Answering the "Unanswered" Questions of The Dark Knight Rises

This article is in response to the numerous articles that have cropped up today citing the "unanswered questions" in The Dark Knight Rises.  I've put "unanswered questions" in quotes because I want to make clear that it doesn't mean what those words normally mean.  Rather, the phrase means "I'm confused," "I wasn't paying attention," or "paint tastes yummy, what movie is this?"  More specifically, this is a direct response to the 15 Issues raised over at slashfilm.com.  You may want to read that article because I will be addressing things directly from it.  However, it is not for the easily upset.  I'm singling out /Film not because I want to pick on them but rather because I hold them in such high regard (and because they had the highest number in a day of increasingly high numbers).

Clearly, SPOILERS below.

When and how did Bane find out Batman's identity and the location of applied sciences?
-As the original article alluded to, Bane knows Bruce is Batman because Talia knows. Talia knows because Ra's & the league of shadows knew. The league wasn't destroyed in Begins. Bruce insists that Ra's was the league but as we saw, there are many more members, most of who are not accounted for at the end of Begins. So, now you have a leaderless league & a daughter filled with vengeance. Combine those & you get Talia knowing who killed her father. As for applied sciences, once you know what you're looking for, it should be easy to find. It's connected to the Wayne building after all. "Off the books" simply means the records won't reflect it but Bane & Talia know Bruce has to get his tech somewhere. Makes sense they'd look at his company. Bane has city plans & knows Wayne Enterprises is hiding something. Not hard to see where there is a massive unaccounted for space.

Blake makes Bruce as Batman.
-While Blake's explanation my not appease you, it makes sense. He's going off of a shared pain & experiences he's felt. More importantly though, is that Bruce never denies it. So Blake's hunch or belief is simply said, & then Bruce lets him off the hook. Blake doesn't know. He assumes until Bruce confirms.

Bruce is Down, Then Back Up 
-You pointed out the knee is cured by the brace but then say he never has it the rest of the movie. There is no evidence of this. He may have always had it on. Bane snapped his back. I doubt he cared about a knee brace. As for the back, look up decompression therapy. As someone with severe back problems, that looked like it would help. Don't take my word for it though. I called my doctor. He said that was the best thing they could have done. If Bruce's back wasn't broken but rather severely herniated & dislocated, decompressing for up to 3 months would get him back on his feet, especially in movies.

Why doesn't the SEC overturn Bane's fraudulent trades? 
-Because they were confirmed by finger print. If he could get them overturned, it would take a great deal of time because billions was spent. There's not just an undo button. Finger print failsafes are put in as verification. If that is done, very tough to get around.

Miranda & Bruce have some sex but they barely know each other
-Yes, because people never have sex before they get to know each other. Please.

Bruce is a street artist?
-Seeing as how that symbol help galvanizes a city, no there isn't a better use of his time. "People need dramatic events to shake them out of apathy."

Shouldn't Bruce do better background checks?
-Talia certainly had an iron clad background to check up on. As for Selina, she can pass a cursory background check. There hasn't been serious crime in Gotham in 8 years & Bruce has been in hiding for 3. He's not running any background checks. He'd be more thorough but as Bane said victory has made everyone soft. They felt safe. 8 years will do that.

Why does Bane take Bruce to the desert?
-Bane isn't taking a break from his master plan. This is the master plan. The slow knife. He also has plenty of time. He's in no rush with Gotham. It's about making Bruce suffer.

How does Bruce get back to Gotham?
-We saw Bruce survive with no resources for years at the start of Begins. He knows how to do this. Stow away on a ship or cargo plane. They aren't watching people sneak back into Gotham. They're watch that one bridge. Arguably, no one knows Gotham better than Bruce. Sneaking in would be easy.

What the deal with the prison?
-What's the deal with the prison? This is explicit. It was once a pit to simply throw the worst people in (hence why Bane was there.) Then Ra's killed everyone there as revenge. Now Bane runs it. You don't need a guard or wardens. It's a hole. Bane throws you in there. Only one person has ever escaped. Design seems fine to me. It kills hope.

Why do all the police go into the sewers?
-They knew they had the numbers. No one could anticipate that Bane would trap them down there. They planned on overwhelming Bane who had just kidnapped the Wayne board, the first major crime in 8 years. An overreaction? Maybe, but it's a massive raid on a criminal compound. You use your numbers.

Hanna & Your Highness

Hey folks, after being whipped into shape by a journalism god, I'm back writing reviews again. Depending on when I write, they'll either appear here or hosted on other sites. Please check out my Hanna & Your Highness reviews over at Napiersnews.com (for those computer challenged folks reading this, if you click on the movie titles, it'll take you to the review. You're welcome Mom.) I will post links here to any of my reviews that appear anywhere else.

My Cinematic Alphabet

So, all the cool kids are doing this cinematic alphabet thing and so I figure why not? Who cares if I haven't written in over a year and whatever readers I may have had are long gone? Not me. There's some debate as to whether it is "favorite movie" or "best movie" so I've decided that the standard is "if I could only watch one movie at each letter ever again." Now, without any further ado, my cinematic alphabet...

Aliens

Bad Boys II

Children of Men

Dark Knight, The

Equilibrium

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Godfather Part II

Happy Gilmore

Inception

Judge Dredd

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

Memento

No Country for Old Men

Once Upon a Time in the West

Prestige, The

Quick and the Dead, The

Rocketeer, The

Se7en

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Unforgiven

V for Vendetta

Walk Hard

X2: X-Men United

Young Frankenstein

Zoolander

Avatar

Today, I am disappointed in the movie nerd community. This is a group that I have been proud to be a part of for many years. Whenever a good movie slips past the general public and is danger of falling into obscurity, the movie nerds give it the respect it deserves. Without movie nerds, I never would have seen Brick, Oldboy, or the Pusher trilogy. They're also responsible for turning me onto such television shows as Veronica Mars and Battlestar Gallactica, both of which now rank amoung my all time favorites. But as I said, today I am disappointed, because they have allowed themselves to fall victim to Fox and the James Cameron hype machine, to forfeit the need for plot and characters and drama all in the name of some pretty pictures. Avatar may be pretty, but it is dramatically inert and as emotionally hollow as the Na'vi home tree (for those who haven't seen the movie, it's a hollowed out tree.)

I don't want to come across as a James Cameron hater. There are many of them out there, but I am not one of them. Up until recently, he was my favorite director and had he chose to keep making real movies rather than take a 10 year hiatus to make documentaries, he probably still would be (the title now goes to Christopher Nolan.) Cameron is responsible for my two favorite movies of all time (Terminator 2 and Aliens), but that is not enough to make me see past the failure that is Avatar. Yes, I said failure. Any movie that takes a decade and close to $300 million to bring to fruition should be something spectacular. What we are given is far from that.

I'll get to the tech Cameron used in a minute, but as it should have been in the movie, I'll start with the foundation elements, plot and character. I made the assertion to someone earlier that the movie had no plot, only to have this person give me the Webster's definition of plot, so, yes, it has a plot in the technical sense, but not in the sense that matters. This is basically a reshashing of Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, or any other white guilt movie ever made. The focus of Avatar is a paraplegic marine named Jake, who through a crazy random happenstance becomes part of the avatar program on the distant planet Pandora. This program is designed to mix human and alien DNA to create synthetic aliens which are remotely driven by humans. If it sounds complicated, it's not, and is all explained in one line of dialogue. Through his avatar, Jake is given the ability to walk again and he slowly begins to infiltrate the Na'vi (10 foot tall blue cat people who make up Pandora's native race) to find out all of their secrets. Surpisingly (read: not suprisingly at all), Jake begins to connect with the aliens and realizes they are not savages at all, but really nice people. For $300 million, we deserve a lot better than this as a story.

Aside from being the most unimagined story ever, it is just filled with things that don't make sense. For example, the first thing that we are told about the Na'vi is that they are very hard to kill. If by hard to kill, they mean just shoot them with a gun, than yeah, it's true. Also, the year is 2154, we have the tech to create artificial aliens and drive them iwth our minds, and yet wheelchairs are still the exact same thing. Oops, didn't think that one through, did ya Jim? These are just more examples that show the script came second to the visuals, which should never happen.

Maybe, just maybe, this simple and cliche story might have worked if every character in the film hadn't been flat and one note. Sam Worthington is good as Jake, but there is no reason behind anything his character does. It's as though he's supposed to do certain things to move the "plot" along, though neither he nor audience really understands why. Neytiri, the alien warrior princess, is the most interesting character in the movie and probably gets the closest thing to a character arc in the film (yes, more happens to Jake's character, but it's all bullshitl.) Zoe Saldana gives an excellent performance and thanks to Cameron motion capture tech, we are able to see the few instances of emotion in the film (but sadly, we don't feel anything.) The best performance is the live action one of Stephen Lang, the film's bad guy, Colonel Quarrich. Quarrich is a buffed out, scarred, Ryan Seacrest looking soldier who is hell bent on solving every problems with guns and thinks humans are awesome and alien sucks. Never has anyone done so much with such garbage lines ("You're not in Kansas anymore. You're on Pandora.") Rounding out the cast is Sigourney Weaver, who's horrible, and Michelle Rodriguez, who's good.

The reason that this film took so long to make is the tech that Cameron used. It is an evolution of the motion capture tech we've seen in Lord of the Rings and King Kong. Never has it been done on this scale and never has it been done as well as Cameron has used it here. We see every twitch of the Na'vi faces, and it is really something to behold. The problem is, at no point do we ever forget we are watching mo-cap and it creates a buffer between the film and the audience. It's just hard to care about something you know isn't real at all. It's also tough to care about the Na'vi when they are nothing more than blatant stereotypes of native americans. Again, you spend $300 million creating a world and the creatures, and then you give them no traits of their own. That's just bad writing.

Not only did Cameron create the race with mo-cap, he also used digital 3D when creating the entire planet of Pandora and all of its other creatures. The various alien animals are impressive and look good, but the designs are nothing more spectacular than Pan's Labyrinth. Also, creating a world, while never seen on this scale in movies, has been done in video games for years. And that's really what Avatar is. It's a video game you can't play, and that's no fun.

At the end of the day, when you advertise your movie as a "game changer" and your tagline is "Movies will never be the same" people will expect things from your movie, and Avatar doesn't just not deliver on it, it's just a average movie by any standards. Don't get me wrong, it's very nice to look at, but if you're someone who likes a little more than some pretty pictures moving on screen, then you should probably look elsewhere.

UPDATE: Upon rereading this, it feels as though I'm saying I am the only person in the movie nerd community who sees this movie for what it is. That's not the case. There are some very good bloggers out there who have written articles on Avatar's problems, mostly notably CHUD's Devin Faraci and Cinematical's Elisabeth Rappe. There are others, and I did not mean to paint the community as a whole, though I am still disappointed in the vast majority.

Invictus

Clint Eastwood used to be a badass. Really, this guy was awesome. He's responsible for Unforgiven, which could be the best western ever (yeah, I said it.) He also made Mystic River, a great movie that would have won a ton of Oscars if not up against the juggernaut of Return of the King. Since then, he's made a movie about lesbian boxers, a WWII double feature that was only half good, a period piece that nobody saw, and a horrible movie about racist old men and his neighbors who can't act very well. So, instead of going back to smaller movies that have worked well for him, or possibly going back to westerns where he could eventually become an all time great, he makes a period piece about rugby. Damn, what happened to this guy?

Invictus suffers most from being just plain boring. When you can explain the entire movie in a sentence, you've got problems. Don't get me wrong, things happen on screen. But if you ask yourself exactly what important events happened, you realize there weren't any. Eastwood obviously didn't read my article about how to make a good sports film, because he went against pretty much everything I said, except for not casting Dennis Quaid (thank god).

Not one character in this film has any sort of depth. It took me a while to realize that I wasn't watching Morgan Freeman's character from Robin Hood, but rather a movie about Nelson Mandela. Eastwood throws some character traits about Mandela at us, but we're just told them, never allowed to see them blend in with the character and feel real. Yes, he has good intentions and wants to unite the country, but we never see what's below the surface. At least Freeman actually does things in the movie. Poor Matt Damon was a glorified extra. He gets a few lines of cliche dialogue and that's about it. His accent was pretty good though.

Another thing I said about making a sports movie is don't make it all about the big game. Good thing this movie isn't all about winning the rugby world cup. Oh wait, it is. Well shit. All we're told to care about the whole movie is this game, not the players, not the country, but this game. Luckily the actual rugby games aren't really awkwardly shot so I have no clue what's going on. Oh wait, they are. Well shit again. At least we don't have to deal with another "slo-mo, ball in the air for the final shot" cliche ending. Wait a minute, we do. What the hell Clint?

The best way to describe Invictus is that it's a movie that never had to be made. Nothing good comes from it. It'll either be forgotten in years when Eastwood gets back on track or it'll be the movie that defined him as a mediocre filmmaker for the rest of his career. Either way, nothing good. Eastwood is in a rut right now, and I really hope he gets out because he's got an eye for making certain movies. Go back to westerns Clint, and remember, nobody cares about rugby.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

As a English major, I like to think of myself as someone who is good with words and can be an eloquent writer when I so choose. I'm also legally old enough to not enjoy various alcoholic drinks (anyone who says that alcohol is better than yoohoo is a liar), so that means I'm mature, or at least I should be. I'm going to throw both of those out the window in my broad generalization of stop motion animation as "moving poop." Yes, it's juvenile, but out of all the various statements I've made on film, I don't think I've ever said anything more accurate. So, now that we've got my feelings on stop motion out of the way (seriously though, it's like some colored poop and it is moving, but I digress), let's address the film at hand, The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Throughout this horrible excuse for a movie I found myself trying to understand the origins of the title. Is it supposed to be ironic, because it's the exact opposite of fantastic? Don't worry, my lawyers are already drafting a letter to director Wes Anderson's people to deal with this blatant false advertising. While I await a response, why don't I tell you why it's so bad? From the first frame, I knew this wouldn't be a movie for me. While this is not claymation, it is still stop motion which is just the most aesthetically off-putting visual style I can ever imagine. Maybe if there was a plot or or humor or emotion then I could see past the visuals, but none of that is existent in the movie. Instead we are presented with dry attempts at humor and a plot that any 5 year old child can see through. I've never been the biggest fan of Wes Anderson's humor, but I laughed during Life Aquatic, so I can find it funny if it's done right. Instead, TFMF is a serious of zany comments and off beat jokes. From a plot standpoint, it's about a family of Fox's that keeps digging deeper to get away from a group of hunters above them. How about you stop going down and start digging sideways to get away?

While I may hate this movie (yes, Mom, I know hate is a strong word; I wish there was a stronger one), I am still enough of a movie man to be impressed when something is done right. I certainly appreciate the work that went into the animation in this movie. Each hair on the animal is an actual hair. That level of work is insane, I just wish it was used for a better movie. Anderson has a few continuous shots that impressed me and for those seconds, I forgot how much I hate stop motion. The most interesting thing that came out of this movie is something that we will never see, but is rather how Anderson got the voices. Rather than place the actors in a sound booth, he brought them to a farm and had them act out the movie. This creates a much fluid, conversational tone between the voice actors and allows the voices to feel more natural as they are actually doing the things that their animated characters are.

Whatever good things this movie has going for it are overshadowed by the dumbass narrative song sequence in the middle of the film. Remember that dance sequence in (500) Days of Summer? Well, this is the opposite of that. It takes the movie from "hmm, this is pretty bad" to "oh my god, this is horrible." I could probably come up with a witty ending to the article, but I'll leave you with what the kid behind me kept saying: "Mommy, why is that funny?" I wish I knew.

The Road

Earlier this year, I opted not to review Watchmen because I didn't trust my ability to separate the movie from my love of the source material. The same argument could be made about The Road, but I think I'm a much more awesome and accomplished blogger now (wouldn't you agree, my 5 readers?) and this is a movie that will definitely be in the awards conversation at the end of the year.

Really the quickest way to cover what I think about The Road is to say it's very good. It's right on the cusp of greatness, and I would never fault anyone for saying that it's great, or that it's just good, but as it stands now, I view it as a very good movie that lacks rewatch value. That probably comes off sounding like a shot at the movie, but it's not. The Road is a slow, dark, depressing movie that packs an emotional whallop. It is made to weigh on you well after you leave the theater. If you could watch this multiple times in a week or month, I'd say the filmmakers failed to do there job. Any movie I like as much as this, I usually see about 2 or 3 times during it's theater run. There is no way I will watch it again until blu-ray because I just can't take that much drain again.

If this sounds like a bit too much for you, then you can stop reading now (but stay and read some of the other stuff.) Everything about this movie is deliberately done. The world that director John Hillcoat creates is most realistic representation of a post-apocalyptic world I have ever seen (Yes, even more realistic than McG's Terminator Salvation.) Everything is covered with dirt and devoid of any color, including the people. The violence and visuals are uncompromising and graphic, exactly the way the book intended them to be. It is a style of filmmaking that just wears on the audience, but it is really something special to watch.

Despite taking place in this dreary, run down world, this is not an adventure movie or your typical post-apocalyptic movie. At it's heart, The Road is a film about the bond between a father and a son and how they survive once the world falls apart, which is why this film would die without outstanding performances from it's leads. Thankfully, Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee are perfect. I'll make an official prediction list closer to awards season, but Mortensen will get a nomination. His interactions with McPhee are great, and he has other fantastic moments with the other inhabitants of this world, but it is Mortensen's eyes that will get him nominated. In all my year's watching movies, I have never seen more expressive eyes. They carry all the love, sadness, and hope his character has and it is truly beautiful to see. All of the other actors are great as well, but special mention goes to The Wire alum, Michael K. Williams. His one scene with Mortensen makes for one of the most powerful in the film.

The one knock that I have on the film is that it is slow. I'm fully aware that this is not the fault of the filmmaker; I would make the case that it is Hillcoat's intention for the film to be slow. But the fact remains that the movie moves at a very slow pace, and it does not have any sort of usual plot structure. Events just unfold at varying speeds and then the film ends. This is mainly due to the novel, and I'm not faulting the film for this, just if you go to watch it, be warned. As a fan of both the book and novel though, I can say this is a near perfect adaptation, and I really couldn't see the film be done in any other way.

If it seems like my tone on this film is dark and unsure, let's pretend I'm a really good writer and I made the tone of my article mirror that of the movie. Truthfully though, this is a movie that everyone should see, because it will stay with you for days after seeing. Whether or not you like cannibals or post-apocalyptic movies, The Road is about love and family, and that is something we all can relate to.