Notes and Bolts Blog

This will be appearing in the upcoming issue (#7) of Paper Houses in mid-August. For now, take heed if you have not seen this film yet and do not wish to be spoiled.

I was excited. Arriving at the AMC downtown on Michigan Avenue, I quickly made my way up the elongated escalators towards the second floor where I found a line of several dozen people forming. Figuring that it would be awhile before we were let into the theater, I found a place on the ground and began flipping through a Joe Meno book that I had just gotten at Quimby’s earlier two hours earlier. Within minutes, we were all standing to our feet and moving into the foyer, past the ticket takers who gave us lanyards to commemorate the event and into theater 2 where the entire trilogy would be screening in succession within the hour. Mellie wasn’t going to be joining me until the last half an hour of Batman Begins since she wouldn’t be getting off of work at Wicker Pet until 7:00, but neither of us minded. In the years that we’ve been together, Mellie has come to accept that my Batman obsession borders on the obsessive while her interest is more out of support that anything else. Her missing the bulk of the first of the three films didn’t bother her, she was just happy that I would be having a good time.

Passing the hour reading Office Girl, I tried to a tune out the loud voices of the fanboys surrounding me, talking as if they knew every production detail, as if they had personally rubbed shoulders with Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale and the rest of the Bat team. After awhile, I put my headphones on and listened to an Italo disco compilation as I read. When the time hit 5:52, I asked a patron sitting beside me if they could watch my bag so that I could go to the restroom one last time before settling in for the first film. Getting back several minutes later, I texted my friend Jared and gushed my excitement.

“Lucky!” he replied over the text, “I think I’ll do my own little viewing party tonight! Or tomorrow, hahah…”

“When are you seeing it?”

“On Sunday…”

I couldn’t imagine waiting that long. The final installment in the trilogy wouldn’t be airing for another six hours and already I was feeling like I was going to combust from the excitement. As the house lights dimmed and the opening company logo began following one after the other on the screen before me, I reminded myself that I’d waited four years, so what were a few more hours? By the time Mellie arrived, Bruce had picked himself back up from seeing his mansion burned to the ground so that he could take on Ra’s Al Ghul and close the film out with a series of loud crashes and bangs amidst a fight on a subway car and a hydrogen bomb meant to activate fear gas to make the city tear itself apart.

During the intermission, Mellie handed me a wrap that she had picked up at Whole Foods. As I ate it and tried to tune out the clambering of those same obnoxious fanboys, I noted to myself that I needed to start eating better and stop eating so many pre-packaged foods. I tell myself this almost every day. When the lights lowered a second time and The Dark Knight began rolling, Mellie and I tightened the grip we had on one another’s hands as we marveled at the exploits of Heath Ledger’s bank heist on the big screen for the first time since we’d seen it four years previous when the film had been making the rounds upon its release. As the film drove on, Mellie and I giggled endlessly at the various in jokes that we had made over the years about certain lines of dialogue and the intonation used for many of them, all the while trying to avoid being too obnoxious to avoid earning the ire of the attendees peppers all around us. When the credits rolled, I took a second trip to the restroom, collecting a ‘commemorative trilogy’ poster as I exited the theater. Texting Jared when I settled back into my seat once more, “Two down. Now to wait…”

“Ah! I’m contemplating going in the morning, but I want to wait for Saturday or Sunday.”

“The anticipation is killing me. Only 16 minutes…”

“Have there been any reviews of it yet?”

“Totally. Spoilers are out as well and I caught a couple on accident. Don’t go to Wikipedia, the entire plot is on there…”

As Mellie and I waited, we watched more attendees flood into the theater, folks who hadn’t been around to see the first two who had arrived only for the midnight screening of the final installment. A large group of high schoolers strolled down the right hand side of the aisles and settled into the front rows. Two of them, making their best attempts to cosplay Catwoman, despite the clear thriftiness of their outfits, were the most excited and squealed loudly as they watched the black screen only feet away from them.

Opening the text conversation on my phone, I typed to Jared, “One minuteeeeeeeeee…”

A minute later, “Yeah, I’m going tomorrow! Hahah! It should be starting by now, right?”

“It is! And I’m out!”

Powering down the phone, I turned my attention to the screen as the house lights dimmed once more. After sitting through fifteen minutes of previews for movies catered to the bro’s and the brainless, the familiar company logos began to fill the screen as the opening scene came down upon our heads – all flash and explosions and stunts 40,000 feet in the air as the film’s antagonist, Bane, kidnaps Doctor Pavlov, a physicist and sends the aircraft crashing to the ground below.

From there, I spent the next two and a half hours feeling completely confused. Tom Hardy’s voice, all filters and amplification, was clearly the product of an overdub since the crew probably weren’t able to capture the actor’s voice live on the set as they were filming the scenes – it shows too, because every time Bane speaks, his voice thunders over all the rest of the background sounds and voices, sounding like a loud sound drowning everything else out on a bad computer torrent. As the plot thickened, I found myself amazed that this character was working on such a low-key level in Gotham City and yet everyone seemed to know everything about him, everyone but Bruce Wayne, that is. Several times throughout the film, Bruce depends on supporting characters like Alfred, Lucius Fox and James Gordon to fill in the blanks on who this threat is – it’s as if Bane has an online profile somewhere that the cast all have access to, but Bruce has somehow missed it since he sits around all day pining and wallowing over mistakes made a decade before.

As I left the theater when the lights came up, I found myself angry. Why had I invested the past four years of my time making a hobby out of keeping track of this film that was meant to be the feather in the cap of an amazing franchise, only to turn out being a disjointed turkey? I felt angry at myself for not feeling like I was getting it while feeling angry at all of the Christopher Nolan apologists who would no doubt be treating the film like it was Citizen Kane while deliberately choosing to overlook the glaring flaws since their director of choice could seemingly do no wrong.

What’s wrong with this film? There’s more bad than good to be sure. The writing is fast and loose and lacks cohesiveness. Scenes cut from one to the next without giving the viewer the time to process what it is they’re seeing before them and the dialogue at times is so ham fisted and irreverent that one wonders if the screen writers had worked through the final draft in a fit of sleep deprived excitement as the set pieces were being built in the background. I’ll go into some of the greater workings – this will be the closest thing one will ever see to a review in the pages of Paper Houses:

In the previous films, the core of the cast – Lucius Fox, Alfred Pennyworth and Jim Gordon – were Bruce’s triumvirate. They were the ones who kept him grounded in their own various ways. In TDKR, all three of them are cast aside to the back burner. Gordon is dispensed with early on and relegated to the hospital bed for the larger middle portion of the film, his demotion meant to shoehorn Nolan’s version of Robin, John Blake, into the fray. This film is almost more about Gordon Joseph Levitt’s character than it is about Bale. Fitting, considering the ending, where we not only find out that his real first name is Robin – how surprising – but that he’s also been directly cast as Bruce’s replacement when he not only mimics the moves of Bruce in Batman Begins upon finding the cave, but is also admonished by The Batman earlier on to begin wearing a mask when fighting.

Lucius – the genius inventor and CEO of Wayne Enterprises, is barely even a foil in this final go around, instead sitting in the background as Miranda Tate does the lion’s share of the talking. Alfred, once the catalyst and weight that kept Bruce’s lofty goals as Batman from floating him into the atmosphere, can barely do anything more than cry when he appears onscreen. By the time Bruce is ‘buried’ by film’s end, Sir Caine is a weeping mess, all guilt and anguish – but because that’s all he’s been for the last two and a half hours, we can’t help but to snicker.

The villains: There are a great many of them – a pitfall that I’d erroneously assumed Nolan could avoid. Like toppings atop a submarine sandwich, the rogues gallery are stacked to the sky. Bane is the main villain, yet lacks the multi-dimensional facets that made Heath Ledger and Liam Neeson stand out during their turns. His acting is tactile and sparse, his words trapped behind his muzzle and his eyes, the only conduits for us to see what’s going on in his head – indeed, we see him sobbing at one point when Miranda Tate, after having revealed herself as Talia Al Ghul, the cast off daughter of Ra’s, fills Bruce in on the backstory of the two villains, that Bane’s disfigurement came at the cost of helping the woman escape when she was still a small child. Talia is her own bag of conundrums and irritations - the audience is led to believe that this woman is a genuine do gooder for the lion’s share of the film, a red herring that Nolan plays well until the big reveal when Talia literally sticks the revelation to Bruce as she’s physically plunging a knife into his stomach. The entire scene feels like a watered down plot one would find while watching a soap opera on Telemundo. Bruce’s quick dispensation of her as well as his willingness to kill both her and Bane could be arguably seen as character development on the hero’s part, if only it weren’t such a sudden sea change. Seeing Selina Kyle rove in and blast Bane to bits while making an offhanded quip gave the film the feel of Batman and Robin momentarily.

And speaking of Selina, her’s was one of the most skewed performances of the entire cast. Not sure whether to retain the tried and true wise cracking character of her comics or the Judas Iscariot that she takes the role of when handing Bruce over to Bane, Anne Hathaway’s turn in the Catwoman seat is tepid at best. At one point, we see her apologize to Bruce for her fickle nature and all the while, we find ourselves wondering just what it is about her that attracts the man and compels him to give her chance after chance. Surely in the eight years since the death of Rachel Dawes, one would think that a man – even one so deeply fractured mentally and emotionally as Bruce Wayne – would find someone to latch onto. Talia in her Miranda guise? That was briefly explored, but on the night that her and Bruce stay in and make love, the entire interaction feels shoehorned in. At the film’s end, before Bruce seemingly martyrs himself by plunging the bomb into the middle of the lake, he and Selina share an overwrought kiss in full costume, a tired and cliché superhero trope – one of several that I’d assumed Nolan was smart enough to side step, and yet here it was, right there on the screen for all us to groan at.

And that kiss wasn’t the only part of the scene meant to induce an ‘oof!’. No, when Gordon implores upon the Batman to reveal his identity before heading off to his death, Bruce gives a very over the top hint that Gordon’s actions have been a catalyst upon the lives of many, even small boys who Gordon has wrapped coats around. That should have been enough – because really, even in Gotham City, how many adolescent boys has Gordon had to comfort in the face of them seeing their parents shot down? – but no, Nolan wants to believe that we, the audience, are complete nimrods, so he has Gordon go, “Bruce Wayne?” as Batman races off. This happened in Batman Begins as well when Rachel asks who the Batman is, so maybe Nolan just has a fetish for this kind of on the nose hinting game.

Team Nolan’s complete lack of trust in our ability as an audience to recall past events is in play here as there are no less than half a dozen flashbacks to previous films, including a cameo by Liam Neeson where he reprises his Ra’s Al Ghul role to taunt Bruce in a dream sequence. Only at the end, when we’re given the convenient round of fan service-y resolutions – Bruce survives! And he ends up with Selina! Batman gets a statue erected and Gotham sees him for the hero he truly is! Gordon doesn’t go into cardiac arrest like we all figured he would! Everyone’s happy! – does this movie threaten to make its audience cry. Unfortunately, ten minutes of good don’t undo 155 minutes of a muddled plate of spaghetti.

In summation, The Dark Knight Rises is a hot mess. The two previous films held running times that exceeded the two hour mark, and yet most viewers felt like the films zipped by. With TDKR, one finds themselves looking down at their clock numerous times, wondering when the agony is going to end. Somewhere within the 165 minute albatross of this film, there’s a great film and an appropriate closing salvo to the trilogy, but as it stands in its current iteration, it would appear that Nolan and Co. have succumbed to the dreaded third movie curse that they’ve long maintained they were attempting to avoid like the black plague.

As of this writing, the film itself is shrouded in a cloud that goes beyond the failed mechanics of its writing, bloated plot and final execution – somewhere in Colorado, another bag of wasted flesh unfit to operate in our society took it upon himself to open fire within a crowded movie house, killing 12 and injuring nearly 60. Does Batman have anything to do with the shooter’s machinations? Most likely not. The person was simply aware of the hot anticipation for the film and knew that he could secure a high body count on opening night when the theater was packed so full of people that no one would be able to move as he picked them off. Will what has now become the worst shooting massacre in American history become indelibly tied with this film? Absolutely.

With such an extreme loss of life, lamenting over the failed inner workings of a film seems so very first-worldish. In light of the mourning of dozens of families at this very moment, my personal frustration over having built expectations for a bad product over a four year period is simply frivolous. At this point, any complaint lodged at anything but the loss of human life feels over indulgent. Much like the film itself, my thoughts are simply scattered.

Next text from Jared, July 20th, 2012 9:01 P.M.: “Haha, I saw your somewhat capsule review of the movie (on Facebook) and decided to wait until tomorrow. I probably shouldn’t have read it…”