I don’t do a movie entry on everything I see, of course, but
some of them I feel compelled to share my thoughts on, usually if I have strong
feelings one way or another, and I have strong and mixed feelings about this
one.
This was a highly anticipated flick, not just for me but for
everyone. The Nolan Batman trilogy has
been a great take on the Batman character and legacy. In general, I expect the third of a trilogy
to let me down. They can rarely meet the
expectations of the audience or fulfill the promises made by the first two,
especially after a marvelous second movie (the Spider-Man and Matrix movies
come to mind). This actually is a great movie. No matter the criticism I’m about to make, it
was awesome with deep storytelling and was better than I expected... but I was
still disappointed. While this was a
great movie, it really wasn’t much of a Batman
movie. (A sentiment I’m about to repeat
several times...)
It comes full-circle.
One of the great things
storytelling-wise about this movie was that it linked so well not only with the
second movie, but came full-circle back to a lot of the first movie (Batman Begins). The downside of that (at least for my wife,
who was watching with me), is that if you’re not as familiar with the first as
most of us geeks are, you miss a lot of good stuff. (But hey, it’s the third of a series, you
better have seen the other two, right?)
Lots of good
characters; too bad Batman isn’t one of them.
This one draws in a lot of characters from previous movies and gives
us some new ones, including a lot of classic comic book personalities. Catwoman was great, Bane was great—both very
well portrayed with cool looks. New
characters were introduced, well developed, and got lots of screen time. Gotham came
alive with good characters. My main
complaint here is that Batman wasn’t one
of them. Of all the characters in
the movie, Batman probably got the least
amount of screen time. One of the
things I liked about the first movie was that Bruce Wayne was as much a
character as Batman. And while that also
contributes to the coming full-circle idea here, I was gravely disappointed
with the severe lack of Batman. Bruce
Wayne is a troubled character with a lot of stuff going on, and that’s all well
and good, but by the third movie, we want more Batman. There was a lot of Dark Knight Returns to this movie and it starts in a cool place
with Batman retired and he has to find his way back. That’s great story. And the first time we really see him come
back on he’s on the Batpod bike and he materializes out of the darkness and BAM! there he is. I got all excited—everyone did. Alright,
he’s back! But that didn’t last. Most of the time that he was Batman he was in
his new flying car, which was great for flying contraption fans, but not so
great for Batman fans. I came to this
flick to see Batman kick ass.
Unfortunately, most of the time, he was on the receiving end.
This movie is epic,
dark, gritty, realistic... depressing, dismal... and not really a Batman movie. It is
a great movie. It is. Awesome story, but it certainly was darkest
before the dawn and just kept getting darker all the time. This became almost more of a dark utopia type
of movie than a Batman flick. And while
in the second movie we had the comic book flare of the Joker and Two-Face, any
flare was strained out of these characters.
I did like Catwoman’s look, the visors that looked like ears when pushed
up on her head, her attitude and selfish portrayal (Anne Hathaway did a good
job—and looked good doing it too, by the way).
And I loved the dark theme and drive of the League of Shadows stuff and
supposedly turning Gotham over to the under-privileged
and all that. I thought I wanted just
the gritty, realistic Dark Knight kind of movie Nolan’s given us here
but... Somewhere in making it more
realistic, he lost the fantastic.
Somewhere in translating it to match our world, he lost the fun, cool,
super-heroic aspects that made it what we wanted to see: a Batman movie.
Despite all that, I
did like the ending. Dawn does
finally break and the resolution of everything is pretty cool. Lots of strings that get tied off (or left
untied) in ways that contradict the usual Hollywood
norm. Everything in the ending was very
satisfying to me.
All this said, it is an excellent, epic, dark, realistic
movie. Well done in almost every
way. It just doesn’t come off to me as much
of a Batman movie. In fact, this might be the most appropriate poster I could find:
To score it, I’d say 4 of 5 stars. (4.5 as a movie in general, with a penalty of
minus 0.5 points for not being the movie I went to see.)
(this blog entry is being simul-cast, by the way)
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