I didn't care for "The Dark Knight Rises"

Opinions seem to be split on "The Dark Knight Rises," the final installment of Christopher Nolan's Batman-opus.

Batopus?

Spoilers! I'd like to note that the ending of this movie was spoiled for me on opening day when I was reading my office's Facebook page and one of our students posted the ending because s/he is a massive asshat and can suck my freshly sharpened Batarang, thank you very much.

I've read a couple of reviews calling it a masterful, fitting end to a grand, sweeping trilogy, and other reviews calling it a sloppy, incoherent mess.

And I really, REALLY want to be in the fitting end camp. Batman! Catwoman! 'Splosions! IM-splosions! I loved it's predecessor, "The Dark Knight." It's one of my favorite movies of all time, and it's definitely the best superhero movie ever made. It blew everything else out of the water, the original "Batman," "X2," "Spider-Man," "The Incredibles," nothing else comes close to touching the depth and thematic resonance of "The Dark Knight."  

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe my expectations were just too high for the sequel, which isn't a bad movie, really. I liked the villain, I liked Catwoman, I liked John Blake, and the action scenes were cool. I was never bored, exactly, but neither was I sucked into the world, the characters, and their struggles. I had too many questions that were never answered, and I kept getting lured into a philosophical theme only to have that theme discarded for the next plot twist.

The twist is she's my best friend and lets me ride that Batcycle.

Here were my main problems: there was hardly any actual Batman or Batmanning (yes, it's a verb) in this Batman movie, Bruce Wayne was the least interesting person on-screen, I could drive a Bat-wing through the plot-holes, and there was no central theme to hold the whole thing together.

The last one is my biggest gripe. "The Dark Knight" introduced it's thesis early on. What separates heroes from villains? Every action sequence, every line of dialogue, and every character development served to expound on that thesis. Every part of that story worked to expand and explore the basic themes of heroism, evil, and the difference between the two.

The difference is just knives and pocket lint.

What is the theme in "The Dark Knight Rises"? Is it that the past always comes back to haunt you? Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne seem pretty haunted by the lies they told about Harvey Dent at the end of "The Dark Knight." Selina Kyle is wholly motivated by her quest to escape her past crimes and her past selves (she's complicated; I liked her a lot). Bane, too, uses his tragic childhood to fuel his quest for--well, that's one of the plot holes I mentioned earlier. Bane is a lot of fun to watch, but damned if I could figure out what he or Talia really wanted in the end.

Then the movie just sort of forgets that it wants to explore how the past binds and shapes us, and decides it's going to talk about hope instead. Bane doesn't want to kill Batman or destroy the city right now. He wants to give it a few months, long enough for people to get some hope that they'll be saved, and THEN he'll crush them. I think. Seriously, the villainous plots in this movie remind me of a Venture Bros. episode. "I dare you to make less sense!"

More plausible than this movie

So then maybe the movie is supposed to be about fear? About how fear of death is what makes you achieve great things? And you can't fall into despair and hope for death, because then you won't be able to jump really far, even thought there's CLEARLY a rope attached to the lip of that big well and you could just shimmy up the damn rope now that you've cured your eight-year-long limp and your broken back with some prison calisthenics. That plot point did not make a damn bit of sense. And this is coming from someone who read the comic this movie is based on, which had Bruce Wayne's doctor girlfriend curing his broken back with her psychic powers and was STILL more believable that whatever crazy shit went down in the third act of "The Dark Knight Rises."

Somehow still more plausible than this movie

All of these themes are rich fodder for a Batman story. The impact of the past on the present, the power of hope, the function of fear, all good stuff and all covered in the two earlier Nolan Bat-movies, which is why I understand how a lot of people can feel this movie is a fitting end to the trilogy. But "The Dark Knight Rises" never stuck with any of these themes long enough for me to get emotionally or intellectually invested.

I wouldn't have cared so much about themes if the story had been able to pick up the slack. "The Dark Knight Rises" had a very complicated story, and it's lack of thematic coherence made it impossible for that story to mean anything to me. The main reasons I saw "The Avengers" six times this summer (get that judgey look off your face) are because it was fun, funny, and had a simple story that was executed very well.

You make me feel less alone inside.

"The Dark Knight Rises" wasn't fun, it was depressing; it wasn't funny and could barely stir itself to be witty (again, Catwoman is the exception here. I liked her a lot, did I mention that? She brought style, wit, and pizazz to every scene she was in. They should have just made an Anne Hathaway Catwoman movie. I'd watch it twice); and the story left me empty inside. I felt a deeper emotional response to Bruce Banner having his first Hulk-out than I did to Bruce Wayne climbing out of the prison. Considering that the latter is supposed to be the hero's triumphant ascent from the abyss and the former is almost a throwaway scene in the middle of the second act, that's not a good sign. Bruce 1>Bruce 2. A new universal constant? I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens with the Batman reboot.

PS, they're already rebooting the Batman movie because they want to make a Justice League movie ala "The Avengers" and they need a version of Batman that can exist in a world with the Justice League. Nolan's Batman isn't suited for that. I fear that the studios will take the wrong lessons from the success of Nolan's franchise and give us a bunch of superhero movies that are dark, gritty, and completely lacking in maturity, emotional depth, or compelling storytelling. It's exactly what happened to comic books in the wake of "Watchmen" and "The Dark Knight Returns."

This is what happened.

Cross your fingers, folks. The next few summers are going to be bumpy.

Gratuitous Tragedy and the Rachel Explosion

If I was a superhero, my arch-nemesis would be Christopher Nolan, the writer and director of such fine movies as "Memento," "The Prestige," "Batman Begins," "The Dark Knight," and "Inception."

Nolan would be my nemesis for a couple of reasons. First, he's one of the very few storytellers who can surprise me, so I know he could match me in wits and in battle. Not to brag--well, okay, I'm bragging a little--but I'm one of those incredibly irritating people who can almost always guess the ending of a movie or television show ahead of time, because I know what makes stories work. Stories are like math problems to me; once all the variables have been presented, I can make the calculations on my own and see how it all turns out. But except for "Batman Begins," I've never been able to predict where Nolan is taking his characters. Each time, I've had to mutter to myself, "Well played, sir. Well played," as I try and work backwards from the ending to see how it all went down without me knowing.

Nolan wouldn't be my nemesis simply because he can surprise me. Neil Gaiman, Toni Morrison and Steven Moffat (my favorite "Doctor Who" writer) also fall into this category. No, a nemesis has to equal you in power and abilities, AND vex you terribly at every turn. Nolan vexes me terribly. Can you guess why?

*MASSIVE SPOILERS to all of the above movies follow. You've been warned.*

Let me tell you about every one of Nolan's protagonists: a handsome guy is mentally unstable and can't have normal human relationships because the love of his life was tragically taken away from him, and now he lives to rectify that tragedy.

Memento: guy with short-term memory loss is on a quest to find the man who raped and killed his wife.

The Prestige: magician is obsessed with humiliating the other magician who may or may not have killed his wife. The other magician's wife hangs herself.

Batman Begins: Batman's character is so perfect for Nolan's formula that I'm pretty sure Nolan's formula is really just the Batman formula with a dead woman substituting for Bruce Wayne's dead parents. However, perhaps because he's not content unless there's an imperiled women in there SOMEWHERE, Nolan created the character Rachel Dawes and then had her get attacked by the Scarecrow so that when Batman faces him in battle, he's not just fighting some guy in a scarecrow mask--he's fighting his beloved's attacker! It's personal!

The Dark Knight: And speaking of Rachel Dawes, did she get a raw deal in this movie or what? She gets blown up by the Joker, breaking not only Batman's heart, but also the heart of her fiance, Harvey Dent. Dent is so traumatized by the Rachel Explosion (also the name of my new feminist techno dance group) that he becomes Two-Face and goes on a murderous rampage to avenge her death.

Inception: I just saw this movie last night. I highly recommend it. Good stuff. Great scene in a gravity-less hotel hallway, among other things. But again, Nolan's protagonist is a man both haunted and motivated by the loss of his beloved wife, who killed herself and now haunts the hero's subconscious.

What the hell, Nolan? You found one type of character that you really liked and just decided to run with it until the studios stopped giving you money? I know that tragedy is a great motivator, but do your heroes always have to be dudes with dead girlfriends? The BF really likes Nolan's movies because they're intelligent, exciting, feature explosions and gunfights, but DON'T include gratuitous sex scenes, which he hates. I agree with him, but I'd argue that Nolan relies too heavily on gratuitous tragedy, which in some ways is just as anti-feminist as gratuitous sexuality.

You knew that's where this conversation was headed. Don't pretend like you didn't.

Nolan sucks--suckysuckySUCKS--atwriting female characters. Not one of his movies passes the Bechdel Test, which requires 1) at least two female characters, who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man. It's such a simple series of requirements, yet each of Nolan's movies is an epic fail when it comes to the ladies. His women are all either someone's wife or girlfriend, which means they're most likely dead or going to die onscreen. The exceptions are the evil woman in "Memento," the mistress in "The Prestige," and Ellen Page's character in "Inception." You know what happens to those women? Yeah, neither do I. They all just sort of fade out of the story with little to no explanation once they've served their narrative purpose.

And as long as we're talking about that, why was Ellen Page even in"Inception"? She served no narrative purpose except to get the protagonist talking about his dead wife. Try this: watch "Inception" and imagine if Ellen Page wasn't in that movie. See? Almost no difference. The only reason she's there, as far as I can figure, is because she's a woman, and women can get men talking about their feelings and all that other girly shit. It doesn't matter that Cobb, the protagonist, literally just met this woman; he'll totally tell her incredibly personal and heartbreaking things about his past, things he wouldn't tell his male teammates even though they've been working with him for years and already know all about his wife's death and the damage it's caused his psyche. Cuz they're MEN, that's why, and men don't talk about their feelings with each other.

I'm not hating on Christopher Nolan. I'm not a superhero yet, nor even a morally ambiguous anti-hero who commits crimes but with good reason, so we don't need to be nemeses. I don't think that Nolan is a misogynist; if you asked him how he feels about female characters in movies, he'd probably say they're just as important as male characters, and that he tries to write them to be strong, independent, and believable. And he'd probably be telling the truth. But Nolan is a product of institutional sexism. The movie industry is intensely sexist down to its core. (If you need proof, list the last ten movies you saw and check how many of them pass the Bechdel Test.) And because Nolan is male, he has the privilege of maintaining what I like to call a "sexism blind spot," where he doesn't see how he shortchanges his female characters because hey, at least he's not putting them in gratuitous sex scenes like all those other sleazy directors. His women are smart, sexy, kind, and possess emotional depth, no argument there, but they don't have a reason to exist outside of their relationships to the male protagonists. They don't have lives of their own, and what life they do have is most likely going to be tragically cut short to give the heroes a reason to do whatever it is the movie's REALLY about.

So, Christopher Nolan--perhaps smarter and better at storytelling than me, and something of a chauvinist. Yes. He will make a worthy opponent.

Bounty of Awesome

Have you ever had one of those days where the universe just keeps heaping scoops of awesome onto your already-loaded plate of awesome until the awesome dribbles down your arms and makes your paper plate get that crease in the middle where the potato salad gets all mushed in with the pulled pork, because of course this awesome is served at a barbecue as G-d and William Shatner intended?

Ever had one of those days, readers?

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja. It's everything you'd expect from a title like that. To your right, Dr. McNinja fights chainsaw nunchucks.

Nerd York City, "NYC for misfits, geeks, nerds, otaku & fanboys." Yes, please.

Batman's Twitter, God_Damn_Batman. "Limitation breeds innovation. If I could turn my head I never would've developed the "No Look-back Punch." A true classic."

I'm not on Twitter. I won't be on Twitter unless and until my ancient phone dies and I'm forced to upgrade to a smartphone, because if you can't update your account as soon as you save Gotham from circus freaks, what's the goddamn point?

Like I said, heaps of awesome.