How in the world can a big yellow school bus crash through a bank and nobody on the street seems to notice? Further, after the bak robbery, the bus COINCIDENTALLY pulls out of the bank and into the middle of a line of other school buses in broad daylight, with cops right up the street and no one decides to pull the bus over?
Has wnyone ever seen a school bus line? They follow each other closer than elephants, they barely give inches of space between them yet somehow The Joker had enough room to pull out of a gaping hole in a building into traffic in the middle of a bus line and everything continues as normal in traffic as if nobody could have possibly noticed.
This was the end of the opening scene of the movie. It pretty much matches how the rest of the movie goes – “This is supposed to be real – oh wait, now we have something completely unrealistic happen. But, serious, it’s real, don’t suspend your disbelief just yet. Oh, but wait, actually do suspend your disbelief. No, it’s realistic. OK, it isn’t.”
There’s a notion when watching/reading fictional movies/stories, and it’s called “suspension of disbelief”. Most contemporary movies, even if they are based within reality, require the audience to maintain at least SOME suspension of disbelief. Suspension of disbelief is [from Wikipedia] “the willingness of a person to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction, even if they are fantastic or impossible”.
Yes, “The Dark Knight” is a piece of fiction. It is a piece of fantasy, based on a comic book. However, the clear premise of the rebooted Batman series, and the clear goals of Chris Nolan, the director, is to ground the fiction in reality. Nolan goes to great effort to place the world of Batman into the real world, including: the locations, the characters, the story dynamics, and the plausibility of the elements of the story and plot. That is the obvious goal. Especially in “The Dark Knight”, extending from the basis of “Batman Begins”, there is a persistent focus on keeping things realistic and not idealistic. TDK is an attempt at taking something sourced from fantasy and placing it into reality, and also removing any semblance of idealism.
That’s all find and good – it’s an interesting goal and “Batman Begins” pulled it off quite well. Watching BB, the audience can truly believe the various aspects of the story. The main problem with TDK is that it fails miserably in that regard. There are numerous scenes and situations that are completely not plausible at all, and the audience is expected to have a greater suspension of disbelief than what is implied throughout. It steals from the audience the very thing that is meant to prop the value of the movie up in the first place. The movie contradicts itself, it cheats itself, and the audience. To compensate, what the audience is given is a lot of explosions and sadistic scenes, and the masses appear to have bought into it.
The original bat suit can’t protect him against dog bites? What? Wait, it can withstand bullets, but it can’t protect against dog bites. The new one is easier to move in and protects him better from dog bites (maybe, this was never clarified), but no longer even partially protects him from bullets. He’s one of the richest men in the country, he can coordinate huge government contracts which somehow allow him to appropriate the signals of 30 million cell phones in Gotham city (nevermind that the sonar thing is totally and completely unrealistic), but apparently he can’t afford a decent bat suit that BOTH let’s him turn his head AND protects his body the same as the first one.
So one would think that given this degradation of bat suit quality, there’s a prime opportunity in the movie for the addition of cool new gadgets. Ya know – to make up for the stupidity. What we get is: some sharp stuff that shoots out of his gloves. Wow, cool. Sharp things that fly out of the forearms of his gloves. And the Bat Pod (motorbike) which lasted all of a single segment before getting trashed because, although he could control it enough to do a 180 against a wall, he can’t keep from crashing it when trying to avoid smashing into The Joker.
I almost forgot – we also got the amazing new addition of a short-lived hydraulic glove which allows him to bend steel… only in the first minutes of the movie.
So in anticipation of Batman 3 (or is it 6?), here are some thoughts for new gadgets and costume ideas:
Taser guns, so he can keep The Joker from getting close enough to beat him nearly bare-handed when endless ninjas can’t
Mace, so when The Joker or a small child with an attitude does manage to get too close he can distract them long enough to run like a bat out of hell
A stick, so he can hit people and inflict actual damage – like causing blood to come out of their face (apparently as the interrogation room scene shows us, his fists can’t make blood come out of The Joker’s face even when he punches him dead-on and hard multiple times)
This got me laughing today. Edit: This is just a brief comedy break everyone, the TDK Sucks blog is still on track LOL… with more writeups on the way. Bookmark the site, grab the RSS feeds, add it to Del.icio.us, Digg it, save it as a fav in Technorati, do what you must. More on the way. In the meantime, enjoy a laugh:
Secret Pants Sketch Comedy presents “Bush or Batman”
Let’s look a little closer at yet another aspect of Nolan’s “ultra-real” superhero movie:
The time period of the hospital evacuation segment is implied as being enough time to evacuate an entire hospital. The initial moments of The Joker’s threat hitting the airwaves, Gordon is heard shouting to various police crew to evacuate Gotham General Hospital as the priority (and it happens to be the one The Joker picked). Regardless, it’s implied that the whole ruckus about the hospital happened in less than 30 minutes since the Reese guy was about to go on a TV show to expose who Batman is (seems to imply a show teaser at the beginning of a 30 or 60 minute “news” show hosted by Gary Wallace from Weird Science). So, it’s IMPLIED as being enough time by the dialogue of the movie but in reality it would take HOURS, if not an entire day, to completely evacuate an entire hospital. If it was the case that there was such an evacuation ahead of time, and it was evacuated before The Joker went to Dent’s room, why was Dent not evacuated?
Why would Dent be the sole patient left (contrary to Gordon wanting desperately to keep Dent safe throughout the story)? The implication, then, is that the hospital is being evacuated at the same time The Joker shows up to Dent’s room. The entire exchange between The Joker and Dent took place over 2-3 minutes and when The Joker walks out of the hospital it appears to be fully evacuated.
An entire major city hospital evacuated in 3 minutes.
The realness of this movie is astounding. Not to mention how much the building actually looked like a hospital from the outside rather than an abandoned building in the middle of an industrial zone.
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Ever since the last scene of “The Dark Knight” faded to black, the masses have been wondering who the next villains will be. There’s been great anticpiation, since the hype machine for Batman 3 (or Batman 6?) needs to get started, and wide speculation is spreading. Everyone seems to agree that the villains need to be more viscious and dangerous than the main villains of TDK – namely, the rottweilers.
Fresh from the production of Batman 3 (working title: “Batman: The Killer Joke”), we’ve got some on-set photos everyone has been dying to see. The mystery is over!
Harvey Dent (shown here as Two-Face), cleaning up the criminal element in Gotham.
Well, the writers must have been a bit more lazy on the day they wrote the segment where Rachel and Harvey were trying to nail Lau on something. Particularly, they were trying to use Lau as a means to incriminate all the crime heads in Chicago (I mean Gotham).
Apparently, they got Batman to go all the way to China, risk his life, illegally kidnap a Chinese citizen who had not been convicted or even indicted on any US-based crime, and bring him back for questioning and they didn’t have an actual plan. They had NO IDEA what to nail him on, they just knew that he was the money-man for the mob. So, when he finally admits to being the banker for numerous criminal organizations, Harvey has a eureka moment with Rachel and blurts “we can get them on RICO!”, presuming of course they can prove just one of the organizations pooling their money with Lau had committed crimes.
A bit of education: RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) is a US federal law. That means HAD that been the case that Harvey chose to pursue that path, he would have to hand over the entire case to a FEDERAL court, taking it completely out of his hands to prosecute – his jurisdiction was at a city level for Chicago (I mean Gotham). He was not a federal prosecutor. If he was, he would be referred to in the movie as a United States Attorney. If some want to argue semantics that he was a federal attorney and merely referred to as a District Attorney, that argument will fail because such positions are appointed by the President of the United States. They are not elected to that position, as is the case with Harvey Dent (it’s pretty clear in both the viral marketing and election context of the movie).
That was just one flaw with that segment; another flaw is the fact that Lau’s lawyer just stood there doing nothing while Harvey and Rachel were using unjust tactics to pressure him to talk, making implications they would place his life in danger based on how much he cooperates. Because, without those tactics, they didn’t seem to even have a clue of what to get Lau to admit to which might implicate the criminals they were after.
I was laughing with my buddy today about the rottweiler scene near the end and how farcical it was overall. Firstly, it was funny how in a movie where the lead villain happens to only carry knives for weapons, Bruce Wayne just happened to want a newer costume and the new one Lucious gave him just happened to not be effective at defending against knives or dogs (presumably the original one would better help against dog bites or attacks somehow…). They actually had dialogue about this in the movie, so it was implied to be meaningful, and then HOW COINCIDENTALLY those were the primary “weapons” he would have had to defend himself in the last confrontation scene in the movie. Woah… didn’t see THAT coming…
Well anyway, so he’s got all this nifty sci-fi 30-million cell phone bat sonar 3D thing hooked up to his headgear, and is able to “see” every everything up until just getting to the floor The Joker is on. So, uh, what – he couldn’t see that there were dogs up there and be prepared? I mean, maybe if he’d have taken that one tiny precaution since he was doing that pretty thoroughly floor-to-floor anyway, he’d have thought to stop by a Ralph’s on the way and picked up a couple juicy raw steaks for the puppies. That’s usually the way every other protagonist in all other Hollywood movies distract guard dogs.
My friend also mentioned something else that was odd about that scene – The Joker had Batman pinned and he uses those projective “knives” (or whatever they were) to quickly get The Joker off him. So you would think they would be gashing into The Joker’s face based on the angle, otherwise if they were just a distraction then it was a pretty lame use of that gadget. This one I’m not so sure about (maybe he did have huge gashes or slices on his face or neck when hanging upside down?), but worth mentioning. Still, with all of Batman’s fighting skills, he couldn’t get a single scrawny Joker off of him from that position? Even a low rung UFC guy can do that with a simple leg grapple. Maybe Bruce needs some tips from Randy Couture or Chuck Liddell?
How in the world can a big yellow school bus crash through a bank and nobody on the street seems to notice? Further, after the bak robbery, the bus COINCIDENTALLY pulls out of the bank and into the middle of a line of other school buses in broad daylight, with cops right up the street and no one decides to pull the bus over?
