so that's what that feels like
i very randomly ended up seeing the dark knight rises today - i walked into davis square intending to go to the comic store to pick up my comics, and i got to the movie theater (which is right next to the t station) at five, and coincidentally there was a showing at five on the big screen [1], so i bought a ticket and went in. (i caught one preview, for the new superman movie, which is coming out in... summer 2013. oooookay.)
i liked it. i think i liked the second one better, but i think i liked heath ledger's joker as a villain slightly more than tom hardy's bane. (and i would not have recognized him as tom hardy if i didn't know it was him.) i'd read some about the overall plot(ish), and i had a fairly good hunch how it was going to end, but there were definitely things i was not expecting:
alfred leaving!
josh stewart! ie, will from criminal minds. every time he was on screen i went "OH MY GOD IT'S WILL WHAT THE HELL".
burn gorman!
matthew modine! who i didn't recognize right away. >.<
cillian murphy! and judging from the surprised - and generally pleased - noises in the audience, no one else was expecting him either. i may or may not have done a little chair wiggle with glee.
miranda turning out to be a. ra's al ghul's daughter, and b. the kid who escaped from the pit. altho in retrospect, bane says he didn't see sunlight until he was an adult, and the two old prisoners in the pit said "a child" was the only person who'd ever climbed out. not even "a little boy" or "a little girl" - just "a child". so i guess if you were really paying attention, you might've figured out bane wasn't the child escapee (and thus not ra's al ghul's kid) sooner than i did. altho i have no idea if there were enough clues to point the observant viewer to miranda as the villain mastermind.
and, y'know, i wasn't quite expecting bruce wayne to be alive at the very end, but by the time it happened i wasn't surprised. i knew alfred's florentine cafe would come up again.
and i was surprised this movie wasn't shot in chicago like the previous ones, and that gotham city looked more like new york city (which i guess is what it was based on in the comics?) and, er, pittsburgh.
some folks in the audience kind of giggled when we learned that blake's real name is robin. i can't see joseph gordon-levitt in the red and green leotard, but to be fair, my experience of robin kind of starts and ends with the campy 60s tv show. i mean, the only batman i've ever read is grant morrison's arkham asylum, and robin's not in that.
and can i just say, putting a prison full of criminals smack in the middle of the city is stupid. convenient from a story-telling pov, but stupid. is that canon, that blackgate is in the middle of gotham city? what's the justification for that?
there was a lot of speechifying in this movie, by the way. not that i necessarily minded, but there seemed to be a lot of blocks of text, as it were. also? a couple-three plot holes and some handwavium. like, how the hell did bruce get back into gotham after climbing out of the pit? especially since all the bridges but one had been blown, and the tunnels were blocked. and why did it seem to only take him a day or two? (or was it just me who thought it took no time at all?)
but there were lots of things i liked! i thought it was a really good end to nolan's trilogy. i really liked gary oldman (which, well, i always do), i even liked that he was kind of out of commission for half the movie, i loved joseph gordon-levitt, i liked that selina kyle never referred to herself as catwoman and neither did anyone else altho she did kind of have the cat ears (night vision goggles perched on her head! kinda nifty), i did like bane as a villain - he's a very different kind of bad guy than the joker, and i like it when the villains aren't the same(ish) from movie to movie - and i can see how people might think tdkr is a commentary on the occupy movement and current economic climate in the us (altho i think christopher nolan's disclaimer that no, it really isn't about that at all, he wasn't thinking about that when he made the movie, is kind of disingenuous) (not that i don't believe him, because obviously he knows what he was thinking and why he made the movie he did, but even if all the common-man-rising-up-against-the-one-percent stuff was unintentional or unconscious, it's still there), and i love tom hardy but man, i would like to see him in a movie where he doesn't play a thug. (partly because i always remember him in the reckoning, when he was younger and less bulky, so there's always a second of cognitive dissonance while my brain switches over from "young and innocent" to "big and violent".)
i may or may not have teared up a little when alfred apologized to the grave of bruce's dad for failing him. but i don't have such an emotional attachment to bruce/batman, and i still hate christian bale's batman voice. he did an excellent job as the tired, reclusive bruce, and then the fired-up, now-i'm-pissed batman bruce, with a stopover in the middle for oh-wait-i'm-out-of-shape-for-this bruce, but i will not miss the voice.
oh, and i liked the occasional flashbacks from the two previous movies. continuity!
i haven't read anyone's reaction/review posts, so those of you who've seen it, what did you think?
it took me waaaaaaaay too long to type this up and now i really need to go to bed.
[1] the movie theater in davis square started out life as a live theater theater, but now has i think five screens - two in the basement, one or two upstairs, and one in the space that used to be the actual theater, with the banked seats and the stage and the balcony and everything, which is obviously the biggest screen. occasionally they have concerts there.
i liked it. i think i liked the second one better, but i think i liked heath ledger's joker as a villain slightly more than tom hardy's bane. (and i would not have recognized him as tom hardy if i didn't know it was him.) i'd read some about the overall plot(ish), and i had a fairly good hunch how it was going to end, but there were definitely things i was not expecting:
alfred leaving!
josh stewart! ie, will from criminal minds. every time he was on screen i went "OH MY GOD IT'S WILL WHAT THE HELL".
burn gorman!
matthew modine! who i didn't recognize right away. >.<
cillian murphy! and judging from the surprised - and generally pleased - noises in the audience, no one else was expecting him either. i may or may not have done a little chair wiggle with glee.
miranda turning out to be a. ra's al ghul's daughter, and b. the kid who escaped from the pit. altho in retrospect, bane says he didn't see sunlight until he was an adult, and the two old prisoners in the pit said "a child" was the only person who'd ever climbed out. not even "a little boy" or "a little girl" - just "a child". so i guess if you were really paying attention, you might've figured out bane wasn't the child escapee (and thus not ra's al ghul's kid) sooner than i did. altho i have no idea if there were enough clues to point the observant viewer to miranda as the villain mastermind.
and, y'know, i wasn't quite expecting bruce wayne to be alive at the very end, but by the time it happened i wasn't surprised. i knew alfred's florentine cafe would come up again.
and i was surprised this movie wasn't shot in chicago like the previous ones, and that gotham city looked more like new york city (which i guess is what it was based on in the comics?) and, er, pittsburgh.
some folks in the audience kind of giggled when we learned that blake's real name is robin. i can't see joseph gordon-levitt in the red and green leotard, but to be fair, my experience of robin kind of starts and ends with the campy 60s tv show. i mean, the only batman i've ever read is grant morrison's arkham asylum, and robin's not in that.
and can i just say, putting a prison full of criminals smack in the middle of the city is stupid. convenient from a story-telling pov, but stupid. is that canon, that blackgate is in the middle of gotham city? what's the justification for that?
there was a lot of speechifying in this movie, by the way. not that i necessarily minded, but there seemed to be a lot of blocks of text, as it were. also? a couple-three plot holes and some handwavium. like, how the hell did bruce get back into gotham after climbing out of the pit? especially since all the bridges but one had been blown, and the tunnels were blocked. and why did it seem to only take him a day or two? (or was it just me who thought it took no time at all?)
but there were lots of things i liked! i thought it was a really good end to nolan's trilogy. i really liked gary oldman (which, well, i always do), i even liked that he was kind of out of commission for half the movie, i loved joseph gordon-levitt, i liked that selina kyle never referred to herself as catwoman and neither did anyone else altho she did kind of have the cat ears (night vision goggles perched on her head! kinda nifty), i did like bane as a villain - he's a very different kind of bad guy than the joker, and i like it when the villains aren't the same(ish) from movie to movie - and i can see how people might think tdkr is a commentary on the occupy movement and current economic climate in the us (altho i think christopher nolan's disclaimer that no, it really isn't about that at all, he wasn't thinking about that when he made the movie, is kind of disingenuous) (not that i don't believe him, because obviously he knows what he was thinking and why he made the movie he did, but even if all the common-man-rising-up-against-the-one-percent stuff was unintentional or unconscious, it's still there), and i love tom hardy but man, i would like to see him in a movie where he doesn't play a thug. (partly because i always remember him in the reckoning, when he was younger and less bulky, so there's always a second of cognitive dissonance while my brain switches over from "young and innocent" to "big and violent".)
i may or may not have teared up a little when alfred apologized to the grave of bruce's dad for failing him. but i don't have such an emotional attachment to bruce/batman, and i still hate christian bale's batman voice. he did an excellent job as the tired, reclusive bruce, and then the fired-up, now-i'm-pissed batman bruce, with a stopover in the middle for oh-wait-i'm-out-of-shape-for-this bruce, but i will not miss the voice.
oh, and i liked the occasional flashbacks from the two previous movies. continuity!
i haven't read anyone's reaction/review posts, so those of you who've seen it, what did you think?
it took me waaaaaaaay too long to type this up and now i really need to go to bed.
[1] the movie theater in davis square started out life as a live theater theater, but now has i think five screens - two in the basement, one or two upstairs, and one in the space that used to be the actual theater, with the banked seats and the stage and the balcony and everything, which is obviously the biggest screen. occasionally they have concerts there.