The Dark Knight Rises
Batman returns to stop Bane from his evil plot to destroy Gotham in the most drawn out movie I have ever seen.
I’m just going to say that honestly no matter how much I love Batman and Nolan this movie was BORING. It was the most drawn out and boring Batman movie I have ever seen. It definitely holds up the Hollywood curse that the third movie in any series is always the worst. There was actually a point in the theater where I thought watching Batman and Robin would have been more entertaining.
The movie opens with potential as you see things happening. But then nothing happens and it tries to set up some kind of huge climactic ending that just doesn’t ever seem to come. The build up and expository dialogue just drag on and on forever. The middle of the film seems to drag on for over and hour and Batman is nowhere in sight.
All the villains seem to have no motivation or reason at all for anything they are doing. We are given countless explain the plot speeches, not that we can understand anything they are saying anyway, that adds absolutely nothing to the story, plot or build up. It’s just like Nolan decided to go all Michael Bay and throw in explosions because they look cool and a transformer-like jet but then put in all these emotional drawn out scenes where characters are talking endlessly about nothing.
Let’s break down everything wrong with this movie. Spoilers start here.
So the movie opens 8 years after the last film. Why 8 years? That’s a long time. The movie is already telling you that nothing is happening in Gotham City and nothing has been for years? If they wanted Batman to take a hiatus, why not just make it 3 or 4 years (you know that actual length in between movies)? Gordan has cleaned up Gotham with the legacy of Harvey Dent, Batman still taking the blame for his murder. This is so pointless and goes nowhere. They just had to include it because of how the last film ended but it’s completely inconsequential.
Actually I’m getting ahead of myself. The movie opens with Bane doing an airplane heist to kidnap someone. The person who is kidnapped is inconsequential (you will see this word a LOT in my review). He’s a Russian nuclear physicist or something. I think Nolan just wanted to introduce the main villain in a “cool” way so he had an airplane heist even though he could have just kidnapped him anywhere. Then Bane says his first line of dialogue and we know it’s downhill from here. He’s wearing a stupid looking mask, he sounds like a crazy mad-scientist (think Batman and Robin, seriously) and there’s some kind of distortion on it. I honestly could not understand anything this character was saying the ENTIRE movie. Who thought this was a good idea? Did they test screen this shitty movie? I seriously needed subtitles for Bane. And this guy talks a LOT. He probably has the most expository dialogue of anyone in the movie. He just goes on and on with speech after speech about how he’s an evil badass who wants to destroy the city for NO REASON. It’s the worst voice I have ever heard in a movie, period! It’s like they were trying to go Darth Vader but it ended up sounding more like a really bad PA system where you can’t hear anything that’s being said. Imagine if you were at Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion but the announcer over the loud speaker was inaudible. Yeah, it sounds like that.
Batman for some reason has a bum leg (I don’t remember him getting injured in the last movie) and has to use a cane, also Bruce Wayne has been out of the public eye for the last 8 years. Both of these things are also inconsequential because he immediately decides to go to a party and as soon as he decides to be Batman he puts on a leg brace and it’s completely fine. So why even bother to write those two things in at all?
So we learn that his company is going broke. “Catwoman” steals his fingerprints to sell to a rival company executive (or maybe he was a Wayne board member, I don’t really know because it was boring and hard for me to pay attention, somehow they’re all related). Catwoman’s motivation and plan is stupid. She wants to erase her identity from all police databases. This is her entire motivating factor for anything she does in the movie. She goes to a shady bar to exchange the fingerprints for said magical technology and gets double-crossed. To show off that she is tough and smart she kidnaps a Congressman (drugs him or gets him really drunk) and then alerts the police that he’s there (the police have been searching for him since he was kidnapped). So the cops show up to save her from being shot. This convoluted plan is dumb for many reasons, the main reason being that the Congressman could identity her and press charges, which he does later in the movie so they can have a scene where she goes to prison.
Bane breaks into the New York (Gotham?) Stock Exchange (this is as boring as it sounds) to use the fingerprints to sell off Wayne’s stocks and make him broke (even though he was already broke at the beginning of the movie). I don’t know if Nolan wanted to make a political statement about the New York Stock Exchange being crooks but it didn’t really work. So Batman makes his first appearance, driving his motorcycle around. Which seems cool and you’re thinking that the movie will be good and reminiscent from the last one. It doesn’t last. The police decide for no reason that they should all chase and try to capture Batman, completely forgetting about Bane’s men who held up the Stock Exchange and are riding around with HOSTAGES on the backs of their motorcycles. They literally decided that the criminals they were called in to stop in the first place weren’t worth chasing since Batman showed up.
Alfred pulls a X3 and after too many pointless expository (you will also see the word expository in my review a LOT) speeches about how he doesn’t want Bruce to be Batman because he doesn’t want to see him die (only one of these dialogue scenes would have done it, we don’t need more than that), he leaves. And doesn’t show up again for the rest of the movie until the end.
Joseph Gordon Levitt is a cop who goes around doing noble cop things. His character doesn’t really do that much for the story but he was the most enjoyable thing about this movie. His performance really steals the show and upstages all the other actors. Honestly, the movie should have just been called “Cops of Gotham” and been solely about him. It would have been more enjoyable and interesting. Also he, along with everyone else in the movie, knows Bruce Wayne is Batman.
So there’s more expository dialogue and scenes about Bane being in the sewer. Gordon goes in and gets shot which puts him out of commission for a good chunk of screen time, again reminding me of X3 where the actor seems to not have time to be in this movie. Catwoman has a bunch of random scenes here and there to show that she is “tough” and still in the movie. She tries to steal from the guy who double-crossed her in the beginning who is somehow connected to Bane and gets caught and meets Batman in his second appearance. Batman asks her to take him to Bane because the two need to be somehow connected together. Honestly how does he know that she knows where he is? And I mean physically where he is? His underground hideout in the sewers that is probably very easy to find seeing as how Gordon was literally there in a previous scene in the movie.
So in between all that or sometime before I honestly don’t remember the order of shit happening in this movie, Bruce Wayne has a nuclear reactor that’s supposed to be for energy efficiency or something but he’s afraid it’ll be used as a nuclear bomb so he tells one person about it. Some corporate chick who’s dedicated to clean sustainable energy. I’m actually not sure how a nuclear device is sustainable energy, but okay.
Then Catwoman leads Batman into the sewers to find Bane. And they find him, but she double-crosses him by not walking onto the catwalk from Street Fighter the Movie (yes, that horrible movie, there’s even a bell noise when they fall off) where they face off. I don’t understand how it’s a double-cross honestly. Because Bane knew he was coming? Bane is so inexplicably tough that he kicks Batman’s ass. I’m convinced the exact same outcome would have happened whether she double-crossed him or not. It honestly didn’t seem like Batman had a plan to stop him. He was just charging in anyway. So what’s the difference whether she double-crossed him or not? They would have fought regardless and he would have gotten his ass kicked either way. It would have made more sense is she just gave him a blue print of where the hideout was in the sewers and he formulated an attack plan. Instead he was blindly following her in like a calvary charging in without any kind of strategy or plan. He didn’t know how many henchmen were there or the layout of the hideout. They weren’t even subtly sneaking in so he could stake it out. They were literally charging in, beating up every bad guy they came across in the most non-discreet, non-stealthy way possible. So it honestly makes no difference whether she betrays him or not because the outcome would have been exactly the same regardless.
Bane’s base ends up being directly under Bruce Wayne’s military lair. So he blows up the floor and his tanks fall down. This is how Bane takes over the city with military-like force using Wayne’s own tanks, weapons and technology. Though it’s never touched upon how they got the tank out of the sewer after he blew it up and it fell through. Maybe they just didn’t bother to use that one.
Inexplicably Bane is so strong he can punch through concrete. Comic book or even general Batman fans know Bane was experimented on with a super steroid called Venom. The movie does not touch on this at all. We’re just supposed to believe that he’s just strong. The only thing they mention about Bane’s character is that he was born in the worst prison on earth and used to run with Ra’s Al Ghul’s League of Shadows. That’s it for character depth/development. And for a 3 hour long movie that sprouts endless expository dialogue for every scene, that is really weak character development. The whole time I’m wondering what Bane’s actual motivation is for anything he does in the movie. It isn’t money because he basically kills every person who hires him. What’s the point of introducing all these characters if they’re just going to get killed off immediately anyway? To show how tough Bane is that he can’t be bought with money? They already did that with the Joker. I guess that’s what they were going for here but failed in every way. There are too many characters and side storylines to even follow and if everyone just gets killed off, what’s the point? Why invest in their story when it’s inconsequential. It’s possible Bane explained his motivation in one of his scenes but again I can’t understand a single word he says. That character seriously needed subtitles.
So the next hour of the movie should have been cut from the film entirely. If they removed the entire middle section of the movie, it would have been better. This review is long because so much pointless shit is happening I have explain it all.
Batman is out of commission for the next hour of the movie. So we had 3 scenes with Batman and then an hour without, he’ll show up at the end, but is this even a Batman movie? Where is Batman? The next hour of the movie shows a bunch of shit happening all intercut together. The music score at this time is so loud and overbearing it’s far more epic than the film will ever be. The score just hammers away at your patience trying to build up some epic climax for over an hour. It’s like being tortured. It’s the longest segment of epic music where nothing is actually happening that I honestly contemplated leaving the theater.
So what’s happening? We see Bruce Wayne in the prison getting tortured. While he’s in prison all these characters with thick accents are shouting out expository dialogue that we can’t understand about how Bane grew up in the prison because his mom was sentenced there. Also the throat thing happened while he was in there, but somehow he also escaped as a child and the child that escaped was the offspring of Ra’s al Ghul (twist ending not really a surprise). Bane blows up a football stadium for no reason (killing the mayor in a pointless cameo) and tells the city that he is going to blow it up, but in the meantime the citizens are free to cause anarchy and chaos in the longest most boring speech you can’t understand ever (he also kills the scientist from the beginning of the movie, see inconsequential). All the policemen in the city are trapped in the sewers and can’t get out for some reason. A bunch of explosions go off all over the city blowing out all the bridges. Bane let’s all the prisoners out of the prison and gives off another boring pointless speech that goes on for way too long. They set up a court system among the anarchy where the Scarecrow is the judge in a pointless cameo (it kind of reminded me of that Batman the Animated Series episode where the villains capture Batman and put him on trial, only if it were done pointlessly and horribly). He sentences people to walk out on thin ice over the bay (that’s connected to the ocean so it likely would never actually freeze) where they fall through and die. Joseph Gordan Levitt tries to help among the chaos. Rescues Commissioner Gordon, tries to get the police out of the sewers and fails several times. Bane reveals that Gordan covered up Harvey Dent’s true identity as Two-Face and for some reason everyone cares amongst a terrorist attack. This is so stupid. Everything happening is stupid. Why he hell would anyone care about Harvey Dent’s murder being covered up 8 years later amongst a terrorist attack where they city is being blown up and criminals are taking over shooting everyone and chasing them out of their homes (we see abandoned houses throughout)? Who seriously gives a shit? There’s more important things going on. I think everyone would be more concerned with fleeing for their lives than caring that the police Commissioner lied to everyone 8 years ago.
I don’t know. There’s just too much pointless shit going on to explain everything. There’s also some cop side story where this guy whose name I don’t even know is struggling with caring about his job. When he decides to stand up for what he believes in and be a cop, he promptly dies (another inconsequential character). Apparently the city is in chaos like this for 3-5 months. The bomb will go off in exactly 5 months so this whole hour long film fodder fills in that time with Batman being trapped in prison the whole time and all this pointless crap going on. The US government and military does make an appearance as someone would be bound to ask, if this really happened wouldn’t the government intervene? The answer is no, they’d actually join the terrorists. The military literally shows up and one of Bane’s guys says, “If you try to stop us or evacuate the city, we’ll blow everyone up.” And they’re like, “Okay, let us help you keep people trapped inside by creating a military barricade on this bridge to prevent innocent civilians from escaping.” This literally happened in the movie, I shit you not. And it honestly is even dumber than it sounds.
Which begs the question, what are Bane’s henchmen getting out of this? Why are they working for this clown? He makes it no secret that he’s more than willing to kill his own men for no reason at all and it’s not like he’d be paying them. How would currency work in an anarchist society where everyone kills and steals? And how does he have so many guys? Enough to police an entire city the size of New York? The beginning of the movie establishes that Dent and Gordon won. There’s no crime, it’s a clean city and no need for Batman. So where did all these criminals come from? Is Blackgate prison really that big? Besides the prisoners, Bane recruited boy’s home rejects. So how many boy orphans that turn to crime are actually in Gotham? How is it that Bane is everywhere and able to stop every plan to rescue the police from the sewers (they’ve been trapped there for 5 months and they were never able to dig or find a way out yet somehow food and water rations were getting in to them)? The city is as big as New York. How can he be everywhere? What is Bane’s plan? It shows at the end of the movie that he always had every intention of letting the bomb explode and killing himself along with everyone in the city. But why? For what? He just says to make Batman suffer. But why? Seriously, there is no motivation for anything anyone does in this movie.
Batman finally escapes the prison after an hour of pointlessly getting tortured, healing, working out and failed attempts at trying to escape. Then he makes it back to Gotham and finds Catwoman on the street randomly. Again, her motivating factor is to erase her identity from police databases so he offers her the technology in exchange for help. But, why the hell would that matter now? The city is in utter chaos and the police have been trapped underground for 5 months. There have been zero cops in the city for 5 whole months. Why does this even matter now?
They fight to find the bomb. Batman gets in his Transformer/Battleship-like CGI airplane. And they fight. Twist ending surprise, clean energy CEO chick is Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter Talia from the comics and she’s the mastermind behind the whole operation. If you didn’t figure that out from the earlier scene where they literally say that Bane grew up in the prison and that he also escaped as a child. You would think in the 5 months that Bruce was in that prison listening to stories about Bane, someone might have mentioned that the escaped child really wasn’t Bane. Or he would have asked, “Wait, how can Bane have grown up in the prison if he escaped as a child?” But maybe their accents were so indecipherable that he just couldn’t figure out what they were saying at all. Anyway, Talia’s plan was just to blow up the city and apparently herself while Batman watches to make him pay for killing her father in the first movie. That’s it. And then they stop her. The end.
This begs the question, is the League of Shadows somehow involved in this? And why didn’t they take advantage of that idea? I mean, the League of Shadows are the world’s top assassins. There could have been some sick fight scenes if Batman were facing off against a bunch of ninja-like warriors that were trained the same as him. But no, they didn’t really go in that direction. In fact the film lacked fight choreography to the point where it was boring. Anne Hathaway clearly had no martial arts training. Her fight scenes involve her spinning around with kick noises to try and play off her lack of fighting and Bane and Batman just punch each other endlessly like they don’t have legs or the ability to move in more than one direction at a time. It was pretty anti-climactic.
This movie was boring and drawn out. Every character is pointless, one-dimensional and uninteresting. I also find it ironic that the only reason the city is in peril is due to Bruce Wayne’s own technology being hi-jacked. So Batman saved the city from terrorists who stole the bomb and tanks that Bruce Wayne himself made? So he saved the city from his own technology? Yeah, that’s stupid and doesn’t really make him a hero in my eyes. He doesn’t have a fail-safe for his nuclear bomb that he himself made?
They were clearly trying to go for another Joker-like villain but it doesn’t work. The Joker was crazy and worshipped chaos. Everything he did was for his own sick sense of pleasure based on what he thought he understood of human nature. In the end the prisoners on the ship chose not to blow up innocent people or be responsible for that much death and destruction. This turned his world upside down because he was proven wrong about his theories on how people are mindless self-centered sheep only concerned with their own well-being. Batman rubs it in his face that he was wrong and people have goodness in them and are worth saving. The ending to the original Dark Knight showed that even amongst terror and fear there was still some good in all people to do the right thing. So in this movie all the prisoner’s decide to join Bane in his martial law of the city and kill and pillage everything. Did they suddenly have a change of heart for this movie? It makes everything pointless because there’s no redemption or meaning behind anything that happens. It’s just chaos for the sake of chaos. I was never invested in this story or any of the characters because they were flat and had no emotion or depth. Or even any morals. There’s nothing relatable to anything that happens in this movie.
You could literally remove all of Catwoman’s scenes from the movie and it would have played out exactly the same. You could have also removed all of Talia’s scenes and got the same result. You could have cut out Gordan’s scenes and even Joseph Gordon Levitt (even though I like his character) and the movie would have played out exactly the same. None of these characters contributed anything to the story. They were just there. Nothing was affected because of their actions or inactions. They should have just literally cut out the middle of the movie. They should have just went from Batman being defeated, to working out and healing so he could come back. And then he showed up and saved the day. We did not need any of this Batman helpless and tortured in prison while the city’s in chaos, pointless explosions, criminals taking over, police trapped underground, martial law by Bane with military/government inaction for 5 months. It’s totally implausible and pointless filler. Were they honestly trying to make Arkham City the movie? If so, it failed in every way possible. That game was awesome. This movie is shit. Even the game knew how completely stupid and implausible it would be to make the entire city a chaotic criminal zone. It’s only a section of the city that’s barricaded off in the game. Instead of going so implausibly ridiculous why didn’t they just do that, if that’s even what they were going for?
Why am I still talking about this movie? It’s bad. Don’t see it. It doesn’t live up to the Batman hype. Anyone who actually likes this movie only likes it because it’s Nolan’s Batman, and yes I am going to use the term fanboys. This movie is illogical and stupid in every way. But besides the ending, Batman himself is only in the movie for 3 scenes in the beginning. It’s like they didn’t want to bother with the suit or something. It’s like Nolan had all these ideas for scenes he wanted in the movie and then asked the writers to write around the scenes and try to make it into a story. It didn’t make sense at all. And did I mention that it was BORING?
I’m just going to say that honestly no matter how much I love Batman and Nolan this movie was BORING. It was the most drawn out and boring Batman movie I have ever seen. It definitely holds up the Hollywood curse that the third movie in any series is always the worst. There was actually a point in the theater where I thought watching Batman and Robin would have been more entertaining.
The movie opens with potential as you see things happening. But then nothing happens and it tries to set up some kind of huge climactic ending that just doesn’t ever seem to come. The build up and expository dialogue just drag on and on forever. The middle of the film seems to drag on for over and hour and Batman is nowhere in sight.
All the villains seem to have no motivation or reason at all for anything they are doing. We are given countless explain the plot speeches, not that we can understand anything they are saying anyway, that adds absolutely nothing to the story, plot or build up. It’s just like Nolan decided to go all Michael Bay and throw in explosions because they look cool and a transformer-like jet but then put in all these emotional drawn out scenes where characters are talking endlessly about nothing.
Let’s break down everything wrong with this movie. Spoilers start here.
So the movie opens 8 years after the last film. Why 8 years? That’s a long time. The movie is already telling you that nothing is happening in Gotham City and nothing has been for years? If they wanted Batman to take a hiatus, why not just make it 3 or 4 years (you know that actual length in between movies)? Gordan has cleaned up Gotham with the legacy of Harvey Dent, Batman still taking the blame for his murder. This is so pointless and goes nowhere. They just had to include it because of how the last film ended but it’s completely inconsequential.
Actually I’m getting ahead of myself. The movie opens with Bane doing an airplane heist to kidnap someone. The person who is kidnapped is inconsequential (you will see this word a LOT in my review). He’s a Russian nuclear physicist or something. I think Nolan just wanted to introduce the main villain in a “cool” way so he had an airplane heist even though he could have just kidnapped him anywhere. Then Bane says his first line of dialogue and we know it’s downhill from here. He’s wearing a stupid looking mask, he sounds like a crazy mad-scientist (think Batman and Robin, seriously) and there’s some kind of distortion on it. I honestly could not understand anything this character was saying the ENTIRE movie. Who thought this was a good idea? Did they test screen this shitty movie? I seriously needed subtitles for Bane. And this guy talks a LOT. He probably has the most expository dialogue of anyone in the movie. He just goes on and on with speech after speech about how he’s an evil badass who wants to destroy the city for NO REASON. It’s the worst voice I have ever heard in a movie, period! It’s like they were trying to go Darth Vader but it ended up sounding more like a really bad PA system where you can’t hear anything that’s being said. Imagine if you were at Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion but the announcer over the loud speaker was inaudible. Yeah, it sounds like that.
Batman for some reason has a bum leg (I don’t remember him getting injured in the last movie) and has to use a cane, also Bruce Wayne has been out of the public eye for the last 8 years. Both of these things are also inconsequential because he immediately decides to go to a party and as soon as he decides to be Batman he puts on a leg brace and it’s completely fine. So why even bother to write those two things in at all?
So we learn that his company is going broke. “Catwoman” steals his fingerprints to sell to a rival company executive (or maybe he was a Wayne board member, I don’t really know because it was boring and hard for me to pay attention, somehow they’re all related). Catwoman’s motivation and plan is stupid. She wants to erase her identity from all police databases. This is her entire motivating factor for anything she does in the movie. She goes to a shady bar to exchange the fingerprints for said magical technology and gets double-crossed. To show off that she is tough and smart she kidnaps a Congressman (drugs him or gets him really drunk) and then alerts the police that he’s there (the police have been searching for him since he was kidnapped). So the cops show up to save her from being shot. This convoluted plan is dumb for many reasons, the main reason being that the Congressman could identity her and press charges, which he does later in the movie so they can have a scene where she goes to prison.
Bane breaks into the New York (Gotham?) Stock Exchange (this is as boring as it sounds) to use the fingerprints to sell off Wayne’s stocks and make him broke (even though he was already broke at the beginning of the movie). I don’t know if Nolan wanted to make a political statement about the New York Stock Exchange being crooks but it didn’t really work. So Batman makes his first appearance, driving his motorcycle around. Which seems cool and you’re thinking that the movie will be good and reminiscent from the last one. It doesn’t last. The police decide for no reason that they should all chase and try to capture Batman, completely forgetting about Bane’s men who held up the Stock Exchange and are riding around with HOSTAGES on the backs of their motorcycles. They literally decided that the criminals they were called in to stop in the first place weren’t worth chasing since Batman showed up.
Alfred pulls a X3 and after too many pointless expository (you will also see the word expository in my review a LOT) speeches about how he doesn’t want Bruce to be Batman because he doesn’t want to see him die (only one of these dialogue scenes would have done it, we don’t need more than that), he leaves. And doesn’t show up again for the rest of the movie until the end.
Joseph Gordon Levitt is a cop who goes around doing noble cop things. His character doesn’t really do that much for the story but he was the most enjoyable thing about this movie. His performance really steals the show and upstages all the other actors. Honestly, the movie should have just been called “Cops of Gotham” and been solely about him. It would have been more enjoyable and interesting. Also he, along with everyone else in the movie, knows Bruce Wayne is Batman.
So there’s more expository dialogue and scenes about Bane being in the sewer. Gordon goes in and gets shot which puts him out of commission for a good chunk of screen time, again reminding me of X3 where the actor seems to not have time to be in this movie. Catwoman has a bunch of random scenes here and there to show that she is “tough” and still in the movie. She tries to steal from the guy who double-crossed her in the beginning who is somehow connected to Bane and gets caught and meets Batman in his second appearance. Batman asks her to take him to Bane because the two need to be somehow connected together. Honestly how does he know that she knows where he is? And I mean physically where he is? His underground hideout in the sewers that is probably very easy to find seeing as how Gordon was literally there in a previous scene in the movie.
So in between all that or sometime before I honestly don’t remember the order of shit happening in this movie, Bruce Wayne has a nuclear reactor that’s supposed to be for energy efficiency or something but he’s afraid it’ll be used as a nuclear bomb so he tells one person about it. Some corporate chick who’s dedicated to clean sustainable energy. I’m actually not sure how a nuclear device is sustainable energy, but okay.
Then Catwoman leads Batman into the sewers to find Bane. And they find him, but she double-crosses him by not walking onto the catwalk from Street Fighter the Movie (yes, that horrible movie, there’s even a bell noise when they fall off) where they face off. I don’t understand how it’s a double-cross honestly. Because Bane knew he was coming? Bane is so inexplicably tough that he kicks Batman’s ass. I’m convinced the exact same outcome would have happened whether she double-crossed him or not. It honestly didn’t seem like Batman had a plan to stop him. He was just charging in anyway. So what’s the difference whether she double-crossed him or not? They would have fought regardless and he would have gotten his ass kicked either way. It would have made more sense is she just gave him a blue print of where the hideout was in the sewers and he formulated an attack plan. Instead he was blindly following her in like a calvary charging in without any kind of strategy or plan. He didn’t know how many henchmen were there or the layout of the hideout. They weren’t even subtly sneaking in so he could stake it out. They were literally charging in, beating up every bad guy they came across in the most non-discreet, non-stealthy way possible. So it honestly makes no difference whether she betrays him or not because the outcome would have been exactly the same regardless.
Bane’s base ends up being directly under Bruce Wayne’s military lair. So he blows up the floor and his tanks fall down. This is how Bane takes over the city with military-like force using Wayne’s own tanks, weapons and technology. Though it’s never touched upon how they got the tank out of the sewer after he blew it up and it fell through. Maybe they just didn’t bother to use that one.
Inexplicably Bane is so strong he can punch through concrete. Comic book or even general Batman fans know Bane was experimented on with a super steroid called Venom. The movie does not touch on this at all. We’re just supposed to believe that he’s just strong. The only thing they mention about Bane’s character is that he was born in the worst prison on earth and used to run with Ra’s Al Ghul’s League of Shadows. That’s it for character depth/development. And for a 3 hour long movie that sprouts endless expository dialogue for every scene, that is really weak character development. The whole time I’m wondering what Bane’s actual motivation is for anything he does in the movie. It isn’t money because he basically kills every person who hires him. What’s the point of introducing all these characters if they’re just going to get killed off immediately anyway? To show how tough Bane is that he can’t be bought with money? They already did that with the Joker. I guess that’s what they were going for here but failed in every way. There are too many characters and side storylines to even follow and if everyone just gets killed off, what’s the point? Why invest in their story when it’s inconsequential. It’s possible Bane explained his motivation in one of his scenes but again I can’t understand a single word he says. That character seriously needed subtitles.
So the next hour of the movie should have been cut from the film entirely. If they removed the entire middle section of the movie, it would have been better. This review is long because so much pointless shit is happening I have explain it all.
Batman is out of commission for the next hour of the movie. So we had 3 scenes with Batman and then an hour without, he’ll show up at the end, but is this even a Batman movie? Where is Batman? The next hour of the movie shows a bunch of shit happening all intercut together. The music score at this time is so loud and overbearing it’s far more epic than the film will ever be. The score just hammers away at your patience trying to build up some epic climax for over an hour. It’s like being tortured. It’s the longest segment of epic music where nothing is actually happening that I honestly contemplated leaving the theater.
So what’s happening? We see Bruce Wayne in the prison getting tortured. While he’s in prison all these characters with thick accents are shouting out expository dialogue that we can’t understand about how Bane grew up in the prison because his mom was sentenced there. Also the throat thing happened while he was in there, but somehow he also escaped as a child and the child that escaped was the offspring of Ra’s al Ghul (twist ending not really a surprise). Bane blows up a football stadium for no reason (killing the mayor in a pointless cameo) and tells the city that he is going to blow it up, but in the meantime the citizens are free to cause anarchy and chaos in the longest most boring speech you can’t understand ever (he also kills the scientist from the beginning of the movie, see inconsequential). All the policemen in the city are trapped in the sewers and can’t get out for some reason. A bunch of explosions go off all over the city blowing out all the bridges. Bane let’s all the prisoners out of the prison and gives off another boring pointless speech that goes on for way too long. They set up a court system among the anarchy where the Scarecrow is the judge in a pointless cameo (it kind of reminded me of that Batman the Animated Series episode where the villains capture Batman and put him on trial, only if it were done pointlessly and horribly). He sentences people to walk out on thin ice over the bay (that’s connected to the ocean so it likely would never actually freeze) where they fall through and die. Joseph Gordan Levitt tries to help among the chaos. Rescues Commissioner Gordon, tries to get the police out of the sewers and fails several times. Bane reveals that Gordan covered up Harvey Dent’s true identity as Two-Face and for some reason everyone cares amongst a terrorist attack. This is so stupid. Everything happening is stupid. Why he hell would anyone care about Harvey Dent’s murder being covered up 8 years later amongst a terrorist attack where they city is being blown up and criminals are taking over shooting everyone and chasing them out of their homes (we see abandoned houses throughout)? Who seriously gives a shit? There’s more important things going on. I think everyone would be more concerned with fleeing for their lives than caring that the police Commissioner lied to everyone 8 years ago.
I don’t know. There’s just too much pointless shit going on to explain everything. There’s also some cop side story where this guy whose name I don’t even know is struggling with caring about his job. When he decides to stand up for what he believes in and be a cop, he promptly dies (another inconsequential character). Apparently the city is in chaos like this for 3-5 months. The bomb will go off in exactly 5 months so this whole hour long film fodder fills in that time with Batman being trapped in prison the whole time and all this pointless crap going on. The US government and military does make an appearance as someone would be bound to ask, if this really happened wouldn’t the government intervene? The answer is no, they’d actually join the terrorists. The military literally shows up and one of Bane’s guys says, “If you try to stop us or evacuate the city, we’ll blow everyone up.” And they’re like, “Okay, let us help you keep people trapped inside by creating a military barricade on this bridge to prevent innocent civilians from escaping.” This literally happened in the movie, I shit you not. And it honestly is even dumber than it sounds.
Which begs the question, what are Bane’s henchmen getting out of this? Why are they working for this clown? He makes it no secret that he’s more than willing to kill his own men for no reason at all and it’s not like he’d be paying them. How would currency work in an anarchist society where everyone kills and steals? And how does he have so many guys? Enough to police an entire city the size of New York? The beginning of the movie establishes that Dent and Gordon won. There’s no crime, it’s a clean city and no need for Batman. So where did all these criminals come from? Is Blackgate prison really that big? Besides the prisoners, Bane recruited boy’s home rejects. So how many boy orphans that turn to crime are actually in Gotham? How is it that Bane is everywhere and able to stop every plan to rescue the police from the sewers (they’ve been trapped there for 5 months and they were never able to dig or find a way out yet somehow food and water rations were getting in to them)? The city is as big as New York. How can he be everywhere? What is Bane’s plan? It shows at the end of the movie that he always had every intention of letting the bomb explode and killing himself along with everyone in the city. But why? For what? He just says to make Batman suffer. But why? Seriously, there is no motivation for anything anyone does in this movie.
Batman finally escapes the prison after an hour of pointlessly getting tortured, healing, working out and failed attempts at trying to escape. Then he makes it back to Gotham and finds Catwoman on the street randomly. Again, her motivating factor is to erase her identity from police databases so he offers her the technology in exchange for help. But, why the hell would that matter now? The city is in utter chaos and the police have been trapped underground for 5 months. There have been zero cops in the city for 5 whole months. Why does this even matter now?
They fight to find the bomb. Batman gets in his Transformer/Battleship-like CGI airplane. And they fight. Twist ending surprise, clean energy CEO chick is Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter Talia from the comics and she’s the mastermind behind the whole operation. If you didn’t figure that out from the earlier scene where they literally say that Bane grew up in the prison and that he also escaped as a child. You would think in the 5 months that Bruce was in that prison listening to stories about Bane, someone might have mentioned that the escaped child really wasn’t Bane. Or he would have asked, “Wait, how can Bane have grown up in the prison if he escaped as a child?” But maybe their accents were so indecipherable that he just couldn’t figure out what they were saying at all. Anyway, Talia’s plan was just to blow up the city and apparently herself while Batman watches to make him pay for killing her father in the first movie. That’s it. And then they stop her. The end.
This begs the question, is the League of Shadows somehow involved in this? And why didn’t they take advantage of that idea? I mean, the League of Shadows are the world’s top assassins. There could have been some sick fight scenes if Batman were facing off against a bunch of ninja-like warriors that were trained the same as him. But no, they didn’t really go in that direction. In fact the film lacked fight choreography to the point where it was boring. Anne Hathaway clearly had no martial arts training. Her fight scenes involve her spinning around with kick noises to try and play off her lack of fighting and Bane and Batman just punch each other endlessly like they don’t have legs or the ability to move in more than one direction at a time. It was pretty anti-climactic.
This movie was boring and drawn out. Every character is pointless, one-dimensional and uninteresting. I also find it ironic that the only reason the city is in peril is due to Bruce Wayne’s own technology being hi-jacked. So Batman saved the city from terrorists who stole the bomb and tanks that Bruce Wayne himself made? So he saved the city from his own technology? Yeah, that’s stupid and doesn’t really make him a hero in my eyes. He doesn’t have a fail-safe for his nuclear bomb that he himself made?
They were clearly trying to go for another Joker-like villain but it doesn’t work. The Joker was crazy and worshipped chaos. Everything he did was for his own sick sense of pleasure based on what he thought he understood of human nature. In the end the prisoners on the ship chose not to blow up innocent people or be responsible for that much death and destruction. This turned his world upside down because he was proven wrong about his theories on how people are mindless self-centered sheep only concerned with their own well-being. Batman rubs it in his face that he was wrong and people have goodness in them and are worth saving. The ending to the original Dark Knight showed that even amongst terror and fear there was still some good in all people to do the right thing. So in this movie all the prisoner’s decide to join Bane in his martial law of the city and kill and pillage everything. Did they suddenly have a change of heart for this movie? It makes everything pointless because there’s no redemption or meaning behind anything that happens. It’s just chaos for the sake of chaos. I was never invested in this story or any of the characters because they were flat and had no emotion or depth. Or even any morals. There’s nothing relatable to anything that happens in this movie.
You could literally remove all of Catwoman’s scenes from the movie and it would have played out exactly the same. You could have also removed all of Talia’s scenes and got the same result. You could have cut out Gordan’s scenes and even Joseph Gordon Levitt (even though I like his character) and the movie would have played out exactly the same. None of these characters contributed anything to the story. They were just there. Nothing was affected because of their actions or inactions. They should have just literally cut out the middle of the movie. They should have just went from Batman being defeated, to working out and healing so he could come back. And then he showed up and saved the day. We did not need any of this Batman helpless and tortured in prison while the city’s in chaos, pointless explosions, criminals taking over, police trapped underground, martial law by Bane with military/government inaction for 5 months. It’s totally implausible and pointless filler. Were they honestly trying to make Arkham City the movie? If so, it failed in every way possible. That game was awesome. This movie is shit. Even the game knew how completely stupid and implausible it would be to make the entire city a chaotic criminal zone. It’s only a section of the city that’s barricaded off in the game. Instead of going so implausibly ridiculous why didn’t they just do that, if that’s even what they were going for?
Why am I still talking about this movie? It’s bad. Don’t see it. It doesn’t live up to the Batman hype. Anyone who actually likes this movie only likes it because it’s Nolan’s Batman, and yes I am going to use the term fanboys. This movie is illogical and stupid in every way. But besides the ending, Batman himself is only in the movie for 3 scenes in the beginning. It’s like they didn’t want to bother with the suit or something. It’s like Nolan had all these ideas for scenes he wanted in the movie and then asked the writers to write around the scenes and try to make it into a story. It didn’t make sense at all. And did I mention that it was BORING?