MTG Salvation

Quote from Highroller

The Joker was compelling. Bane is boring, ridiculous, contradictory, and inscrutable. If the Joker were Emperor Palpatine, then Bane would be General Grievous.

In fact, comparing Bane and the Joker as villains gives us a greater understanding of what makes a Batman story truly compelling and what doesn't. Bane could beat up Batman, and was therefore a physical threat to him, but outside of that he really didn't do much that was all that interesting. His ridiculous Bond villain schemes were silly and his faux-Occupy Wall Street bull**** just bogged the movie down. Meanwhile, the Joker was not as physically strong as Batman (although he still managed to be a physical threat due to the fact that he never fought fair), but it didn't matter. The Joker was terrifying because he was cunning, sinister, and unpredictable. There was always something more going on with the Joker than just two people punching each other, exemplified in the interrogation scene where the Joker just lets Batman wail on him, laughing at the fact that despite all of Batman's strength, he couldn't possibly do a thing to win because the Joker had outsmarted him.

Hell, comparing Bane and Ra's does the same thing. Ra's was physically equal to Batman, but the fights between Ra's and Batman were more interesting than just two people punching each other because more was going on. For starters, Ra's was Bruce's mentor and surrogate father figure. Also, Ra's had established the entire movie that he had better awareness than Bruce in a fight, so the end of the fight is when Bruce shows his growth by flipping that around on him. Finally, Ra's motivations for being a vigilante were the perfect foil for Bruce's motivations, so a fight between them wasn't just a fight between two men, but also a fight between two contradictory views as to what justice really means.

Bane, on the other hand, is a big, tough, angry guy who punches Batman. Every attempt to give him characterization beyond that does not work at all. Well, that's not true, he's also established as Scottish, but every attempt to characterize him beyond that doesn't work at all. The The World is Not Enough reveal gives him a glimpse of depth, but that scene is horrendously handled and totally contradicts everything established about Bane previously.

To make matters worse, once Batman gets his **** wrecked and thrown into a lightless prison that is brightly lit (here's a drinking game: drink a shot everytime something you're shown in TDKR doesn't match up with what you're told), the movie doesn't know what to do in terms of the story it's telling. We have this long stretch of time where Batman doesn't appear on screen again, and an even longer stretch of time where even when he does, he's completely divorced from everything going on in Gotham. So the movie limps around trying to figure out where it's going to go, and really no one gets any real development except John Blake kind of.



Yeah, because there is still absolutely no reason for him not to put a bullet in the Joker's skull. I never said The Dark Knight was flawless.

We've only discussed it for in least four threads. Read any of those again.

Really? Viva la Bane-volution wasn't contrived?

Quote from Morphling

I honestly wish I hadn't seen it, but left off with the Dark Knight and have let THAT one be my final impression of the series. It was just so solidly done (for what it was, mind you).

Quote from mandelbrot

Well, it was so and so.

Let's see: The film was too long and at some points too tiresome. The whole Batman in prison thing dragged on forever.

I wasn't too impressed with the action scenes, like the final battle. Most impressive scene was at the beginning of the film with the plane hijacking.

Politically it was questionable to say the least. Cat Woman says to Wayne: "There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us".

And what happens? A warlord takes over the city. So the message is: "sit tight and be content with capitalism because the alternative is chaos or a dictatorship". Right, that's very progressive...

And in a city of millions of people, nobody forms a resistance against Bane? They have to wait for the police to stand up to him? They are all so terrified that nobody does anything? What kind of message is that?

Quote from dimir impersonator

*yawn*

Besides the fact that I think zombies are way too played out at this point, the film does look fairly generic. It's interesting the way the zombies move like locusts or something, but that isn't enough to get me excited.

Mostly I'm just tired of zombies. I liked them more when they were a fringe thing than a pop culture staple.

Quote from Skillzrock2

why use the priest instead of elvish archdruid? they do basically the same thing, but the archdruid is like a $3 card vs a $20 card