The Dark Knight Rises Review OR In A Word: EPIC

I just saw The Dark Knight Rises, and WOW it was crazy!!  And I loved it.  I was on the edge of my seat for pretty much the entire movie.  It was a rough go of it for our friend the Batman but he, not surprisingly, rose up and beat the hell out of the bad guys.

But first, the Man of Steel trailer!!  In my theater they showed like 7 other trailers before Man of Steel and I was losing my mind jonesing for some Superman.  And then FINALLY it came up and it turns out that Superman’s a hitchhiking fisherman now.  Then he flew, though, and I was very happy.  Watching Superman fly is like my fourth favourite thing in the entire world.  I sat through the ENTIRE final season of Smallville just to see Clark turn into Superman and that show was pretty damn terrible by the end, so that shows you how much I love seeing Superman being Superman.  Anyway, I learned absolutely nothing about the movie from the trailer, so yeah… Superman likes to fish, I guess.

Now onto The Dark Knight Rises!!  I suppose that before we get to that I should point out…

SPOILERS!!!!

Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na SPOILERS!!

Seriously, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, I’m going to spoil it SO bad.  So go away until you’ve seen it!!

Okay, so The Dark Knight Rises.  It was EPIC.  The sheer scope of this movie was insane.  It was like The Dark Knight Returns, Knightfall, and No Man’s Land all smashed together into one movie.  Which sounds like a lot, and it really was… it was nearly three hours long!!  But surprisingly, it all wove together super well into an absolutely nutso and fantastic movie.

When I first heard that Bane was going to be the villain, I thought Christopher Nolan had totally jumped the shark.  Heath Ledger’s AMAZING Joker had set an unbelievably high bar, and the generally mindless, busting stuff up Bane struck me as the absolute worst way to go next.  But they figured out a way to a) make Bane work in the real world, and b) make Bane AWESOME.  That voice was so creepy and bizarre, he carried himself with such confidence and swagger, and he was SUPER scary.  With the Joker, he was frightening but unpredictable enough that you would probably figure you’d have a 50/50 chance of surviving meeting him.  He was insane, sure, but goofy and not necessarily homicidal ALL of the time.  If you ever meet Bane, chances are he’s going to kill you at some point because that’s just what he does.  However you encounter Bane, ultimately it’s going to end badly for you.  Combining this precise, brutal killing machine with the master plan of the League of Shadows was a fascinating combination.  He’s brute force incarnate, but he’s also extremely strategic and cunning.  It made for such a good villain.  Plus he looked super cool.  They made the mask work, and his wardrobe, especially that jacket, was perfect.

Also, I might have cheered a little when he broke Batman’s back.  I love Batman, but that was SO classic!!

So yeah, Bane was fantastic.  Also fantastic was that I actually dug Batman in this movie.  In both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, I felt like Batman was the least interesting character on the screen.  His voice was ridiculous, he was always so serious but in a dull way, and I’m not big into the costume.   I think the build up to him returning as Batman had me jonesing for some Batman action (however silly the recluse Bruce Wayne thing was), and the lack of a gratingly annoying romantic subplot helped me like him a lot more too.  When the lights went out in the tunnels in that motorcycle chase, I was beside myself with excitement.  When he came back to Gotham City and we heard his voice for the first time, I might have been a smidge emotional.  I still don’t love Nolan’s Batman and how Bale plays him, but this was BY FAR the most I’ve liked him in any of the movies. 

Joseph Gordon Levitt’s John Blake, or Robin John Blake, was great too.  I felt like he was the real heart of the movie.  Gordon was all laid up in the hospital and Batman was off being Howard Hughes for a while and then Bane broke him.  Blake was there for everything, tying it all together and constantly taking on Bane and later his regime however he could.  I LOVED that the movie ended with him about to take up the mantle.  Even though he was a new character with no real comic book basis, he was so well done that I thought the ending was very earned.

The plot of the movie was rather massive in scope, from bringing back Batman to Bane’s gradual growth to breaking Batman to Bane’s takeover to the resistance and Bruce recuperating and then the final battle.  Compared to a normal superhero movie, this was so much bigger.  Even in The Avengers, which had a much meatier plot than its predecessors, it was still a few small skirmishes and then the big final battle.  For The Dark Knight Rises, the big final battle happened in the middle of the movie and the bad guy won, and then the second half of the movie was dealing with the repercussions of that and leading to a bigger, more finale battle at the very end.  Funny they both ended with nukes, though.

While this movie was huge, it worked really well and it flowed along decently, especially when you consider how much was going on.  There were bits when a character would sort of disappear for a while, but they were always back before you missed them too much.  Some of the early sections dragged… there were a lot of lengthy speeches, and I hated the entire Alfred storyline, so there were things they could have trimmed.  But all in all, the plot kept moving and the action kept coming and I was perpetually on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what would happen next.  It felt like there were real stakes, and I got VERY invested in everything VERY fast.

Now, I loved The Dark Knight Rises like crazy but I do have some criticisms.  They really didn’t affect my enjoyment of the movie, so I’m just going to run through them quick.  Bane was so awesome and I was super behind Batman and the plot kept barreling forward, so I was totally sucked in and loving it.  These are more after the fact quibbles:

• I didn’t love Anne Hathaway as Catwoman.  I didn’t hate her, but she just didn’t have that Catwoman vibe to me.  Both in look and attitude, it wasn’t Catwoman.  Also, whenever I see Anne Hathaway I feel like she’s about to break into song, which is really not what you’re looking for in Selina Kyle.   
• In all three movies Gotham was totally generic and had no character.  Gotham City is not New York City.  It’s dark and weird and gothic and even the new bits feel old.  This was just a run of the mill city.
• I can’t even handle Michael Caine’s Alfred.  The accent is wrong and he’s so overwrought all the time.  I wanted Bruce to punch him in the face after the eighth time he was harping on about him settling down.
• Also, I don’t give a hoot about Rachel at all.
• Batman’s armour and his vehicles still look silly.  I know the bike can do cool things, but it also looks ridiculous.  Ditto the helicopter.
• Batman kept getting the rug pulled out from under him when Batman is the one who should be pulling out the rug.  The bad guys were a few steps ahead of him instead of the other way around.  You shouldn’t be able to outsmart Batman, much less continually outsmart Batman.
• Along the same lines, there were a lot of twists and turns, especially near the end, and it was maybe a bit much.  It got a little bonkers there with everything going awry and/or flipping around on you.

There were also a ton of other little things I loved.  Gary Oldman and Marion Cotillard were fantastic, and I especially liked the Talia al-Ghul reveal.  That totally caught me by surprise.  The special effects were great and integrated beautifully into the movie.  Cillian Murphy coming back for a cameo was a good time, and the court in general was nicely done and frightening.  Also, I loved Bruce throwing the rope down into the prison after he escaped.  That was such a Batman move.

I could say more, but I’ve blathered on enough.  Suffice it to say, I loved it.  It’s a totally absorbing movie… it’s got an epic, kind of insane plot, and it sucks you right into it and gets you super invested in what’s going on and never lets you go.  I think I liked The Dark Knight a little bit better, but that’s mostly because Heath Ledger is so very brilliant in it and that performance just can’t be topped.

However, it’s impressive what a completely different sort of movie The Dark Knight Rises is.  Comparing the two is almost like apples and oranges.  The Dark Knight was sort of insular, focused on the inner workings of Gotham City and one anarchist making trouble.  The Dark Knight Rises was just EPIC, with an entire revolution and HUGE action set pieces and the complete upheaval of everything.  The Dark Knight was about a tour de force performance while The Dark Knight Rises was about spectacle in scope, visuals, and plot.  And both are great, of course (I didn’t much care for Batman Begins).

So the Nolan Batman trilogy is over now.  Another one will start soon enough, I’m sure, but Nolan’s set a high bar.  Luckily, it’s a very specific bar, with the dedication to realism and the world around Batman that’s as much Nolan as it is source material.  The well is in no way dry, and there are so many different ways other filmmakers can approach Batman in the future.  I’m not particularly sad that this take on Batman is over, now that I think about it.  Nolan’s done some amazing stuff, but it feels like everything we need to know about Batman in this world has now been told.  Nolan condensed everything important into these three movies, and now the story’s been told.  I’m curious to see what comes next, and I really hope that Warner Bros. has the sense to do what they did with Nolan in the first place and hand the franchise over to a smart, creative director and let them build their own world.

Justice League: Doom Review OR It Was Okay, But Wonder Woman Was Pretty Fantastic

I don’t usually review DC’s animated movies, but this one had Wonder Woman in it and it’s not like my blog has rules or anything, so let’s give it a go.  Also, I’m a bit late since it came out about three weeks ago now, but still… I have things to say!!

Justice League: Doom was written by the late Dwayne McDuffie and directed by Lauren Montgomery, and is a loose adaptation of Mark Waid and Howard Porter’s JLA: Tower of Babel.  The basic story is that Batman’s developed contingency plans to take down the Justice League should they ever go rogue or get mind-controlled.  The Legion of Doom, led by Vandal Savage, steals these plans and uses them against the League.  Ultimately (and this is a huge spoiler but if you’re at all familiar with how superhero stories tend to go then you know how it’s going to end anyway) the League is momentarily incapacitated but gets it together in the end to defeat all the bad guys and save the world.

It’s a decent movie, and generally enjoyable.  The DC animated line has been hit and miss for me, but I’d say that Justice League: Doom was one of the better ones.  This was quite a pleasant surprise actually… I just watched it on a lark.  It’s always fun to have the Justice League TV show voice team back together, and I just can’t say no to some Kevin Conroy Batman.  Plus villain team-ups are always fun.  It was a good, standard superhero movie that could have easily been a solid Justice League TV show two or three-parter if that show still existed.  Man, I wish that show still existed.

There were some weird bits, though.  First off, it was the Justice League TV show voice team, but Michael Rosenbaum’s Flash was Barry Allen instead of Wally West.  I mean, a) it was Wally in the comic, b) they don’t even change the characterization at all so it still feels like Wally, and c) if you’re going to make it a different guy, get a different voice.

Similarly, Phil Lamarr’s John Stewart Green Lantern was swapped out for Nathan Fillion’s Hal Jordan.  It was actually Kyle Rayner in the comic, so I don’t see why it had to be Hal.  Other then everyone loves Nathan Fillion, of course.  And yes, I know he played Hal in the Green Lantern animated movie, but Keri Russell was Diana in Wonder Woman and she’s not here.  So that was weird.

Also, the animation was bizarre.  It was sort of anime but sort of not, and seemed to flip back and forth between an anime style and something resembling Young Justice.  The inconsistency was odd, and the anime influence made everything disproportionate.  Faces were out of whack (eyes go in the middle of the head, dammit!!) and people tended to look vaguely Asian sporadically.  It was a weird stylistic choice, especially when the voice actors are so associated with a certain art style for the characters.

So all of that was distracting and a little weird, but on to the main point: Wonder Woman was pretty awesome!!  She was played by Susan Eisenberg, who did a great Wonder Woman for years on the Justice League TV show, and throughout the entire movie Wonder Woman always looked strong and capable while all of the other heroes floundered.  With the anime influence, she looked like this sometimes:

But still, she was pretty kick ass.

When the Legion of Doom took down the Justice League, almost everyone was rendered powerless or entirely ineffective.  Let’s go through them:

• Bane beat up Bruce Wayne and buried him alive in his parents’ grave, trapping him.
• Metallo shot Superman through the heart with a kryptonite bullet, and he fell to the ground unconscious.
• Ma’alefa’ak lit the Martian Manhunter on fire and he flailed about wildly for quite some time.
• Star Sapphire (with a little Scarecrow gas) made Green Lantern feel bad, take off his ring, and basically lay down in a cave to die.
• Mirror Master attached a bomb to the Flash and he had to keep running and not slow down or else he’d blow up.

Everybody was trapped.  They were useless and ineffective, and couldn’t fight back.  Wonder Woman, however, had a different sort of problem.  The Cheetah injected Wonder Woman with nanites so she thought that EVERYONE was the Cheetah.  She set about beating up everyone she saw, and ended up mowing through a SWAT team.  The plan was to make Wonder Woman fight so hard and so long that she exhausted herself beyond recovery.  Literally, it made her TOO kick ass.  Now, she was as ineffective as everyone else, but she was active and fighting at least.  It’s a slight difference, but an interesting one when you look at the end of the movie too.

In the big climactic battle, all of the heroes faced their villains again.  Because it’s a superhero movie, they all had an “Oh no, the villain is going to win!!” moment during their fights:

• Bane flung Batman around by his cape, and then started to choke the life out of him.
• Metallo blasted Superman with kryptonite and beat the hell out of the weakened Man of Steel.
• Ma’alefa’ak and the Martian Manhunter had a shapeshifting battle and Martian Manhunter was choked and losing as well.
• Star Sapphire had Green Lantern wrapped up tight in some sort of binding ring construct.
• The Flash was surrounded by hundreds of armed Mirror Masters.
• Cyborg had tagged along, and he got stabbed in the back by Vandal Savage.

Of course, everyone got their acts together and beat the bad guys in the end, but it was looking pretty bad for a while.  All of these moments ran back to back, painting a pretty dire picture.

And what was Wonder Woman’s “Oh no!!” cliffhanger?  The Cheetah, running away into another room.  Wonder Woman had the drop on her the ENTIRE time.  There was no dramatic scene where the Cheetah had the upper hand.  The worst was when Wonder Woman threw the Cheetah across a room into a gun cabinet and Cheetah blasted a laser at her, but Wonder Woman just blocked it with her bracelet with one arm and then lassoed Cheetah with the other arm.  Easy peasy.  At most, the Cheetah landed three or four punches.  Wonder Woman OWNED her, while everyone else was very nearly defeated.

So yeah, Wonder Woman was kind of great in Justice League: Doom.  She almost died kicking too much ass, and then she easily kicked ass when the world was on the line.  Everyone else was all flailing or trapped, and then almost lost again later, but not Wonder Woman.  She was the only lady superhero in the movie and obviously was the best one!! 

Too bad they didn’t work in Hawkgirl (which they should have!!).  That whole Legion of Doom crisis would have been handled in half the time.