Comments on: Lost in the Reboots

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 21:15:00 +0000

Gotham seems less bad in the second film because Batman drove Gotham’s organized-crime off the streets and into hiding. Yet, Batman’s theatrics cause the Joker’s appearance and its accompanying escalation in destruction–things get visibly dangerous in Gotham once the dynamiter appears. In the third film, Gotham is peaceful on the surface due to the no-parole Dent-act, yet evil is rising—and eventually resurfaces from–beneath where Bruce and Gordon buried their lie. Likewise, Gotham chose, amidst their flimsy illusory peace, to bury neglected social-problems out-of-sight and out-of-mind–namely, the increase in troubled at-risk and orphaned youth. The orphaned youths go down to the sewers when they age-out of the orphanage because there isn’t any work for them up in the city.

In the story, Gotham is the metropolis of the world–a center of trade, commerce, innovation and culture–corrupted into a city run by greedy elites, self-interested bureaucrats, and crooked law-enforcement and inhabited by selfish citizens. Gotham epitomizes a beacon of development and progress gone wrong–power wasted on greed, indulgence and injustice. As for the pit, Christopher Nolan’s Batman-trilogy is a popularized contemporary quasi-myth and the pit-prison holds obvious metaphoric significance of the common mythic themes death and re-birth. As for the Talia‘s “zipping into Gotham” and climbing the city’s social-ladder, this is a pretty silly objection and thus I will answer in a half-silly manner. The al-Ghuls are presumably powerful and wealthy and Talia actually mentions her PLANE (which gives a hint about the prologue). Furthermore, Talia is presumably intelligent and worldly (so she ought to know how to get to Gotham). Thus, with resources, intelligence, wit, charm, beauty, enchantment–she is Marion Cotillard after all–Talia could easily make it in Gotham.

By: Boonton

Boonton — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 23:44:25 +0000

I suppose strictly speaking its coherent. Just not very convincing. Gotham seems like an exceptionally bad place in the first movie but not the 2nd two. Why is it deemed so worthy of punishment when it’s not so different from every other city in the developed world?

Let’s not ask how people who live in Tibetan mountains (or is next to a giant hole in a Middle Eastern desert?) manage to not only zip into Gotham but climb to the top of its social establishment?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 19:52:47 +0000

Not to engage in a lengthy discussion about the trilogy’s plot, but in Batman Begins, Ra’s al Ghul explains that–in the story of course–the League of Shadows was behind the “cleansing” of every civilization that became corrupt beyond saving. Gotham–the metropolis of the world in the story–was the next target. The execution of the thief farmer was a test for Bruce Wayne’s initiation–his compassion, his humanity, differentiated his thirst for justice from their vengeance driven idealism.
Ra’s excommunicated Bane because his deformed face and his very horrid existence was a reminder of the hell he sent his wife to. Bane embraced Ra’s mission because it was the will of the one person he cared for–Talia, a daughter almost to him. Talia never forgave her father for excommunicating her protector, Bane, until Bruce allowed her father Ra’s to die. Although her father’s expulsion of Bane pained Talia for years, she agreed with her father’s vengeful plan. Bane and Talia believed the world irredeemably unjust and, similar to the way that Ra’s took his guilt and anger out on Bane, they sought to extract vengeance for all their sufferings on Bruce, a man who dare show compassion for a city where “innocent” is a strong word to use.

By: Boonton

Boonton — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 13:37:22 +0000

I agree the series was the best Batman ever but it had its flaws. The idea that the League of Shadows had to punish Gotham for being ‘corrupt’ never made much sense. But Liam Neison’s accent may let us overlook the odd mission of a group whose mission is to punish crime among Chinese farmers and Gotham but nowhere inbetween. Bane’s decision to embrace that mission was never really explained, esp. since Liam so mistreated the man who saved his daughter.

The real capstone was the 2nd movie with the Joker which I read as a take off on the Book of Job. His motive was to make things so bad that he would force people to ‘reveal themselves’ and make them do things they would swear they would never do in ‘normal life’ at the end even forcing Batman to embrace a lie rather than the truth.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 22:01:55 +0000

Although I’m far from a Christopher Nolan fanboy, a humanity uncommon to action-films and attempts at contemporary popular-myth emerges in the Dark Knight Rises. While the trilogy’s finale doesn’t quite expunge the idealism and fideism–the split between hope and realism–of the previous films, the hunger of something better rises.

We see a subtle example of an awakened humanity fairly early in the film, just as the storm is brewing amidst the darkness and shadows. When Bane brutally beats Batman, we see Catwoman–underneath a fragile woman rather than the outward femme fatale she projects herself–begin to tear and cry. This subtle, yet surprisingly touching, display of humanity is unusual in action-films. The audience clearly isn’t meant to take sadistic pleasure in the beating, but to recognize Bane–driven by a disordered and vengeful sense of justice–as humanity gone wrong, turned into a monstrosity.
Even earlier, we see the need for realism rather than fideism emerge when Alfred affirms, risking of his friendship with Bruce, the need to “stop trying to outsmarting the truth and let the truth have its day.”
At the end of the film, it becomes clearer–though never stated–that Bruce devoted himself to incarnate human lives, however wicked and selfish, not an ideal. Innocent may be a strong word to use around Gotham, as the vengeful Talia al Ghul says, but humanity is never a lost cause.
Bruce Wayne attempts to defeat evil via jujitsu—disguising himself in the shadows in order to defeat the shadows of evil. Yet, as we see in the sewer-fight scene with Bane, shadows belong to evil; evil disguises, the good is transparent. There is a hunger for something better in TDKR but ultimately hope is reduced to escape and anonymity rather than transparency. (The transparency of the Cross is more awesome than any clean-slate).