Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice review

Warning: This review contains spoilers.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is the child of two parents. On the creative side, there is a tradition of DC's two flagship superheroes who sometimes fight. On the business side, there is the invisible presence of Marvel's cinematic Avengers franchise, which has produced blockbuster after blockbuster, tying several successful sub-series together to build a massive, shared audience of devotees – and revenue. DC's superheroes have had success on the big screen only as individuals, and only occasionally. Unmistakably, Warner Brothers is now trying to build on the success of 2013's Man ofSteel as the anchor of a multi-hero megafranchise like Marvel's cinematic Avengers (and, for that matter, X-Men).

In the world of BVS, Superman's debut took place in a world where an elder Batman has been fighting crime in Gotham City for twenty years now and sociopathic businessman Luthor are already prominent, as had been hinted via allusions back in MOS.

BVS provides two strong impressions: First, it is for most of its ample running length absolutely magnificently scripted, directed, and acted. The photography is gorgeous. Characterization is well-rounded yet recognizable as versions of the archetypes from comicdom. This is a very well made movie. The second impression: This movie contains perhaps the least fun of any superhero movie ever. Astonishingly, it begins and ends with funerals.

To a considerable extent, those two outstanding aspects of the film hold most true for the first hour and a half. Then, as the careful setup turns to climactic action (there is plenty of non-climactic action earlier) the script tosses some red meat for fanboys and fangirls to cheer, and the film turns into a movie. This is perhaps a good thing, because, to fulfill the goal of launching a major cinematic universe, BVS needs to convince moviegoers that it's not going to be a bleak, depressing (albeit well-written) cinematic universe.

No one will leave the theatre complaining that there wasn't enough movie or love for DC source material. BVS covers the themes of three or four landmark DC works. It has about a half-dozen lines from The Dark Knight Returns, which is unquestionably the central source from printed media, but it also features a dream scene right out of Red Son, a massive plot to frame Superman a la Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, and then launches right into the Death of Superman story while introducing the Justice League-to-be very economically. There is even a scene where Lois Lane dives into water to recover some kryptonite just like Miss Tessmacher did in Superman: The Movie. Perry White mentions Superman's origin year of 1938 in some canny dialogue, and there's a kidnapping in Smallville reminiscent of the early Byrne issues of Superman.

Despite the heavy borrowing, the overall plot is original. About half of it had already been communicated in the trailers. The film opens with cinema's nth retelling of the Waynes' murder. At their funeral, young Bruce falls into a cave at Wayne Manor and – this part is just a dream – bats swirl around him, flying him back to the surface. Then we see a second defining trauma in Bruce Wayne's life: His physical presence in Metropolis during the Superman-Zod battle that killed some people Wayne was close to.

We flash forward 18 months: Superman has become the world's greatest hero… but nobody whatsoever seems to be happy about it. Awed, sometimes grateful, but nobody in the movie is happy, so they aren't happy when Superman saves someone's life, either. Batman, meanwhile, has become darker in his operations, branding the criminals – the news calls them his victims – with a hot bat symbol. Superman and Batman intensely dislike one another from afar – Superman loathing the cruelty that Batman shows and Batman loathing the lack of controls in place to stop Superman. This is a sentiment shared exactly by a U.S. Senator and a giggling, rich, brilliant, and mentally ill Lex Luthor. All three – Wayne, Luthor, and Senator Finch – undertake plans to take control back from Superman. As it turns out, Luthor is the master chess player directing the others like pieces on his board. Knowing that he can't hurt Superman directly, Luthor gives Wayne and the world more reasons to fear Superman, using his own gunmen to cause collateral-damage deaths during a Superman mission in Africa. When Superman arrives in Washington to testify before Congress, the film unleashes one of its biggest surprises when a massive explosion caused by Luthor kills the committee and many civilians Superman is unharmed, but the world wonders if he somehow caused it.

Batman is, in the meantime, playing the world's greatest detective, working on a case that leads towards an unknown master criminal who turns out to be Lex Luthor, importing kryptonite via ship from MOS's Indian Ocean battle site back to Gotham/Metropolis. Batman infiltrates Luthor's headquarters, stealing the kryptonite for himself, which was Luthor's plan all along. Bruce Wayne keeps catching sight of a gorgeous, elegant, and mysterious Diana Prince who is also investigating Luthor. While following the breadcrumbs that Luthor intentionally left in order to drive Batman into battle with Superman, Batman also finds Luthor's computer files indicating the existence of four meta-humans – Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Flash, and Aquaman. Batman also sees the Flash in a dream and/or interdimensional interlude reminiscent of the Flash speaking to him early in Crisis on Infinite Earths, in which Flash gives Batman a warning – one that's hard to hear, but apparently useful. Meanwhile, Clark Kent has become Batman's biggest detractor, which leads to Superman zooming down and threatening Batman, telling him to end his bat career now, or else.

Luthor plays his first plan to kill Superman just past the film's midway point. To summon Superman, he throws Lois Lane from the top of the LexCorp building. She's safe, but Luthor shows Superman photos of a bound and tortured Martha Kent. Luthor tells Superman that Martha Kent will die unless Superman kills Batman. With no choice, Superman goes to Gotham to try to talk to Batman, who is ready for him in a battle a la Dark Knight Returns. Sonics and machine guns slightly irritate Superman, but kryptonite powder/gas has its intended effect, allowing Batman to pummel Superman for a while. The gas wears off, giving Superman the upper hand, but Batman fires a second dose at him, beats him for a while, then lifts a kryptonite spear over him. Begging for his life, Superman tells Batman that he has to save Martha. Here the film catches one of the DCU's least-noticed quirks – that Martha Wayne and Martha Kent share a first name. Hearing his late mother's first name, Batman becomes insane with curiosity – why did Superman say "Martha"? Lois Lane arrives in time to tell Batman why, and this intel ends the fight, making the two men allies.

While Batman saves Martha Kent, Superman goes to corral Luthor, who unleashes his Plan B – a creature he created by combining his own DNA with that of General Zod. This is sort of a combination of the origin stories of Kon-El and Bizarro, but the result is unmistakably Doomsday.  This raging, superpowered behemoth begins to pummel Superman in a battle reminiscent of MOS's Superman-Zod battle. Suddenly, Wonder Woman shows up, and the two superpowered heroes swap blows with Doomsday while Batman manuevers around the battle scene, looking to make a blow of his own. Wonder Woman's skill and zeal in fighting Doomsday is one of the lightest moments in the film, but only manages to hold the monster off for a while. Superman retrieves the kryptonite spear that Batman crafted and, after resisting Lois Lane's pleas for him not to do so, flies in to plunge the weapon into Doomsday's heart. At the same time, the monster plunges a massive, bony spear into Superman's chest, killing him. Wonder Woman and Batman stand over the two dead combatants.

Now Superman is dead and the world knows that Clark Kent was his alter ego. Superman has a glorious funeral with, suddenly, America's gratitude. Bruce Wayne tells Diana Prince that they must find the other superheroes and prepare to fight as a team. Luthor, from a prison cell, gloats to Batman that by killing Superman, he has "rung the bell" to summon a new, dark force, which seems to introduce Darkseid as the next Justice League film's villain. Bruce Wayne and Lois Lane mourn at Superman's funeral, but in the film's final moment, we see Superman's coffin and get a sign that there will be a resurrection.

There are virtually no missteps in Batman v Superman. It's wonderfully crafted: Every scene, every shot, every line of dialogue achieves just what the creators intended. It's also relentlessly dark and brooding, with sex trafficking, child molesters, torture, and terrorism just part of the background. This cinematic DCU, even with superheroes, is worse than our own world. Warner Brothers is betting that people will enjoy visiting this dark place one or two times a summer for the next few years. I'm not sure of the audience they are hoping for, but they seem to be intent on an audience closer to that of The Godfather than Superman: The Movie. Serious comic book fans may enjoy seeing their heroes in such realistic fight scenes. Families and couples on dates may find themselves watching Avengers movies at the next movie screen over.

Man of Steel Review (spoilers)

Man of Steel will inevitably be compared to the first two movies in the Salkind franchise starring Christopher Reeve. Fans of the comics will tally up the stories it references, and where it diverges from them. Its visuals, at times lyrical, at times more frantic than a fork in a garbage disposal, are a tour de force. It’s well acted. The dialogue is never strained. And yet, I wonder who it’s for, and perhaps what it’s for.

The earlier Superman franchise followed the example of the character’s history in establishing the Kryptonian lad’s birth and journey to Earth, then an early period in which he faces ordinary menaces like aviation disasters and bank robberies, before things get wickedly sci fi. This time around, not so. This Superman debuts, at least in the suit, precisely to face a Kryptonian invasion of Earth, with nary a cat saved from a tree, nor a Daily Planet article, before he has to face Zod’s army.

Along the way, we are given scenes from Clark Kent’s boyhood and adulthood, with jumps forward and backward in time. His adult phase may remind one of Birthright, although he’s at sea rather than in Africa. His boyhood is close to the one portrayed in Geoff Johns’ Secret Origin, a sort of sorrowful time when young Clark wonders “Why me?” Johns’ take on Krypton and its pre-cataclysmic politics are also used in Man of Steel, with Jor-El and Zod contemplating an alliance before they split. Krypton’s destruction is blamed on a form of fracking, one of two ways the movie takes a jab at the safety of petroleum production. The movie’s main plot most closely resembles the Eradicator plot from the Nineties’ comics, but it is Zod and his fellow criminals who wish to terraform Earth into a new Krypton.

In terms of plot, the biggest surprises take the form of three deaths. Jor-El does not live to see Krypton explode, dying at Zod’s hand shortly before the planet dies with him. However, Russell Crowe gets more than a little screen time, speaking as an avatar so often it’s almost as though he never died. A more surprising twist on comic book convention is that Jonathan Kent dies in full view of Clark in a way that is easily preventable, but it would blow Clark’s secret identity. Father has convinced son that the identity is more important than human life, so Clark, hemmed in by the unfortunate presence of witnesses, stands by as Jonathan goes smiling to his doom. Finally, Superman kills Zod by snapping his neck. The rationale is very compelling, but here any acknowledgement of the gravity of that act passes within seconds. When Superman killed Zod in the comics of 1988, the event haunted him for over a year.

Death is simply quite common in this movie. It’s hard to imagine that the destruction wrought by the Kryptonian villains could have killed any fewer than 100,000 victims, and we see many of those onscreen. These Phantom Zone ex-cons make Superman II’s villains look like peaceniks.

Scenes in this movie are exceptionally well photographed and rendered. You see set pieces right out of Avatar, Sweet Hereafter, even Poltergeist. The battle scenes don’t sacrifice the overwhelming and savage speed that Kryptonians possess to make it easier to follow. They move like gunshots, seemingly materializing and dematerializing because they move so fast, either under their own power, or after being punched, which tends to send them on a 14-mile path of destruction through at least a few buildings.

Ultimately, everything in the movie is well done, but I’m not sure who will rave that they loved it. The luscious, ponderous beauty of some scenes look like Terrence Malick directed them. But does anyone who appreciates that also appreciate CGI battles with skyscrapers exploding into flames? I think a lot of people will appreciate at least one aspect of Man of Steel or another. But there’s a rift between its careful, thoughtful camerawork and the kinetic action. If this reboot earns a second entry in the series, it will be interesting to see if they try to keep the tone or discard it for something more lively.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Note: This review is structured in two distinct parts. The first part describes the film without revealing details of fact beyond what could be easily deduced from the trailers and other pre-release promotional materials. The second part includes full spoilers in a more complete review.

I. Non-Spoiler Review

Eight years have passed since the final moments of The Dark Knight. Harvey Dent, his crimes hidden by a lie that Batman and Jim Gordon agreed to, has been remembered as a martyr. Some tough anti-crime legislation in his name has allowed the city to put most major crime away. Batman has not been seen since then, and as we all know very well, that absence must end when a new threat arises.

The first of the movie's many acts is stolen by Anne Cathaway as Selina Kyle. She's as confident and glamorous as any Catwoman you've imagined, without ever for a moment trying too hard. She may have been tacked to the plot as an add-on or even merchandising gimmick, but at times the gimmick exceeds the main story in worth.

Though whatever shortcomings the movie may hold, it's not for a lack of inspired performances. Tom Hardy's performance as Bane is brilliant, as is the character himself. One imagines many action casting decisions over the years where a powerfully-built brute is chosen and capable acting is sacrificed. Not here. With a megaphone-like voice emanating from his mask, Bane intimidates you in your seat in three ways at once, for his diabolical evil, his great power, and the quickness of his mind. Neither the script nor Hardy try to make this role bigger than the last movie's Joker, but there is nothing to apologize for in the choice of villain.

Christian Bale gets to play Bruce Wayne / Batman many ways in this one. As a scraggy shut-in, a man of uncertain will to live, and with - in comparison to the earlier films - more (and more comprehensible) time in the bat mask itself.

This is a film with many, many nods to comic books and graphic novels. Fans will challenge one another to see who can catch more sly references, though some of them are exceedingly obvious to anyone who knows anything about Batman. More front and center, fans may ask themselves which previous Batman opus is the most important inspiration for this plot. There is no one right answer.

For me, and I suspect for by far most viewers, this film will languish in comparison to The Dark Knight because it lacks, for the most part, that film's moral complexity. TDK, as I argued in my review, transcended the super hero genre entirely, and served as a workable crime movie of the second, if not the first, rank. The Dark Knight Rises is an action movie. Even in comparison to Batman Begins, this is a movie of the pre-Nolan genre of super hero movie, and no matter how well it carries off that task, it will have people second-guessing the Joker's line from TDK: "You've changed things. There's no going back." This is an epic story, in more ways than one. But all of the things that made Nolan's Batman remarkable were put back on the shelf. One wonders how, having earned the plaudits he did for the previous movies, he could be so willing to go back. This film might have served as a good third movie in the previous Batman series. If it had come then, no one would have complained. Coming after TDK, the appeal will have to be in just how well it does as an epic.

II. Spoiler Review. Very big spoilers follow. After a few blank lines, they begin. You were warned.

For eight years, Bruce Wayne has been shut in his home, reclusive and so beaten up from his days as Batman (perhaps just that last fall that killed Harvey Dent) that he cannot walk easily. Gotham has moved on and it thinks it's doing fine. It seems fine, but that's because nobody knows that Bane is coming. Like a freight train he's coming, and in a sharp distinction from the comics' Knightfall, he's not after Batman. He's simply after Gotham. Like R'as al-Ghul and the Joker before him, destruction is his goal, not profits. In fact, we will learn early on, he like Bruce was trained by the League of Shadows. As we learn while his plan is underway, he in fact wants to pick up precisely where R'as left off. Destroying Gotham so it may begin a renewal is his only aim. He is perfectly willing to overcome Batman when that proves to be necessary, but that is an afterthought.

In the first of many events shocking in terms of the Batman comics' mythology, Selina steals Martha Wayne's very pearl necklace right in front of Bruce's eyes. She's very skilled, morally gray (a thief, but not a destroyer), and she helps wake Bruce from his long sleep. In fact, she's working for Bane, although she doesn't appreciate the evil she's serving.

Bruce somehow manages, after years of hobbling on a cane, to rush out to challenge Bane's gang and end up escaping the police. The speed of his recovery is inexplicable; was he insufficiently motived to walk normally during the last eight years? The dialogue of the police officers is drawn right from Batman's reappearance in The Dark Knight Returns; moments later, when Selina disappears on him, he says, "So that's how that feels," a line Bruce says about Superman in Kingdom Come. So we see the homages are in full force. Even more so when we find out that Bane's first caper served simply to bankrupt Bruce.

As Bane's evil plan moves forward, Jim Gordon works through a Nolan favorite, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Detective Blake, who gets a curious amount of screentime. Bruce gets in bed with another Nolan regular, Marion Cotillard as Miranda Tate. Both of these serve very well all film long before escalating dramatically in importance during the final minutes.

Bane of course breaks the poorly-conditioned Bruce in a fight which is no fight at all. He keeps Bruce in custody, in a death trap that's almost impossible to escape from, which of course means that he escapes from it. The mood here has a touch of Batman, R.I.P. to it in that Bane wants Bruce to suffer psychologically, broken, and watch the harm he does to Gotham. The harm he does is brilliantly effective. Using a nuclear weapon to hold the whole city hostage indefinitely, Bane creates a city cut off from the United States, clearly a nod to No Man's Land, right down to the chalk bat-symbols written on walls.

Of course, Bruce gets back into shape, escapes his prison, and goes back to Gotham to stop Bane. It is in carrying out these obligatory steps where the film is by far the weakest. It is so formulaic that this all must happen, we wonder where the brilliance of The Dark Knight went. It is obligatory, and takes a long time in unfolding. The scenes of Bane's destructive three-month dictatorship over Gotham (with Jonathan Crane returning as a judge in a kangaroo court) come as a refreshing break between scenes of Bruce getting in shape which may as well have had the Rocky theme playing over them.

Bruce does return, and he does get the best of Bane in a fight. As soon as he threatens to kill Bane, the movie becomes something else entirely. Suddenly, Miranda (note, the wizard's daughter from Shakespeare's The Tempest) drives a dagger into Batman's ribs, and the comic fan may recall that in Bane's second attack on Gotham, he was allied with Talia. So here, where their backstories are intertwined in a bit of explication with scenes of a child whom we thought was Bane in flashback was actually Talia. Her knife attack seems fatal, and given the movie's promotional claims that the legend ends, we wonder if it might be. In fact, being bled by a woman is Robin Hood's death, and this simple act resonates with a vast web of comics (and meta-comics) lore: Alan Moore cited Robin Hood as the sort of legend that Batman ought to be, and Neil Gaiman gave Batman such a death (among several) in Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader? That story comes back in yet another reference as Batman escapes the injury to lash the nuclear bomb to his flying "Bat" vehicle and soars off to sea, getting far enough that the detonation spares the city, but takes him with it, very like a sacrificial death Batman chooses in Gaiman's story. By this time, Bane and Talia are dead. The city is saved.

More twists await. While Bruce (whose secret was at last made known to Gordon) has gone, we see that Detective Blake, himself an orphan, is preparing to play a very Batman-like role which will begin in the near future. The kicker: We learn that his real name is Robin. And for the twist of twists, a la The Dark Knight Returns, we see a final sighting, real unless it's Alfred's wishful thinking, of Bruce and Selina romancing one another in Florence.

This is a movie full of wonderful elements, but for the reasons I've already noted, it sags terribly in the middle act, and aspires to something so much less than it could have been. This will not be remembered as the best movie of the series - more likely the worst, but the worst of a very good trio. And though it endures poorly, it ends well. And isn't that what a super hero story is supposed to do?

The Dark Knight (2008)

When a rabbit is chased by a dog, it zig-zags, making abrupt, unpredictable deviations to its path. This is good work by Nature. Dogs, with their larger stride, can run faster than a rabbit in a straight line, while the smaller rabbit has a shorter turning radius. Each turn is executed as soon as the rabbit thinks of it, but the dog has to observe the turn and react, beginning it later, then completing it more slowly. The randomness is key to the rabbit's success. If the dog could predict each turn, it would make it sooner. Unpredictability is a valuable thing for the weaker party.

This dynamic has been part of the Batman-Joker relationship since the start in 1940, except the Joker is the predator. He knows he can't win face-to-face. "You didn't think I'd risk losing the battle for Gotham's soul in a fist fight with you?", Heath Ledger's Joker asks Batman. He notches all of his successes with the things he does when Batman's not around. He, like the Joker in Batman #1, conceals death traps so sneaky that they kill his intended victim even when the cops are standing guard nearby. He consistently plants bombs where he needs them, and when he delivers an ultimatum, he conceals reality, creating reverse appearances. His thugs are really hostages. The address where he says Rachel is being held is actually where Harvey is. His phone is a detonator.

Reversing course is built into his goals as well as his means. He twice hopes for Batman to kill him, and once puts a loaded gun to his head while someone with excellent reason to shoot him has his finger on the trigger. He accumulates a mountain of cash, then burns it. How does he get the upper hand on Batman in the locked room interrogation scene? By not minding how badly he gets beaten.
How does he walk into a room full of mobsters and walk out unharmed? With explosives under his jacket. The Joker is a suicide bomber who wants to watch the world burn. Yes, this movie was made with the September 11 attacks in mind. The Dark Knight shines in part because of the haunting performance by Ledger, who didn't live to see the film debut, giving demonic conviction to Christopher Nolan's vision of a Joker for the post-9/11 world, and to beat him, Batman has to employ the wiretapping tactics of the post-9/11 authorities, with all the moral uncertainty that Morgan Freeman voices as Lucius Fox.

But the Joker, like Batman, is a comic book character, and The Dark Knight succeeds most because it is the first comic book movie to completely cross genres into the crime thriller. There are brilliant comic book moments along the way, not least when Batman snags a criminal mastermind from a skyscraper in Hong Kong.

But for a large fraction of the film, there is no masked crimefighter or crazy clown on the screen, and in those scenes, this is not that kind of movie. When Aaron Eckhart portrays a district attorney and Gary Oldman portrays a cop, these are performances that could fit right into a Martin Scorsese film and no one would doubt the actors' or the script's or the direction's credentials. This is a good film without asking us to forgive the pandering to comic book conventions. Never better, in fact, than when Christian Bale's Batman stands on a rooftop with the aforementioned pair and brings a moment from the graphic novel The Long Halloween to the cinema and makes it work when Commissioner Gordon reacts to Batman's sudden disappearance by explaining to Harvey Dent, "He does that."

Bale succeeds again by playing Batman smart, and playing him sane. He has no wild compulsion to play Batman and is driven more than anything else to find a way to stop having to be Batman, by finding a better hero, a non-comic-book hero, in Harvey Dent, whose nickname The White Knight provides the real foil to the title. It's a heady moment when a super hero film ends with the hero telling the man with the gun, "You were the best of us." And as Batman takes the rap and flees the scene, we get a murky ending where Batman, with inspired fisticuffs and a couple of lies, won the battle for Gotham's soul, but is now on the run, and has begun a disappearance from his hero identity that will give the Nolan films an opportunity to conclude by showing us what happens when the Dark Knight returns.

Dark Knight Rises Trailer

A year from now, director/producer Christopher Nolan's third Batman film will bring the highly-successful series to a conclusion. It is clear from his comments that "conclusion" is a more appropriate word than "end." For creative reasons -- certainly not lack of audience response -- the third film marks Nolan's intended conclusion, with the legend being given an appropriate ending. As Nolan has earlier said:

"Without getting into specifics, the key thing that makes the third film a great possibility for us is that we want to finish our story. And in viewing it as the finishing of a story rather than infinitely blowing up the balloon and expanding the story... I'm very excited about the end of the film, the conclusion, and what we've done with the characters. My brother has come up with some pretty exciting stuff. Unlike the comics, these things don't go on forever in film and viewing it as a story with an end is useful. Viewing it as an ending, that sets you very much on the right track about the appropriate conclusion and the essence of what tale we're telling. And it hearkens back to that priority of trying to find the reality in these fantastic stories."

The same information is indicated by three taglines spread throughout the recently released trailer:

EVERY HERO HAS A JOURNEY
EVERY JOURNEY HAS AN END
THE EPIC CONCLUSION TO THE DARK KNIGHT LEGEND

The scenes in the trailer speak in particular to that last word... the trailer begins with the voice of Liam Neeson (portraying R'as al-Ghul) delivering the same soliloquy heard in the trailer for first Nolan Batman film, Batman Begins. In those lines, he tells a younger Bruce Wayne (at the time, al-Ghul's protege) that he can make himself into something more than a man -- a legend.

The whole business of epics, legends, journeys, and ends points to something bigger and more traditional than what "epic" has come to mean lately. Nolan is declaring here that he intends to make his series of three films a finite account of Batman's career with a beginning, middle, and end. This stands in contrast to earlier media. Batman has usually been presented as a serial, with the next comic book, news strip, or television episode guaranteed to begin more or less where the last one ended, leaving the status quo fundamentally unchanged when each episode ends.

The business, however, of ending the Batman story is not a new proposition. Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which obviously lent its name nearly verbatim to this new film, rocked the comic book world for, among other reasons, depicting a late-career Batman who returns from retirement to a more decisive conclusion. While this was not completely original, it was much more vivid and mature than earlier stories. The momentous nature of what Miller had done was received with admiration by star comic book writer Alan Moore, who in proposing a never-published story of his own, commented:

"one of the things that prevents superhero stories from ever attaining the status of true modern myths or legends is that they are open ended. An essential quality of a legend is that the events in it are clearly defined in time... in order to meet the commercial demands of a continuing series, they can never have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human as well as falling far short of true myth... providing a fitting and affective capstone to the Batman legend... makes it just that... a legend rather than an endlessly meandering continuity."

So that is what Nolan is doing. How will he go about it? It is not clear how much time or how many events elapse between the end of the last film, the monumentally successful The Dark Knight, and the action in this film (or, for that matter, this trailer). We see Commissioner Gordon badly ailing, probably from injuries suffered in the line of duty, speaking, it seems to a Bruce Wayne whose true identity Gordon knows. Perhaps Gordon's injuries are owing to the absence of Batman in the fields of urban combat. Perhaps he was injured specifically to bait Batman and draw him out.

That last interpretation works with the comic book backstory of the villain shown in this clip, the villain Bane who literally and figuratively "broke" Batman in the 1993-1994 story called Knightfall. Bane first exhausted Batman by forcing him to fight many smaller battles first, then took the weary caped crusader down in single combat. The trailer illustrates a fight between Batman and Bane when the exhaustion has already taken place. Note the body language of Batman in this clip, slowed down four times from the original:

In the first frame, Batman's body is angled oddly to our left. Then he teeters his way back to the vertical, bouncing as though he is trying to summon what is left of his last reserves of energy. His mouth is open, indicating that he is breathing hard. He is perhaps on a nonstable surface -- despite the low ceiling and confining spaces, the ropes to the sides also sway as the two men move. A chant in Bane's native Spanish seems to beg Bane to kill Batman:"Matalo, matalo, Bane, Bane." It should also be noted that a third figure appears in the distance, and it seems as though he is filming the fight, no doubt for Bane to use the film to disgrace his physically beaten foe, adding literally insult to injury. We can be sure that Batman will fall, and then rise.

It is unclear if the conversation we see between Gordon and Wayne takes place before or after Bane has taken Batman down -- probably after. The "pep talk" quality of the speech is unmistakably like that between R'as and Wayne in the first movie and trailer and between Alfred and Wayne in the Dark Knight trailer.


Gordon: We were in this together and then you were gone. And now this evil rising. The Batman must come back.
Wayne: But if he doesn't exist anymore...
Gordon: He must, he must.

All of these pep talks go to the first movie's theme, perhaps far too simple, that Batman's story is at its core the lesson, "Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up." It also suggests countless other stories before The Dark Knight Returns in which a warrior who has left the battle rejoins it to avenge a fallen friend. In a story no less epic than the Iliad, Achilles returns to the battles to avenge the death of Patroclus, and Achilles sets off at once to kill the very same foe who killed his friend. In the end, all three are dead.

If Nolan really has the power to kill the franchise, he might have the power to kill Batman in the final minutes of the film, giving the hero the sort of Robin Hood ending that Moore described earlier, and that Neil Gaiman scripted in a recent comic book story which related the story of Batman's death. Then again, unlike Patroclus, Gordon seems to survive his victimization. If Patroclus lives in this retelling of Western Civilization's first great epic, then perhaps Achilles does too.