The Dark Knight Rises

Just saw it! Awesome. And Mission Impossible is pretty good too.

That football sequence was incredible on the big screen. I actually muttered "Oh, shit" at the end of it.

Here's the good quality trailer:

Link

Interesting that Bruce Wayne appears to be in jail.

I really hope that some of the rumours about how political it will be are not true...

It almost looked like a flash-back to the first movie when he was originally in prison.

I've suspected that Nolan is a closet right-winger. I certainly interpreted that into the Dark Knight.

What are the rumors going around?

Obama is the puppet master of all the bad guys.

(really I don't know I was just making that up.....)

It has been suggested that what happens in the film is a mirror of the "99% movement" on the scene at the moment - Bane and Catwoman representing an analogue of this and the former leading a revolution, with Bruce/Batman opposing it as a representative of the elite.

It's still speculative, but it fits much of what we've seen. "The Fire Rises" is a direct reference to the progress of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities.

And yeah, TDK - while not being overtly political - was quite right-wing. As is the concept of Batman itself, I think.

Well, just from the trailer, the convict revolters can be read as the occupy movement...course, this thing has been in production since before all of that, so, it could just be people seeing things, like Palpatine being Dubya.

Gee watching that trailer I'd think OWS just came to the big screen.

"You're all going to wonder how you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."

I will say I was hoping for more then three movies. Five would be a good number.

Well, Warners say they want Batman to go on forever, like 007, but, they'll do a reboot/director change every 3-4 or so.

Although...they were filming in New York around some of the Occupiers IIRC.

Also on A Tale, are there suggestions of a Carton/Darnay thing between Gordon Love Hewitt's character and Bruce Wayne too? People have said that the former may "fill in" for Batman at some point.

Alleged plot of "TDKR":

I hope this ISN'T true & just horse hockey.

The Scimitar? Oh man. It's like they took the bad ship from XI and the villain from XII.

IIRC, Nolan was not at all happy about people claiming TDK was related to American politics at all. I think that he specifically stated he was aiming it at the clusterfuck in Iraq and hoping that the Iraqis would be inspired to stand up for themselves.

How someone who dresses all in black, thinks that its possible to redeem a corrupt society without tearing it down and starting all over, and refuses to kill anyone, even if they deserve it, could be seen as a right winger is a bit of a mystery to me.

Perhaps Bruce Wayne was a Star Trek fan and thought that he could be like "Surak" and society would adopt his ways of being nice to each other.

It would be awesome if they slipped this scene into the movie!

A theme that keeps emerging in the Nolan movies is the idea of Gotham as a symbol of civilization, an institution worth preserving for the good people who live there. Revolution--particularly if it's the violent form perpetrated by a relative few--is certainly a threat to civilization.

Maybe we'll see something like the Reign of Terror in this film...

The whole concept of superheroism is right-wing: a single super-empowered individual who chooses to intervene in the order of society without the necessity of (and frequently in opposition to) popular support.

Certainly, The Dark Knight could not help but resonate with current events: the perhaps unethical use of mass eavesdropping, the need to stand up and confront terror even when it isn't popular, the "noble lie," the man who does what he thinks right for society even though it means public scorn, etc. I raise an eyebrow especially at the "failure of democracy" that happens in the film: the ferry full of citizens votes to blow up the ferry of prisoners to save themselves, but no individual is willing to enact that decision. I can't believe that the Nolans would be smart enough to come up with this script but, at the same time, be blind to its modern parallels.

That said, comic books superheroes have seldom been about politics. It's only been in recent times where the dark side potential of the superhero has really been explored. And, as has been clearly pointed out in Nolan's movies, Gotham is a city where the social contract has not been upheld, and Bruce Wayne intends to be Batman only as long as it takes to restore it.

Actually, no, the (real) inventor of the superhero did exactly that.

http://members.socket.net/~hiebert/Essays/Unsung_by_Salmon.htm

The concept of the super-hero is right wing? LOL. That's seeing the world through a very small lens.

The original Superman stories included him taking on a corrupt senator and exposing him in Washington DC, and later stories included him destroying slums so the government (gasp!) would have to rebuild them. He also fought against lax safety standards at a mine, and Clark Kent targeted authority figures on a regular basis. He also battled against the military industrial complex decades before Eisenhower would use the term, even going up against 'manufactured wars' created by industrialists bribing politicians. There's very little doubt that Superman, created by two Jewish Democrats, was originally envisioned as working for 'social justice', indeed he was identified as an icon of the New Deal.

Marvel has always tilted more left - while the super patriot is Captain America, their most successful titles since the 60s have been outcasts trying to fit into society, Spider-Man, the Hulk and the X-Men. The X-Men in particular are fighting the status quo while dealing with issues of prejudice and race relations.

As far as the dark side only recently emerging, that's also not true.

It wasn't until WWII and then later the Comic Code kicked in that the Superheroes were all shinied up and made clear that they were working for the powers that be and were pure as the driven snow.

Prior to that, while Batman might have been a playboy billionaire socialite, he was written in a clear pulp style. He killed his enemies with guns, and was a detective first and a superhero second. Indeed, he debuted in Detective Comics, which later became the titular DC Comics.

The modern version of Batman was shaped by Frank Miller, and is definitely a right wing viewpoint. But his return to a 'dark' Batman was definitely truer to the origins of the character, if involving more of a psychological bent.

It is in the sense that superheros are, for lack of a better word, aristocratic. They're individuals who shape society and who do so without any kind of democratic backing. In fact, they're often unpopular.

I've read those stories (actually, I have reprints of all of them), but, though Supes had something of a crusader streak in those early days, he wasn't challenging the existing order. Many of his actions can be seen as a-political. The mineowner, for instance, is depicted as not a bad guy, just someone who was unaware of the conditions he was putting his workers in. The "war profiteer" episode is even less political: when Superman forcibly brings the two leaders together, they can't come up with a reason why they're fighting.

I don't know that any of those make the stories themselves all that left-leaning.

While I'm sure there were some examples from back in the day (D cites the novel Gladiator), it's only been in the last 30 or 40 years that comics have really gotten around to critiquing their central theme: that some empowered people should be able to shape society for the rest of us. Watchmen is, of course, the preeminent example.

Yes. In other words: they were made for kids. But the 60s and, certainly, the 70s changed that. And today the code is totally gone.

I'm not saying there weren't any "dark" stories--I recently re-read the first one with the Joker and was surprised at how violent and dark it was--just that the stories didn't call into question the superhero concept.

Again, the "darkness" I was referring to wasn't the violence or luridness or evil in the stories, it was the dark side of the concept of the superhero. And, yes, The Dark Knight Returns is a good example of that.

We don't need politics in super hero films. All we need is a healthy assortman of:

BAMMMM

CRASSSSHHHHHH

KAPOWWWWWW

...and my personal favorite:


"HULK SMASH!!!!!!!!"

WTF is a "snikt"?????

:santa_huh:

It's the sound of Wolverine's claws coming out.

Ah. For a moment there I thought it was the Man of Steel sporting a boner.

Turn in your geek license.

Are you referring to me? Because I double checked and that's exactly what it is.

I think Lanz's comment was directed to Black Dove.


*BAMF!*