Batwing (Dark Knight Rises)

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

I'm thinking more Spiderman 3 to be honest.

I am also getting a bad vibe off this movie, I so hope I am wrong. I've been getting that vibe ever since they announced that Bane would be the villain. Bane is such a lousy character and is surely the Batman equivalent to Venom i.e. crappy character but fan favourite 'cuz its badazz

I missed that. I was always excited about the last movie and knew Ledger would make a great Joker. Maybe thats because I was never a fan of Jack Nicholson's version.

Hrrmmm.... looking at that photo, I'm curious if the new Batmobile/Tumbler can morph into this "Batwing" configuration? It did have the Batpod in the last film.

Say what?

Except for the whole "reviving the character's cinema presence from the grave and making movies loved by 95% of the human race" thing, which I suppose depends on your definition of "verge."

It was less realistic, but more beleivable?

If that makes any more sense...

Reality is oft claimed as being unrealistic.

Stupid reality.

My only hope is that once Nolan moves on they won't reboot the franchise. If they continue on from there, we might actually be able to get some of the usual Batman trappings.

Since this is early in Batman's career I can get behind the re-purposed military gear idea; but I'm really starting to long for a little more. Heck, even the Bat-cave was only featured briefly in the first movie before being destroyed. Hopefully it'll be back for the next one, but you never know. Nolan might prefer the featureless room we had in Dark Knight.

If it had legs it looks like I might expect a live action version of Batman's Batmobile-mecha from Batman: the Brave and the Bold.

Actually, the cave wasn't destroyed, it was the mansion itself that was destroyed. And the hint is dropped at the end of Begins that when its rebuilt the cave would see a significant upgrade.

I honestly believe the fully formed world's greatest detective Batman works better in the DCAU, and the man who becomes Batman works better on the big screen. So many superhero and similar movies fail because they get caught up too much in telling the backstory of the actual story they want to tell. They get caught up in telling a boring origin before getting to the interesting part, and its clear the film makers see the origin story as a necessary evil. Nolan's trilogy seems to be one giant origin story where the origin of Batman *is* the point: there's no "ultimate Batman" he had any intention of getting to: for Nolan how Wayne becomes Batman is itself the worthy story to tell. And I think that comes across better on screen. The DCAU Batman is smug, arrogant, somewhat cold, and just a little too perfect for live action. But given the environment he gets to play off of in an animated setting, he's perfect as the straight man in his own stories, at least in my opinion.

Its possible someone else could pick up Nolan and run with it, and I'm sure someone will try, but it will be a very tricky thing to do. Schumacher, with strong encouragement from the studio, thought he could camp up Batman to make it more accessible and less dark than Burton's Batman. And maybe Schumacher's Batman would have been fine *without* Burton's Batman on the screen. But once Burton's Batman was out there, Schumacher's Batman was doomed to be compared unfavorably. Someone trying to take Nolan's Batman and amp up the Bat-things is similarly on dangerously thin ice. A really good script and director can certainly do it, but the margin for error is extremely low.

Hopefully. Though with Nolan's refusal to use any of the more fantastical elements of the Batman mythos, I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up looking more like an underground bunker than a cave.


Eh, I always saw it more like when Sherlock Holmes told Watson that understating his abilities was just as bad as overstating them.

It was like; sure, he acted like he knew best. But mostly because he usually DID.

I get a little frustrated with Nolan's movies (excellent movies) because I'm constantly seeing the possibilities that will never happen. I'm thinking about how great characters like Poison Ivy or Robin could be in movies of this caliber.

But since Nolan deems such characters and concepts as too silly for his serious Batman movies, we'll never get the chance to see them.

That thing just looks bulky and clumsy to me.

I'm sure that's the final cut too.

You must be new to special effects.

Well, my definition would be taking a successful franchise and suddenly compromising it because he was not willing to taper his creative vision with the understanding that its still an iconic franchise with certain expectations from a multi-generational fan-base. Screw with too many of those expectations and "kaboom..." that 95% turns on you like a pack of rabid badgers and all your prior deeds are swept away as you become "the man who destroyed *insert name of your franchise here* " instead of the man who revived it.

Don't get me wrong, I really like Nolan's Batman films. But this one seems to be taking a bit more liberty with established canon than the others. Bane seems to have been radically changed, Catwoman seems... well... un-Catwomanly, at least in appearance, and now a "Batmech" that only seems comfortable in Miller's "The Dark Night Returns."

Of course, I concede that we're only seeing out-of-context production snippets here and there, and Nolan has been know to misdirect the rumor mill. But so far, what I'm seeing doesn't have the same "wow" factor that the peeks from the first two films did. I want to see it blow the first two films away and prefer to hear "Clearly the best of the three. Nolan leaves the franchise with bang..." and not "Of the three films, Batman 3 was the let down. Nolan lost his focus, simply not being able to keep up the momentum he built with the first two films. A planned reboot is already in discussion"

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

"Let me get this straight. You think that your client, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante, and spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands?"




-k