninjas. He's a superninja. And yet, he fights like a dude wearing 60 pounds of rubber. Stiffly, every movement precise but slow and obvious. There's no subtlety to the fights, if you don't count what we can't actually see happen because of the cape, or because the camera shakes like crazy during the fights. Compare that to Unleashed, or the Transporter, or the Bond movies.
Also, the movie isn't really about Batman. Batman is an element, sure, but an unimportant one. There are some characters that are powerful enough to warrant a beating from Batman, but he has very little to do with the movement of the plot. He's just running through a funhouse OTHER character have set up for him, hitting all the right buttons but not really getting too into it. Batman is supposed to be the world's best detective but he hardly does any detective work (what little he tries he fails at, such as finding out the Joker's identity).
Christian Bale was actually far better as Bruce Wayne... just like in the first movie. In fact, there's a scene in this one where he beats someone up as Bruce Wayne. No suit, no gravelly voice. Just some quick kung-fu. And it's awesome. It's one scene, but its the best sequence in the flick.
Finally, Batman is supposed to be a ghost-like character. A demon of the night, a sneaky guy who exists more as myth than man. But whenever he does hit the town, he's blowing shit up with his rocket launcher motorcycle. He had to go through ninja training for that?
Overall, I found myself wanting Batman on the screen less and less. Which, thankfully, the movie was more than happy to do for me. He gets very limited screen time, for a movie ostensibly about HIM.
2) Women in Refrigerators: If you're not familiar with Women In Refrigerators Syndrome, I'll briefly summarize (though I suggest you look it up on wikipedia). It's a form of sexism in comics (and really, all media) where a female character is abused, tormented or destroyed in order to motivate a leading male character. In this case, the woman becomes a plot device, rather than a character. The term comes from a storyarc in comics where Green Lantern's girlfriend was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator.
This movie suffers from a textbook example. It has one (1) female character, Rachel. Rachel is Bruce Wayne's ex-girlfriend, knows he's Batman, and is in love with Harvey Dent. That's it. That's her entire role in the flick. She doesn't do anything. She gets shoved off a roof, menaced with a knife, and spends a lot of screen time mooning over the male characters but never once makes an actual decision. Never once takes an active role in the plot. There's one scene where she stands up to the Joker, only to be menaced with a knife and pushed off a building.
Spoilers below. Read only if you've already seen the movie.
**SPOILERS BELOW DON'T READ UNLESS YOU DON'T CARE**
Halfway through the movie she gets blown up. And not the fakey 'she comes back later' kind. She gets the 'immolation by fire' kind. She's dead. I wanna say... about 60% of the way through. As a result, one character goes mad, the other becomes more driven. But that's it. Those are the consequences of her death. She has no family that I can tell, because nobody but the main characters mourns her. And they mourn her by blowing things up and punching. She gets no eulogy, no funeral. Nobody even really mentions that they miss her. Her grisly death exists as a modifier for the main characters... a motivator, a catalyst, and nothing more.
***END SPOILERS***
There are no other female characters of ANY kind. There's one, a female detective, that ends up getting pistol whipped. This is a movie that HATES WOMEN. Women are arm candy and nothing more. They don't DO anything. The male characters growl or fight or make decisions, and the females are there to be menaced and abused to motivate them.
3) The Plot: I honestly couldn't really tell you what the movie was trying to say. I came away from the movie having learned really nothing. And while a lot of even good movies suffer from this, they can make it up in little ways... this one cannot.
The plot is one unconnected scene from the next. The joker shows up, menaces people, blows things up, kills some folks, disappears. A few scenes happen while the main characters discuss and argue about what to do about the joker until he pops back up, wash rinse and repeat. This formula continues throughout the movie. There's a mini-climax somewhere around hour 1:30 that I THOUGHT was going to be the climax of the movie... but it wasn't. It was a false climax, and so I went the rest of the movie thinking... ok, uh, is this over yet? The climax, to me, had already happened. What followed was like padding.
There was a point where I actually got very bored. People were (awkwardly) fighting and things were (needlessly) exploding and I was just bored. There wasn't any emotional anchor left in the movie; they'd removed it at the mini-climax. They actually had to dial up a new female character to be menaced just to keep the tension going, but there WASN'T any tension, because I'd just stopped caring.
Plus, there was no message. "Crazy people are crazy", maybe? There was a lot of ruminating on 'heroes that are deserved' and 'heroes that are needed', but it seemed very specific to THIS MOVIE and this movie only, and I can't really think of a way to apply it in everyday life. Besides, the way they delivered it was ham-fisted in the worst way. Commissioner Gordon literally says it about four times near the end of the movie, to his son (who was made up for the movie. His daughter, who in the comics becomes Batgirl, doesn't get a line and her face is never seen.)
4) Just about the rest of it was lousy too: Here's the part where I bring up all the little things I hated.
a) Nobody just goes crazy, ok? You don't get into a car accident and suddenly you're a criminal. I understand that its handled that way in comics, but this is a movie that spends a LOT of time trying NOT to be like the comics.
b) The movie didn't bother even pretending the comics exist. They ignored everything you could possibly imagine and just made shit up. Here's a few differences: Harvey Dent has a wife in kid in the comic and Maroney throws acid in his face to turn him into Two-Face; Batman doesn't have a kindly old man who makes him his things... he designs them himself, because he's Batman; Batman doesn't have a secret underground bunker in the city, he has the batcave. What's wrong with the batcave?; Commissioner Gordon doesn't have a son, he has a daughter, and she's Batgirl. In the movie, they technically have her there, but they invented a son for him to have for the characters to talk to, presumably because Chris Nolan hates women.
The list goes on.
c) The dialogue was forgettable. It wasn't terrible to the point of being funny, but I can't remember any good scenes.
d) The writers think the audience is stupid. Morgan Freeman (and it doesn't matter what his character's name is, he's always just playing Morgan Freeman) tells Bruce Wayne that his cell phone can emit a high frequency pulse and read the ricochets of the sound waves to determine the shape of objects. I think, oh, like sonar. Bruce Wayne looks up at Morgan and says "Like a submarine?" and Morgan Freeman says "Yes, sonar, like a submarine." Ok, I know I maybe couldn't DESIGN a sonar device, but I know what it IS, thank you.
This happens again towards the end of the film as Gordon goes on a monologue about the concept of heroes we need versus heroes we deserve. Thanks, I understood that when it was mentioned in the beginning and middle of the movie, too.
e) For fucks sake Batman is supposed to be sneaky, how come he can't go into the city without blowing up a bunch of cars?
f) Why the fuck does Batman spend the entire final action sequence of the movie beating up POLICE OFFICERS? Would it really have been so hard to have him just wading through the Joker's goons?
5) Summary: The only moment I truly enjoyed was the opening bank robbery. It was brilliant, exciting, and clever. From that moment on, the movie was just boring and awful. I expected something at least halfway decent... what I got was a strong performance from Heath Ledger in a movie that was essentially about how women can't do anything but get taken hostage, how Hollywood hates comics and comic characters, and assumes the audience will be happy as long as there is a high explosion-per-screen ratio.
GO SEE HELLBOY.
HELLBOY IS GREAT.
HELLBOY IS A GREAT FUCKING MOVIE GO SEE IT.
1) Batman wasn't interesting: The movie is supposed to be about Batman. He's supposed to be the main character. We're supposed to be involved with the character, worry about him, care about the things he cares about, etc. He's supposed to be likable. He's not. He's not at all.
The problem is manyfold, but for starters, Christian Bale cannot act as Batman. Can he really be faulted for this? I don't think so. You wouldn't be able to act if you couldn't move your neck or see, either. Or hell, how about move his body at all? Batman is trained by ninjas. In fact, he's the best out of the ninjas. He's a superninja. And yet, he fights like a dude wearing 60 pounds of rubber. Stiffly, every movement precise but slow and obvious. There's no subtlety to the fights, if you don't count what we can't actually see happen because of the cape, or because the camera shakes like crazy during the fights. Compare that to Unleashed, or the Transporter, or the Bond movies.
Also, the movie isn't really about Batman. Batman is an element, sure, but an unimportant one. There are some characters that are powerful enough to warrant a beating from Batman, but he has very little to do with the movement of the plot. He's just running through a funhouse OTHER character have set up for him, hitting all the right buttons but not really getting too into it. Batman is supposed to be the world's best detective but he hardly does any detective work (what little he tries he fails at, such as finding out the Joker's identity).
Christian Bale was actually far better as Bruce Wayne... just like in the first movie. In fact, there's a scene in this one where he beats someone up as Bruce Wayne. No suit, no gravelly voice. Just some quick kung-fu. And it's awesome. It's one scene, but its the best sequence in the flick.
Finally, Batman is supposed to be a ghost-like character. A demon of the night, a sneaky guy who exists more as myth than man. But whenever he does hit the town, he's blowing shit up with his rocket launcher motorcycle. He had to go through ninja training for that?
Overall, I found myself wanting Batman on the screen less and less. Which, thankfully, the movie was more than happy to do for me. He gets very limited screen time, for a movie ostensibly about HIM.
2) Women in Refrigerators: If you're not familiar with Women In Refrigerators Syndrome, I'll briefly summarize (though I suggest you look it up on wikipedia). It's a form of sexism in comics (and really, all media) where a female character is abused, tormented or destroyed in order to motivate a leading male character. In this case, the woman becomes a plot device, rather than a character. The term comes from a storyarc in comics where Green Lantern's girlfriend was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator.
This movie suffers from a textbook example. It has one (1) female character, Rachel. Rachel is Bruce Wayne's ex-girlfriend, knows he's Batman, and is in love with Harvey Dent. That's it. That's her entire role in the flick. She doesn't do anything. She gets shoved off a roof, menaced with a knife, and spends a lot of screen time mooning over the male characters but never once makes an actual decision. Never once takes an active role in the plot. There's one scene where she stands up to the Joker, only to be menaced with a knife and pushed off a building.
Spoilers below. Read only if you've already seen the movie.
**SPOILERS BELOW DON'T READ UNLESS YOU DON'T CARE**
Halfway through the movie she gets blown up. And not the fakey 'she comes back later' kind. She gets the 'immolation by fire' kind. She's dead. I wanna say... about 60% of the way through. As a result, one character goes mad, the other becomes more driven. But that's it. Those are the consequences of her death. She has no family that I can tell, because nobody but the main characters mourns her. And they mourn her by blowing things up and punching. She gets no eulogy, no funeral. Nobody even really mentions that they miss her. Her grisly death exists as a modifier for the main characters... a motivator, a catalyst, and nothing more.
***END SPOILERS***
There are no other female characters of ANY kind. There's one, a female detective, that ends up getting pistol whipped. This is a movie that HATES WOMEN. Women are arm candy and nothing more. They don't DO anything. The male characters growl or fight or make decisions, and the females are there to be menaced and abused to motivate them.
3) The Plot: I honestly couldn't really tell you what the movie was trying to say. I came away from the movie having learned really nothing. And while a lot of even good movies suffer from this, they can make it up in little ways... this one cannot.
The plot is one unconnected scene from the next. The joker shows up, menaces people, blows things up, kills some folks, disappears. A few scenes happen while the main characters discuss and argue about what to do about the joker until he pops back up, wash rinse and repeat. This formula continues throughout the movie. There's a mini-climax somewhere around hour 1:30 that I THOUGHT was going to be the climax of the movie... but it wasn't. It was a false climax, and so I went the rest of the movie thinking... ok, uh, is this over yet? The climax, to me, had already happened. What followed was like padding.
There was a point where I actually got very bored. People were (awkwardly) fighting and things were (needlessly) exploding and I was just bored. There wasn't any emotional anchor left in the movie; they'd removed it at the mini-climax. They actually had to dial up a new female character to be menaced just to keep the tension going, but there WASN'T any tension, because I'd just stopped caring.
Plus, there was no message. "Crazy people are crazy", maybe? There was a lot of ruminating on 'heroes that are deserved' and 'heroes that are needed', but it seemed very specific to THIS MOVIE and this movie only, and I can't really think of a way to apply it in everyday life. Besides, the way they delivered it was ham-fisted in the worst way. Commissioner Gordon literally says it about four times near the end of the movie, to his son (who was made up for the movie. His daughter, who in the comics becomes Batgirl, doesn't get a line and her face is never seen.)
4) Just about the rest of it was lousy too: Here's the part where I bring up all the little things I hated.
a) Nobody just goes crazy, ok? You don't get into a car accident and suddenly you're a criminal. I understand that its handled that way in comics, but this is a movie that spends a LOT of time trying NOT to be like the comics.
b) The movie didn't bother even pretending the comics exist. They ignored everything you could possibly imagine and just made shit up. Here's a few differences: Harvey Dent has a wife in kid in the comic and Maroney throws acid in his face to turn him into Two-Face; Batman doesn't have a kindly old man who makes him his things... he designs them himself, because he's Batman; Batman doesn't have a secret underground bunker in the city, he has the batcave. What's wrong with the batcave?; Commissioner Gordon doesn't have a son, he has a daughter, and she's Batgirl. In the movie, they technically have her there, but they invented a son for him to have for the characters to talk to, presumably because Chris Nolan hates women.
The list goes on.
c) The dialogue was forgettable. It wasn't terrible to the point of being funny, but I can't remember any good scenes.
d) The writers think the audience is stupid. Morgan Freeman (and it doesn't matter what his character's name is, he's always just playing Morgan Freeman) tells Bruce Wayne that his cell phone can emit a high frequency pulse and read the ricochets of the sound waves to determine the shape of objects. I think, oh, like sonar. Bruce Wayne looks up at Morgan and says "Like a submarine?" and Morgan Freeman says "Yes, sonar, like a submarine." Ok, I know I maybe couldn't DESIGN a sonar device, but I know what it IS, thank you.
This happens again towards the end of the film as Gordon goes on a monologue about the concept of heroes we need versus heroes we deserve. Thanks, I understood that when it was mentioned in the beginning and middle of the movie, too.
e) For fucks sake Batman is supposed to be sneaky, how come he can't go into the city without blowing up a bunch of cars?
f) Why the fuck does Batman spend the entire final action sequence of the movie beating up POLICE OFFICERS? Would it really have been so hard to have him just wading through the Joker's goons?
5) Summary: The only moment I truly enjoyed was the opening bank robbery. It was brilliant, exciting, and clever. From that moment on, the movie was just boring and awful. I expected something at least halfway decent... what I got was a strong performance from Heath Ledger in a movie that was essentially about how women can't do anything but get taken hostage, how Hollywood hates comics and comic characters, and assumes the audience will be happy as long as there is a high explosion-per-screen ratio.
GO SEE HELLBOY.
HELLBOY IS GREAT.
HELLBOY IS A GREAT FUCKING MOVIE GO SEE IT.