Batman and Beyond!

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The problem I think in Nolans film is that he seems to think "realistic" is synonamous with boring...

I get you guys coming down on me like a ton of bricks if I ever hint at the s**t fest which is the Dark Knight.

You know what i find ironic is that you say that but most of the things that make Batman the comic character fantastic and larger than life are excised from Nolan’s movie version most likely because he finds them silly and unrealistic

Well at least in past batman films the batmobile was not boring and the fight scenes were much better. Nolan just does not have a clue how to shoot half decent fight scenes.

I call BS on that. Why? because Batman’s fighting style is brought down to earth so that he’s not doing any high-flying gymnastics or martial arts, just some really boring and dull fight style consisting of extreme, incomprehensible close-ups on repetitive body blows, elbows and arm grabs. And even worse, these fights are all shot in the dark and with lots of quick cuts, which I guess is somehow supposed to increase the realism through incoherency

Can I also just say that really Chris Nolan can not shoot action. He simply sucks at it. His camera work is horrible. You have a general idea what’s going on in the fights, but it’s never really clearly shot. We have a general idea on how he flipped the truck using the batwires but it’s not exactly clear what was happening or how he knew it was going to happen. Outside of things exploding, nothing else in the actions scenes worked, they just came off frenetic, claustrophobic and clumsy. Very, very clumsy. The New Yorker provides a very accurate description of Nolan’s action scenes:

Look just read what they thought of it here:

"Men crash through windows of glass-walled office buildings, and there are many fights that employ the devastating martial-arts system known as the Keysi Fighting Method. Christian Bale, who plays Bruce Wayne (and Batman), spent months training under the masters of the ferocious and delicate K.F.M. Unfortunately, I can?t tell you a thing about it, because the combat is photographed close up, in semidarkness, and cut at the speed of a fifteen-second commercial. Instead of enjoying the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline, we see a lot of flailing movement and bodies hitting the floor like grain sacks. All this ruckus is accompanied by pounding thuds on the soundtrack, with two veteran Hollywood composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) providing additional bass-heavy stomps in every scene, even when nothing is going on. At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber."

The New Yorker gives very honest and accurate opinons.

Look what dailymail says here

“The Dark Knight an unintentionally sick spectacle, pretending to justify law and justice, but in reality celebrating violence and chaos.” A commenter on the website rottentomatoes.com said it way better than I ever could, so I’ll just quote him:"

"I kept getting exhausted and repulsed by how The Dark Knight continually had its cake and ate it too, by how it shoved oppressively bleak moments in our faces, then turned away from them later on: Gary Oldman gets shot, and we have to deal with his wife breaking down and screaming at the policeman who inform her of his death; but a half-hour later: no, he’s not really dead! We have to watch minute after minute of prisoners and civilians on two different barges decide whether or not to detonate explosives rigged to the others’ boat, and linger over their “screw everyone else, I’m totally in it for myself” rottenness (and *no one* on either boat stands up and says, “stop these madmen!” — but oh yeah, then the prisoner decides to throw the detonator out the boat window, and the civilian decides he doesn’t have the heart to go through with it — so you see, folks, the moviemakers finally demonstrated to us that these people REALLY aren’t rotten after all, even though they’ve just forced us to deal with five straight minutes of odious human nature. And then we have to endure another five solid minutes of Aaron Eckhart’s character’s holding a gun to a child’s head, to possibly avenge his girlfriend’s death, while Batman stands by and does nothing except to try to talk him out of it. So many scenes seemed intentionally designed to make us all feel powerless against society’s innate evil, and linger over and shove the rottenness of humanity down the audience’s throats. The constant foisting of fear and oppression and helplessness, going hand in hand with vigilante justice (and even an indirect justification of the Patriot Act, with Bruce Wayne’s radio-monitoring device) made me wonder if Dick Cheney had co-written the screenplay. My wife and I left the theater both wondering out loud, is THIS the movie that our country really needs to be tuning into right now? But of course, we’re only two small voices amongst the movie’s $150 million opening weekend, and after all (as so many fanboys are quick to point out), “it’s only a movie.”






I think the issue you comic fans are just obssesed with realism. I know the truth hurts and all.

The Daily Mail is full of s**t, their critic may leave some half-decent reviews, but he gets wet over the likes of Love Actually and kiddie-orientated movies.

Just like i said, you Schumacher fans are just stuck in the past.

Here's Total Film's verdict, at least they tell it how it is.

“We don’t want you doing anything with your hands other than holding on for dear life.” It’s a threat, it’s a joke, it’s barked by a masked hench-thug during The Joker’s daring opening bank heist. It’s also a mission statement from the makers of The Dark Knight. And you best buckle up: they mean it…

The title sets out the stall, both in theme and ambition. This isn’t Batman 2 (or 6 or 7 or however you tally it up), it’s a stand-alone picture with its own heart and integrity. Christopher Nolan isn’t interested in franchise; he’s fascinated by character, by story, by people. Of all the superheroes Batman is the only one who isn’t, in fact, super. No powers supernatural or extraterrestrial: he lives in a world only a sliver of reality away from our own. Muscle, training and technology are his allies; aches, breaks and faltering will are his foes. When Alfred (Michael Caine) tends to Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale)’s post-fight contusions, he warns his master to know his limits. “Batman has no limits” comes the flat reply. Only, of course, Batman is limited by his beliefs. He’d rather break his own neck than snap the rule that has steered his crim-bashing excursions away from blunt Death Wish morality. He will be the judge and the jury, but he will not be the executioner. He will not kill. But if Batman’s morality is a construct, The Joker (Heath Ledger) is a wrecking ball.

Just as Wayne is contemplating an end to his crime-fighting endeavour – seeing hope in the arrival of Gotham’s “White Knight”, District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) – along comes this anarchic, mischievous terrorist daubed in “war paint”, outwitting and then uniting the underworld in one aim: kill the Batman. Desperate crimes call for desperate measures, but just how far will Gotham’s Caped Crusader go to save himself, his city and everyone he loves?

How far is too far is a pertinent question in the age of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and 42 days’ detention without charge – but while the Nolans (Christopher and co-writer brother Jonathan) touch on everything from extreme interrogation to monitoring communications – in an actually quite bewildering tech-stretch sequence – they don’t draw glib parallels or let the War on Terror allusions overpower the entertainment. This isn’t Michael Moore’s Batman, though there’s a touch of Michael Mann in the visuals, with Gotham no longer a gloomy, gothic comic-book creation, more the corrupt conurbation of Heat. As for those The Godfather: Part II promises in the pre-release pieces?

Right there on the screen, in the hollowed out face of Bale, as he contemplates the consequences of his actions. His brilliance has become almost commonplace but shouldn’t be overlooked – he brings light and shade, depth and compassion to a character previous Bat-men have often made monochrome – though there’s no doubting the limelight will be on the late Ledger, burning brightly as he embodies an icon.

Dig out the thesaurus and run through the superlatives: chilling, gleeful, genius… It's a masterpiece of a performance. The 'meeja' Oscar talk is tasteless, in that the Academy usually ignores comic- book entertainment and the hyperbole is because he has died, but let it be said that it’s such a fearless, fierce, menacing turn that comparisons with Jack Nicholson don’t come into it. This is the definitive Joker.


If there are gongs going, hand another to the Nolans for their script, which fleshes out previous bit-parters – with Gary Oldman particularly benefiting as Gotham’s only honest rozzer – and gives Ledger lip-smacking sequences where he can mock the “Daddy didn’t love me!” motivations of lesser movie villains by spinning different yarns to different audiences about his damaged past. Not that the film isn’t interested in motivations – as evidenced by Harvey Dent’s journey to the dark side (though the less said about that the better; go discover it for yourself).

If The Dark Knight has a flaw, it’s that the attention to each character results in a crammed, tumultuous movie, even at two and a half hours. There’s so much going on, so much energy and ambition, that the through line becomes a little muddled. But just use that as an excuse for a repeat performance. That Mr Nolan: he has a taste for the theatrical.

Verdict: A minor second act shake can't undermine a dazzling, determined superhero classic and Ledger puts Nicholson in the shade. With Batman Begins Nolan set the bar; with TDK he's just raised it.

And stop dodging my questions. Why are you being so arrogant in the knowledge that your right?

No actually The Dark Knight lowered the bar and was not as enjoyable as the Dark Knight. Batman Begins actually had good villians.

Put it this way the villian joker is nowhere near as good as he is cracked up to be. Fans are clamoring to say that finally the Joker was done right, like the comics? Give me a break. The Joker is not a hideously scarred, limping, stooped over creep in the comic books and cartoons. My friend showed me some of his comic books with the joker yesterday. He actually looks like he’s bordering between creepy and harmless. That’s exactly what makes him so cool. He can look like a harmless clown on the outside at times, harmless enough that children would approach him, but that clownlike exterior belies the unpredictable, and psychotic murderer underneath. It’s a great dichotomy: he looks like a clown or jester, immaculately dressed in a press suit, but he’s a f*****g nut loose cannon that can go crazy on you at any minute and shoot or hack you to pieces. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I think Batman and Joker work as archnemeses on a subconscious level: the one who looks like a dark demon of the night is the good guy, the one who looks like the happy, bright clown is the psychopathic force of evil. However Nolan has created a guy that blatantly looks crazy and psychotic and depraved from the moment you see him, before he even speaks, like Leatherface or the blonde Japanese guy from Ichi the Killer.

Does my intelligence intimidate you or something? Because you know I am right and the Dark Knight and even begins are grossly overrated films. Keaton was for sure a better batman than bale as well. no one would ever say bale is the best man ever cause he really is nothing.

And when it comes to the dark night lets face it as well, I guess this may fall under the “realism” criticism, since my take is that the filmmakers and the fans of this movie think that the more relentlessly sadistic, moralizing and depressing the movie is, the more realistic it becomes. But do we really need a superhero movie to explore such heady, bleak and cynical themes rather than a movie with a premise maybe better suited to such themes, like No Country for Old Men? And of course some fans will respond “But T, superheroes are just as capable of adult themes as any other genre. Why can’t Batman explore these same ultraserious, depressing and high art themes.” To which I’ll again respond BECAUSE IT’S ABOUT A RICH NINJA GUY THAT DRESSES AS A BAT WITH SUPERTECH THAT RUNS AROUND KICKING AN EVIL CLOWN’S ASS AT NIGHT. No matter how much you lie to yourself, it’s simply not as high-falutin’ a setting as movies like No Country for Old Men or Sophie’s Choice. It’s a premise best suited for fantasy, escapism and cheap thrills. And there’s nothing wrong with that! You don’t have to reinvent it into Godfather II meets Silence of the Lambs meets a snuff film in order to prove there’s such depth and worth in the source material. Why does a movie about freaking Batman have to be so bleak, ugly and induce such nauseating violence and flinching?

See what I am saying when it comes to batman escapism and fantasy works better. Leave the realism for 'No Country for Old Men."