by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright July 2012
The Dark Knight Rises and Moonrise Kingdom are night and day different movies in many ways. One way is how much I liked them. I enjoyed Moonrise Kingdom a lot. It had a pleasingly different format. It was successfully pushing the envelope on interesting ways to tell a story with a movie. Dark Knight, on the other hand, was "same-ole, same-ole", just longer and more elaborate.
The big difference that makes in my enjoyment is my brain will forgive technofiction problems if I'm seeing something novel and pleasing. If I've seen this format before, I'm a lot less forgiving, my brain notices things.
Moonrise Kingdom was structured as a story-telling tale, and the pacing and the photography of the movie supported that format wonderfully. The point of view used in the photography was novel and enjoyable. The cast was also notable in that it ranged from fresh-faced preteens to gray-haired familiar boomers and all worked well together in this interesting format. There were technofiction flaws in it, but they were forgivable because the pacing and photographic style were so strong.
I highly recommend this movie. It was fun and entertaining.
The Dark Knight Rises, sadly, was way overdone. It was long, it dragged, and it got very silly in the second half. In the end it turned out to be working through three stories, and making me wish that it had picked just one.
The first half of the movie isn't too bad, but you can tell this is now a mature franchise because the opening scene was the kind of expensive novel stunt that opened the James Bond movies as that franchise matured -- and this one is just as peripheral to the main story line. This makes it a Mood Start by my definition, and sometimes these work very well.
Beyond that opening scene two elements in the first half were fun. One was Anne Hathaway's Cat Lady acrobatics. She was unrealistic, but a lot of fun to watch. The second was the Batcycle executing U-turns. It too was totally unrealistic, but, like Cat Lady, fun to watch.
The second half of the movie got silly and chock-full of technofiction flaws. Here are the details on three problems to give you the idea (note: the first example is from the first half).
o The opening scene has one plane flying over another and evil mercenaries rappelling down to latch on to the hapless lower plane and do mischief. The problem with this is that wind force would have those mercenaries floating behind the upper plane, not dropping down underneath it. By the way, it looked like getting those two planes flying together was a tough stunt to pull off because the big plane was flying with its flaps down -- meaning, close to its landing speed, not its cruising speed.
o The bad guy, Bane, with the help of an unwitting industrialist, makes explosive concrete and gets it installed in a ring around Gotham. He then gets all the police force lured into underground tunnels, and blows up the explosive concrete to trap them in the tunnels. Eh? None of dozens of city construction inspectors happened to check the concrete grade and notice it was a bit... peculiar? All the police force goes under ground at the same time?
o Bane reads Gordon's confession about Harvey Dent from a fistful of type-written pages and this is supposed to be believable to the people of Gotham?
Those are some examples. On reflection, it seems that many of the Technofiction problems spring from the movie makers wanting to have proper tick marks on the "good way to tell an action movie story"-checklist. Here is what I mean by that.
o The hero needs to have a problem. OK, we're going to out-Twilight Twilight. Let's make Bruce Wayne inconsolably remorseful for eight years, not eight months.
o We need a ticking bomb countdown. OK, lets talk about a prototype fusion device, and have the bad guys bugger it up, and now that we've hacked the design we know precisely when it's going to blow up six months later. Oh, and because it's fusion that solves the We need something nuclear tick off, too.
o We need a big fight scene, something to parallel the hero/villain final duke-it-out. When the police come out of the tunnels they have been trapped in for six months, they move immediately to a mob-like fisticuffs battle with the bad guys in front of city hall, in spite of the fact that both sides are well equipped with small arms. Worse, this particular tick mark leads to a huge cascade of problems:
oo How to get all the police force into tunnels at the same time so they can get trapped.
oo How to keep them there for six months. They can't tunnel themselves out? How are they getting watered and fed in those tunnels in the midst of a city collapsing into anarchy? When they come out they aren't diseased, weakened or filthy? This series of flaws made the whole second half of the movie seem quite silly.
o The hero must sacrifice himself for the greater good. Batman flies a nuclear device far out over the ocean in less than a minute with a slow-moving Batcopter.
The result of these flaws is that all through the second half I was watching a silly movie. It was a sad way to end this part of the franchise. This movie should have been shorter, it would have been a lot better.
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