Stormy Seas

So, ye come seekin’ adventure and salty old pirates, eh? Sure, you’ve come to the proper place. But keep a weather eye open, mates. Davy Jones is waiting for them what don’t obey…

If anyone, anywhere, has been following Mike Overthinks Movies from the start, you’ll remember that I began this blog in July of 2013 with an analysis of the original Pirates of the Caribbean film, which was 10 years old at the time. Now, over 1000 days and – wow! – seventeen posts later, it’s time for the sequel, Dead Man’s Chest, to commemorate the big 1-0. In its honor, I’m returning to that wonderful world of swashbuckling and high-seas adventure to reunite with our good friends Will Turner, Elizabeth Swann, and, of course, Captain Jack Sparrow.

For the most part, my 2013 self had nothing but good things to say about The Curse of the Black Pearl – mostly because it was, and still is, a great movie. Unfortunately, it is my sad duty to report that Dead Man’s Chest, while still a lot of fun at times, doesn’t quite live up to the standards of its predecessor. In fact, I think there are more than a few easily identifiable ways to improve the film that we ultimately got. But critiquing an existing film while also pitching a hypothetical one could get a bit confusing, so to help me with the workload, I’ve brought back my original co-host: a man who’s always ready to suggest a more pragmatic course of action, even when he knows from experience that it will be completely ignored. Please welcome back to the blog, Mr. Joshamee Gibbs.

Someday, someone will listen to you, Mr. Gibbs. It won't be as entertaining to watch, but it will be much safer for everyone involved.

I will discuss the movie as it is, and Mr. Gibbs will suggest, in that way that only he can, alternatives for a movie that might have been. Savvy?

I’ll do my best to prevent this from being a piecemeal analysis, but the fact is, Dead Man’s Chest is kind of a piecemeal movie. It holds together as a narrative, and few to none of its individual scenes are outright bad, but it never finds enough of an identity to cohere into a satisfying whole. It is so readily accepting of its status as a trilogy’s “middle movie” that it resigns itself to actually being all middle – something that just doesn’t fly when the previous film had a beginning, middle and pretty definitive end. To sum it up in a sentence, Dead Man’s Chest is so preoccupied with what it could be, or will be, that it forgets to actually be anything.

One of the greatest strengths of the first Pirates film was its ability to integrate a clear personal story into its high adventure trappings. For those with fuzzy memories, Black Pearl is the story of Will Turner, a man with an almost irrational hatred of pirates, who gets caught up in the dealings of pirates, ultimately befriending one and even learning to accept his own identity as a second-generation pirate. That story may not win anyone any awards, but it does add a genuine internal conflict on top of the external one, and while it’s a bit on-the-nose, it’s not at all superficial. On the summer blockbuster curve, that puts it above average.

Dead Man’s Chest, on the other hand, aims too high, trying to juggle three main characters instead of one, and not finding room for any of them to have a legitimate character arc. That said, all three members of our core trio do have specific conflicts that they’re working through; Elizabeth’s story, in which she decides that independence fits her better than any corset ever did, lands quite well as written, but is also given the least screen time. Will… well, Will mainly learns to hate Jack again, thus threatening to undo all the first film’s work. (The rest of his story sets up one of several hooks for the third movie, as he vows to move heaven and earth to resolve his daddy issues.)

In the end, though, it’s Jack Sparrow who holds the best claim to Dead Man’s Chest’s dramatic through line. Most of the perils our heroes face in the film are the various results of Jack’s selfishness and willingness to throw others under the bus. It’s only in the end that Jack finds his courage and saves the lives of his companions through a heroic sacrifice that leads to his death.

Spoiler Alert

Or at least, that’s what we’re supposed to feel has happened. As far as the execution goes… we’ll get to that later, but for now, let’s just say it leaves a lot to be desired. In the meantime, it occurs to me that the best way to tackle all this may be in simple chronological order. Don’t worry, I promise I’ll skim.

Dead Man’s Chest begins as Will and Elizabeth’s dishearteningly rainy wedding is broken up by the arrival of the series’ new – or is it only? – Big Bad: Lord Cutler Beckett, of the East India Trading Company. I’m glad to give credit where it’s due, and Beckett is a wonderful villain here. He’s overflowing with power and smug superiority, but he’s not particularly imposing on his own. Instead, what makes him dangerous is what he stands for. This dude is imperialism personified, and he is not nice. He’ll be featured more prominently in the third installment – something that could be said about a lot of things in this movie – but he makes the most of his handful of scenes here. Also to the film’s credit, Will and Elizabeth are pulled back into the pirate world specifically because they helped Jack escape at the end of Black Pearl. Picking that plot thread back up gives the continuation of the story (and especially the continued inclusion of these two landlubbers) a stronger sense of purpose than if, say, Jack had sailed up out of the blue requesting their help, Doc Brown style.

Anyway, Beckett sends Will to find Jack, Governor Swann accidentally breaks a sconce off the wall in a weirdly specific callback to the first film, and the game is afoot!

My big problems with Dead Man’s Chest, such as they are, begin and end with the Pelegostos tribe. They are, to put it bluntly, a twenty-minute diversion that adds nothing to the film but an action sequence and brings the plot to a screeching halt. No information is gained, no one has any emotional breakthroughs, no relationships are formed. Pintel and Ragetti show up, the group is almost eaten, and then they aren’t. End scene. Making matters worse, their inclusion is pure non-sequitur. Sure, Jack has a reason to head for the nearest land, but it’s a big leap from there to “cannibals.” In fact, this sequence might just be the only ‘AND THEN’ transition in the entire series. And as we learned three years ago, anything that comes after an “and then” probably doesn’t need to be in your movie to begin with.

Mr. Gibbs Says: It be no secret that that woman scares the bejeezus out o’ me, but when I saw the Captain was in such dire straits, I urged him to head upriver to Tia Dalma straightaway. Though she be weird and wicked, she’s also the surest source of safe harbor ‘round these parts. And while I may have come to enjoy the antics of those two dolts Pintel and Ragetti… I’m sure they would have found their way to Tortuga in time. As usual, though, Jack didn’t listen. And I got stuck hangin’ in a cage o’ bones with nuthin’ to show for it.

Okay, I guess the Pelegostos do bring one thing to the table: they introduce the idea of a god in human form, which will be crucial to the third movie. But that’s just not worth twenty minutes. Twenty minutes! Thanks to these guys, Davy Jones doesn’t appear until an hour into the movie. Spend that time on character instead. Or better yet, lop it off completely – this behemoth’s too long as is.

Once safely reunited, Jack and Will head off to meet Tia Dalma, who Mr. Gibbs and I agree Jack should have gone to see in the first place. It’s here that we finally learn something about Davy Jones. (Remember him? The main villain of the movie?) He was once a man, we’re told, but he was hurt so badly by a woman that he cut out his own heart. This idea, of either affirming or rejecting the futility of love, of numbing yourself to pain rather than facing it, sure sounds like it could be an interesting theme to hang the movie on. In fact, its mere presence gives Jones a lot more depth – the brief glimpse of him sobbing over the keys of his organ is a wonderfully evocative character moment – but it lacks any sort of follow through. There is a bit of a parallel to be found in Jack, who runs from his pain, but that feels to me like a reach, if not quite a stretch. Still, if that works for you, feel free to swap this particular criticism out for kudos – I don’t mind. The point is, the real meditation on Jones’ condition will, like so many other things, be saved for the third movie. See what I mean about this film being all middle?

Mr. Gibbs Says: When Master William is aboard the Flyin’ Dutchman, he gets a look at Jones’ key by playin’ the devil in a game o’ Liar’s Dice. It’s a clever strategy, t’ be sure, but I can’t help but feel that all it truly did was give poor Will a greater sense o’ guilt over his father, who gambled an eternity onboard the ship and lost. Nah, if it were me, I’d have talked with Jones one-on-one, tryin’ ta get inside his head and makin’ him show me the key that way. Who knows, maybe Jones, believin’ as he does in the fickleness o’ women, woulda given Mr. Turner some second thoughts over whether or not his own dear Elizabeth was worth all this trouble. Of course we all know she is, but if Will had that question put in his head, maybe bearing witness to a certain kiss near the film’s end woulda hit him even harder than it already did.

(Besides, when you get down to it, Liar’s Dice isn’t the most intuitive game. I’ve been playin’ for years, and I still can’t tell for sure if Mr. Cotton cheats or not.)

Never trust a man who lets a parrot do his biddin' for him.

Mr. Gibbs raises one very good point here, as well as one very troubling question. We’ll address these in order:

Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio have written all four Pirates movies so far, but The Curse of the Black Pearl remains their best effort. This is because, while that movie does contain a lot of fantastic action, it also recognized the value of letting two or more characters simply talk to one another. Will and Jack, Elizabeth and Barbossa, Jack and Elizabeth: all these pairings result in different forms of conflict, and all three are given some space to bounce off of one another, better illuminating who each of them are as people. Now, Dead Man’s Chest still has many instances of efficiently and creatively presented information – convoluted or not, it’s executed extremely well – but at times it seems like everyone always has to be doing something. Which is fine in theory: it keeps the energy up, and ‘show, don’t tell’ is a cardinal screenwriting rule for a reason. But when your hero and your villain are presented with a chance to have a dialogue, and instead you have them face off against one another in a dice game that was introduced only seconds earlier, you’re really toeing the line between expression through action and action in place of expression.

As for the question Mr. Gibbs raises, it’s one that I can very nearly find an answer to, but ultimately can’t.

Why in the world do Jack and Elizabeth have a romantic subplot in this movie? Why oh why oh why?

I do understand what these scenes are meant to represent (besides giving Jack and Elizabeth something to do while Will is on the Dutchman). Elizabeth is tempted by the freedom and adventure that Jack represents, especially in contrast to the stability a life with Will would provide. That’s legitimate, and good, and I sign off on that, but to have her giggle like a schoolgirl over Jack when he is being neither funny nor charming is laying it on rather thick. Yes, she flirted with him in the first movie, but what made those scenes so perfect was that she didn’t actually mean it.

Jack’s attraction to Elizabeth, by contrast, is pretty much purely surface level. And while, once again, that’s both in-character and entirely reasonable…

I'll just leave this here.

… it doesn’t do much to aid Jack’s evolution as a character in the way that the film is so clearly aiming for. Were this relationship to become a thing for whatever reason, only one party would need to change in a substantial way. That’s just the ending of Grease. And people don’t really like the ending of Grease. Believe me. You can ask the Internet.

Mr. Gibbs Says: Even an old sea dog like m’self can see that Master William earned Elizabeth’s love – not with gold, or other shiny things of a valuable nature, but through his dedication to her and his willingness to leave his comfort zone. The Captain’s a good man, mark me, but those be two things that, more often than not, are very foreign to ‘im. It’s a shame Elizabeth never laid out the difference between the two men in so many words… Jack would’ve waved it off, no doubt, as is his way – he may have even planted some doubts in her own mind – but he'd also be given a reason to take a good hard look at his life, something he could have stood to do a long time ago.

Speaking of things we should have done a long time ago, let’s talk about Jack’s arc. It’s evident to any viewer what that arc is supposed to be. Governor Swann sets it up early on in a line to Will: “That you would risk your life to save Sparrow’s does not mean that he would do the same for anyone else.”

He’s quickly proven right, as Jack almost immediately ships Will off to serve Davy Jones in his place. The Captain does attempt to haggle his way out of it first, since he’s not a complete monster, but he’s ultimately content to give himself credit for trying. On top of that, he’s willing to condemn 99 other men to the same fate. And yet, at the same time, he’s visibly conflicted; his compass no longer works because he isn’t sure what he wants anymore, and Elizabeth insists, in no uncertain terms, that the time will come when Jack is forced to make a choice, and prove himself to be a good man.

Sure enough, during the climactic Kraken attack, Jack is faced with a choice: run away and let his friends continue to fight his battles for him, or step up. He checks his compass one last time (in a nice touch, we don’t see where it points him) and returns to the ship. Yes, it’s only so that everyone else can run away with him, but hey, baby steps. Then things get messy. As everyone else escapes, Elizabeth tells Jack she’s proud of him, distracts him with a kiss… and promptly handcuffs him to the mast. To be clear, that is a strong character moment for Elizabeth, but it also robs Jack of all his agency. His earlier failings, the blatant foreshadowing – it was all for nothing. The only choice he actually gets to make is whether he will die bravely or die screaming. His is not a hero’s death. In fact, it’s a villain’s death, and I don’t just mean in broad strokes. I mean down to the way it’s shot.

Look at this. The way he’s so pleased with himself for escaping that he fails to notice the beast coming up behind him. I’ve watched this kind of scene before. You’ve watched this kind of scene before. This is how bad guys in monster movies get their comeuppance. And while Jack is a bad dude, comeuppance is very blatantly not what this movie has primed us to expect.

Jack was prepared to sacrifice the Pearl – which is a big step for him any way you look at it – but giving a character a moment of growth, only to immediately ask even more of them and find them wanting, does a fair bit to undercut that moment of growth, wouldn’t you say? It’s interestingly subversive, but I don’t feel comfortable declaring that subversive is what the writers were going for. The dramatic irony of the development certainly clashes with the tone of the subsequent tearful tribute and decision to rescue Jack from the depths.

Mr. Gibbs Says: So long as we’re discussin’ the Pearl’s battle with the Kraken, I’d like to get somethin’ off me chest. All along I had sorta hoped that Master Will, having been the only living soul to survive a Kraken attack, might have picked up on some sort of weakness that would have allowed us to best it.

Perhaps a habit of showin' its mouth in such a way that explosives could be dropped inside, should a crew be willing to sacrifice their ship as a form o' bait.

Of course, being swallowed isn’t always like to set off gunpowder, and certainly not rum. Could be that if it failed to go off, some brave soul would have to follow those kegs into the maw of the beast. To offer up a parting shot, as it were.

Mind, I don’t mean to question Will’s bravery or intelligence. It just seems to me that, if we were going to let Davy Jones get away, and lose the Pearl and Captain Jack besides, the least we could have done was take the bloody beast down with us. The next we saw of the damned thing, it was dead anyway.

With that, we’ve just about reached the end – or perhaps end of the middle, in keeping with our theme – but I do want to go on the record about one more thing:

The Isla Cruces sequence (the one with the three-way swordfight and giant wheel) is one of my favorite setpieces in all of action cinema. It’s not perfect, but there simply doesn’t exist a world where I would cut any of it out. It’s astoundingly fun. I have nothing else to say. I just wanted to be sure you knew that.

I will leave you, then, with a thought experiment that Mr. Gibbs was very keen on performing. He was eager to try and devise an ending for this movie that limits all the Davy Jones elements to a single film, without requiring any massive changes and still leaving enough loose ends for the conclusion of the trilogy. Personally, I don’t think it can be done – Bootstrap and the mystery of Jones’ love life are too significant to be left hanging – but were it possible, it would get my full support, so as I say my farewells, I give my faithful first mate the floor.

Mr. Gibbs Says: Picture it now: all our japes on Isla Cruces shake out roughly as they did, with one key difference. The former Commodore fails to take note of Tricky Jack’s sleight of hand, stealin’ only the empty chest alongside his letters of marque. The heart, meanwhile, stays safe and sound in Jack’s jar o’ dirt, a jar that just so happens to make its way into the bundle o’ gunpowder and rum during our bout with the Kraken. This bundle is then fed to the big beastie – for y’see, in my version, Will was a bit more helpful – but as we feared, it fails to blow. As we escape, the Captain, seein’ no other way out, chooses to stay behind in a moment o’ genuine heroism.

From aboard the accursed decks o’ the Flyin’ Dutchman, Davy Jones watches the Pearl vanish into the depths, no doubt gloatin’ in that blubbery way o’ his. But old Jack’s sudden nobility makes him rightfully suspicious. He opens the chest, only to find it empty. With his last breath, he curses Jack Sparrow as an explosion destroys both the Kraken and the heart, Jones turnin’ to ash in front of his crew’s very eyes.

With its captain dead, the Dutchman’s hold over the crew is broken, and they return to human form before bein’ allowed to pass on into the afterlife as they were always meant to do. From across the great expanse o’ sea, Will and his father share one final smile by way of a goodbye. Seems to me like a happy enough ending, Jack’s misfortune aside.

BUT! Back at Port Royal, in the offices o’ Lord Cutler Beckett, James Norrington still has himself an offer to make. He may not have the heart of Davy Jones as he had hoped, but he does have something almost as good: the Flyin’ Dutchman herself, the scourge o’ the sea, freshly adrift and in need of a new crew.

Sends shivers down your spine, don’t it? 

No? Ah well.

Maybe it’s just the rum.

"*Squawk!* Seven threes! Seven threes! *Squawk!*"

"Damned cheatin' parrot…"

The Creature from the Blog Lagoon

I love Dracula.

Have I mentioned that before?

My affection for Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel is well-documented (both on this blog and off of it), so I won’t put you nice people through the ordeal that is hearing me blather on about it. But believe me, I definitely could.

"…which is why our culture's collective understanding of Van Helsing as a vampire hunter is fundamentally misguided. But anyway, Quincey Morris…"

Suffice to say that when the news broke last year that a new Dracula movie was on the horizon, I was probably one of the few to respond with… well, pretty much anything other than an eye roll.

When I sat down to watch Dracula Untold for the first time, I was genuinely excited. As a rule, movies usually leave me feeling one of three ways – unambiguously entertained, pleasantly surprised, or intrigued by questionable decision-making – and I had a good feeling that this film was going to result in one of the latter two. Instead, the movie did something that very few movies are able to do.

It disappointed me.

Dracula Untold, simply put, is not a good movie. That’s a truth that I was fully prepared to face, and it probably won’t surprise many of you either. But there’s more to it than that, because – and this is what hurts me the most – it didn’t have to be this way. Dracula Untold, as a finished product, is completely forgettable, but it is, at the same time, the first draft of an interesting, engaging, and possibly even great film.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we missed out on a possible new classic of the action horror genre here – as an origin story for one of the most famous and self-explanatory movie monsters of all time, the film was never going to be ‘necessary.’ Still, there’s a definite sense that an ideal version of this movie has something thoughtful and relatively new to say about its subject matter; closing in on two centuries of mainstream vampire fiction, that would have been an achievement in and of itself.

I guess by this point we should get to what the movie is actually about.

Dracula Untold is the story of Vlad Tepes, a former child soldier who served in the Turkish army and grew into a feared warrior, earning the nickname “the Impaler.” Now the ruler of Wallachia, present-day Vlad has put his fighting days behind him, until his childhood-friend-turned-sultan Mehmed II decides that he wants a new batch of soldiers, and demands that Vlad’s subjects hand over their children as tribute. This is unacceptable to Vlad, especially after Mehmed increases his demand to include Vlad’s own son, Rickon Stark.

By far, the most irreplaceable Stark.

Powerless to fight back against the Turkish empire on his own, Vlad comes up with a desperate plan, and makes a bargain with – I kid you not – a local vampire played by Game of Thrones’ Charles Dance (easily the best part of the movie, despite being given sod all to actually do). In a move that he hopes will free him from his imprisonment in a mountain cave, Count Tywin lets Vlad drink his blood, essentially granting our hero a free trial of vampirism. Vlad gets all the familiar powers we’ve come to expect in a creature of the night, but only for three days. The catch? Those new abilities come with a powerful desire to drink human blood, which Vlad must resist if he wants to regain his humanity. If he gives in, the vampirism will become permanent and his maker will go free.

That’s… actually a pretty great hook, even if we can all guess the outcome from the word go. It places a clear deadline on the action, gives our protagonist a fully justified crisis of identity, and ups the stakes (heh) to include not only the fate of Vlad’s people, but of his immortal soul. Mining drama from a premise like that should be a piece of cake.

Sadly, the movie ends up treating drama the way vampires treat garlic; there’s barely a trace of follow through to be found in regard to any of those ideas. Vlad’s actions, which ought to be a constant race against the clock, lack any sense of urgency until literally seconds before his three days are up, and while I’m willing to take it on faith that the writers didn’t skip or add a day anywhere, the audience is never as clearly oriented on the timeline as we should be.

The temptation angle, somehow, is handled even worse. Save for a single moment when he’s distracted by his wife’s neck, good ol’ Vlad is one vampire who doesn’t seem remotely interested in drinking any blood, let alone the blood of his loved ones. Perhaps it’s reluctance on the writers’ part to have their protagonist show weakness, or to waver in his righteous crusade, knowing that the deck is already stacked against him in terms of sympathy. Maybe there was simply no room in the edit for it. Whatever the reason, the unbearable craving that the Master Vampire described – and which offered so much promise – is nowhere to be found, replaced by a halfhearted suggestion, a host suspicious that his houseguest is just being polite. “Are you sure you’re not thirsty? There’s plenty of blood in the fridge. Maybe later?”

Van Helsing says: Ah, yes, here we see the so famous film adage of ‘show, not tell.’ We scientific-minded people of today, we are a cynical lot; we do not believe what we cannot see with our own eyes. It is not enough for us to simply hear that our hero will soon pass through the bitter waters – that will make us fear for them, but the fear must be grounded in the real. If we see that the hero undergo his so-ominous ordeal with no difficulties, or not undergo it at all, our sympathies are lost. We feel that we have been tricked, and may turn our backs on the very film that so dearly needs our investment.

Thank you, Professor.

It’s not often that you’ll hear me asking for a movie to be longer – and make no mistake, Dracula Untold’s breezy, 92-minute runtime is a major point in its favor – but I do feel that this film would have benefitted hugely from having more room to breathe. As it stands, everything from plot to characterization is utterly bare bones, function trumping form all the way down the line. But then, maybe I’m being too harsh. After all, besides the five key players, the film’s supporting cast is jam-packed with such memorable characters as ‘a priest,’ or ‘bearded man that Dracula talks to more than once.’ And really, who could forget ‘kid that the bad guy’s henchman was mean to that one time?’ I know I can’t!

There he is, maybe!

All joking aside, there are enough recurring faces and hints of subplots buried in this film that I truly do want to engage with it on a deeper level. And it wouldn’t have taken much to make that possible. Just give me a handful of scenes in which the characters live their lives. Let them have conversations rather than exchanges of relevant information. Give someone – anyone – a personality that runs deeper than one character trait (or two, in Vlad’s case), and I’d have been sold.

This movie is genuinely filled with cool ideas – Mehmed, knowing that his enemy is a vampire, forces Vlad to fight him in a tent filled with silver coins and mirrors that reflect the sun; that’s cool! – but nobody along the way seemed to realize that cool ideas aren’t enough. What we really need is a reason to care.

Even now, I hold that so many of these flaws could have been forgiven if the film had only managed to nail its thematic arc. Dracula Untold is, first and foremost, the story of a man willing to sacrifice everything for his people; the fact that the main character is Dracula should – if we’re meeting the film on its own terms – be secondary to that. And it’s not only possible, but easy, to pay off that arc while still making room for the character’s ultimate fate. Try this on for size:

Vlad forces Mehmed’s army to retreat and ensures the safety of his subjects, but is unable to save his son, who Mehmed kills out of spite. Enraged, Vlad drinks Mehmed’s blood and lets the demon inside consume him. He almost turns on his people, but the last vestige of his humanity holds him back, and he is successfully driven away, forced to live in exile, feared and hated by those he traded his soul to protect.

Yes, it’s trite, but hey, I made it up on the spot. Broadly speaking, at least, it’s tragic in the right ways, and – if you’ll permit me to bring it up just once – is in keeping with a major theme of the Stoker novel: that it’s possible to fear and hate a monster while still having sympathy for, or even loving, the person that it used to be.

Of course, this movie doesn’t have that ending. Instead, Dracula Untold has Vlad fail to save his people outright: the Turks essentially steamroll them. Vlad drinks his dying wife’s blood – at her own urging, no less, which… you know what that’s going to do to him, right? This isn’t a Popeye/spinach situation – and then turns the few remaining survivors into vampires so that together they can achieve a sort of posthumous revenge.

I’ll say this for that ending: it’s unorthodox, and a lot tougher to pull off, but it still works in theory. In fact, it might be better, since it makes Vlad end on a more villainous note, taking the curse he willingly accepted and forcing it upon others who had no choice in the matter. It also gives him an evil army and keeps him in control of his territory. So, yeah. Kudos on taking the unconventional route.

Except that things don't end there. After achieving his revenge and saving his son (basically the film's only survivor) Vlad immediately – and I mean immediately – kills his vampire spawn all over again because they’re too dangerous to be left alive… er, undead. The film tries to justify this by presenting the newly-made vampires as complete monsters – and Vlad does attempt to kill himself as well, so I can’t cry hypocrite – but their sudden shift is so jarring next to Vlad’s still completely unchanged personality that it only underscores how little attention Dracula Untold pays to its details. If you want to end your movie by turning your protagonist into something inhuman, you have to commit to it. By violating the bodies of those he supposedly loved, and then playing the holier-than-thou card in order to destroy them, Vlad’s final ‘noble act’ is arguably the worst thing he does in the entire film.

Dracula Untold is a movie that clearly wants us to come out of the theater asking ourselves tough questions, like “Can you make yourself a hero by becoming a monster?” or “How far would I go to protect my family?” To its credit, the film does raise those questions, and others, but they’re so clumsily handled that we’re much more likely to come out asking questions the filmmakers never intended. Questions like: “Could you really use a swarm of bats as a bludgeoning weapon?”

I mean, obviously you could weaponize them in the abstract, but smashing them into people? And from the sky, no less! Where does that come from?

OR IS IT?

One final thing, and then I promise I’ll let you go. Even I’m surprised that I managed to go on this long without mentioning that Dracula Untold was intended to kick-start a new shared universe of Universal Monsters reboot films. (Apparently Count Tywin is supposed to be this universe’s Nick Fury, which is a sentence that not only makes sense, but that you understood, because this is an absolutely wonderful time to be alive.) Again, I’m sure that when many of you heard that news – either just now or some time in the past year – your eyes almost rolled themselves out of your skull, but I’m willing to give Universal a complete pass on this one. After all, when you think about it, the Universal Monsters are the OG shared universe. They were doing shared universes before shared universes were cool.

Counterpoint: I dare you to say that this isn't cool.

I’m excited to see what comes out of it, and I hope it leads to some interesting things, unlikely as that may be. The only bad news is that, as far as kicking off a shared universe goes, Dracula Untold is more Man of Steel than Iron Man.

 

Seriously, though, wouldn't you just end up killing all your bats on the first go around? The logistics here are nonexistent.

Un-Bear-able (A Post-Credits Postmortem)

Pixar is in kind of a weird place right now.

While today marks the release of Inside Out (one of my most anticipated films of the year and, it goes without saying, the reason for this blugpost), the last time the once-unimpeachable studio put out a truly great movie was five years ago, with 2010’s Toy Story 3. The three films they’ve put out in the meantime have ranged from pleasant but forgettable, to weirdly mercenary, to downright disappointing.

Can you guess which is which? (HINT: I put them in order.)

It’s a troubling pattern, but the public at large – myself included – is extremely resistant to recognizing it as one. I’m going to see Inside Out today, and despite a full half-decade of evidence staring me in the face, I’m not even considering the possibility that it will be bad. Is that a problem? I really don’t know. My own philosophy involves looking for the good in every movie I see, but it’s definitely dangerous for any studio – especially one with such high standards to live up to – to be given what is basically a lifetime pass. And nowhere do I see that happening more clearly than in the reception to Pixar’s last original feature, Brave.

I really dislike Brave. Like, a lot. I think it’s a failure of storytelling on just about every level. (And this is coming from the guy who called Transformers “a perfectly capable and enjoyable movie,” so you know that’s not an accusation I throw around lightly.) I don’t know if I hold the minority opinion when I call the film a disappointment, or if I just happen to have a lot of friends with similar taste, but I can tell that it definitely isn’t the consensus.

It boggles my mind that the Academy would say that a film like Brave was the Best Animated Feature of 2012. To this day, it’s one of only two Oscar wins I still hold a grudge about. Sure, the movie has the whole feminism angle going for it (which, before I get myself into trouble, I’ll say is a refreshing change of pace), but did any of the voters actually watch all the nominees? Or, you know, any of them? That year wasn’t even a particularly weak field. It’s essentially proof that Pixar can now be an award contender just by showing up. Either that, or everyone was really impressed by how poofy Merida’s hair was.

Look at that. You won't find hair that poofy in Wreck-It Ralph. Just try.

So, even if it’s coming far too late to do anyone any good, I want to use today as an opportunity to share my dissenting opinion about this film, and perhaps make you rethink your own. Consider this a clearing of the palate as Pixar begins its climb back to the top, in the hopes that they don’t forget what they’ve left behind at the bottom.

First things first, we’ll look at a concept that’s applicable to more movies than just this one. This is blog is supposed to be vaguely educational, after all.

The phrase ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ has become a pretty well-known term, but for those who aren’t completely in the know, it refers to a pretty basic idea of storytelling: anytime something is pointed out to the audience, the writer is making a promise, namely that the information they showed us is important. Our end of the deal, therefore, is to remember it, and when a story doesn’t deliver on its end of that promise, the audience can get justifiably upset. Don’t put a loaded gun in the room if it isn’t going to go off, or at least get pointed at somebody. Couldn’t be simpler.

Brave, of course, fails at this completely.

The film’s entire first act – which I’ll be the first to admit is actually excellent – hinges on Merida’s love of archery. The first moment we’re shown of her life is the day that she’s given her first bow. When she goes out riding, it doubles as target practice. In the film’s best scene, when Merida defies custom and makes her first attempt at shaping her own future, archery is the vehicle she chooses. Every moment of Brave’s first half hour paints Merida as a strong-willed young woman with an unorthodox hobby that she will not apologize for, something that makes her far more interesting than your average princess. Even better? She’s really good at it! She’s so good, in fact, that she pulls a Robin Hood, splitting one of her opponent’s arrows in half, all the way down the middle, on the first try. A feat like that is, at the very least, mathematically impossible.

Many Mythbusters died to bring us this information.

This is all great from a storytelling standpoint. The character has a passion, and that passion gets her into trouble. It feels satisfying, simply because the problems that arise are unique to Merida and what we know about her. Plenty of teenage girls get in trouble with their mothers. I imagine that very few get in trouble with their mothers because they outperformed all of their potential fiancés in an archery contest and upset the power structure of an entire Scottish kingdom.

But then Merida turns her mother into a bear. And all of a sudden, for some utterly inexplicable reason, that becomes the thing that this movie is about, consuming every bright spot the film had going for it. From that moment on, Merida’s character becomes that of… a girl whose mother is a bear. Her desires haven’t changed – though she now has the added goal of making her mother not be a bear – but her traits rapidly start to fall away. Where’s the stubbornness? Where’s the desire for adventure? They’re all abandoned in favor of some vague need to ‘mend the bond’ – itself an arbitrary task assigned to the pair by the unnamed witch, who I’ve taken to calling ‘Diane X. Machina.’

But let’s get back to archery and the idea of Chekhov’s Gun. Once Elinor undergoes her transformation, Merida will only fire six more arrows before the film is done. One is used to catch a fish, a task that Merida is shown minutes later to be able to do with her bare hands. Four more are shot at the villainous bear Mor’du, but he shrugs them off like mosquito bites. So far, this integral ability isn’t feeling very essential, is it?

Arrow number six certainly serves a purpose – used to knock a sword out of King Fergus’ hand before he unknowingly kills his own wife – but the film doesn’t play the moment as if it were a pay-off to anything. It’s just kind of cool. During the actual climax, Mor’du is defeated when Elinor slams him against a large stone, which then falls and crushes him. That checks out – fight fire with fire and bears with bears – but wouldn’t it be nice if Merida, you know, contributed? Suppose the stone cracks, just as it does in the film, but rather than gravity, it’s Merida who makes it fall, by dislodging the exact right bit of rubble with a well-placed arrow. Isn’t that so much more satisfying? As it stands now, our main character’s favorite hobby and most significant skill plays no role whatsoever in the resolution of the plot, which goes a long way towards explaining why the film leaves such a bad taste in my mouth. It’s Chekhov’s Bow, and it most definitely goes unfired.

Also sadly unfired? The character designer responsible for this walking headache.

Speaking of applicable lessons, loyal readers may remember my write-up of Cars 2 from two summers ago. (New readers can just click here. Or don’t. I’m easy.) In that post, I argued that Cars 2 wasn’t a bad movie, but that it suffered from an overblown premise and a counterproductive moral: “Don’t change, because you’re already perfect.” And yet, whatever else you might say about Cars 2, and however snarkily you might say it, at least Mater learned something that he could apply to his life at large.

The moral of Brave, by contrast, is “Your mom loves you, so don’t turn her into a bear… unless it’s over something really, really important.”

Yes, the movie features a broader theme of mother and daughter learning to respect one another – I’m not a complete idiot – but if you actually examine the film, you’ll find that we aren’t given any scenes in which that happens outside the context of their immediate situation. Elinor learns that it’s important to be able to survive outside the luxury of a castle (but only if you’re a bear), and Merida learns that it’s important to know domestic skills like sewing (but only if you’ve accidentally changed your mom into a bear). Every bit of growth the characters undergo is solely in service of solving their current problem, and the film gets so overwhelmed by the bear twist that the pair’s reconciliation at the end feels like little more than a nice coincidence.

It’s easy not to realize it in the heat of the moment, but there is absolutely no point of connection between the plot of this film and its supposed emotional stakes. Things are resolved in the end – presumably because that’s what’s supposed to happen – but any real consideration of why it all works out the way it does brings about some pretty dark implications. The absurdity of Brave’s turn into Brother Bear territory is made all the worse by one awful, awful fact, namely that Merida’s plan to poison and manipulate her mother ends up doing exactly what she wanted it to.

Basically, it goes like this: Merida doesn’t want to get married, is told by her mother that she has to get married, changes her mother into a bear, changes her mother back into a human, and is told by her mother that she doesn’t have to get married. I just watched the movie again this morning. I promise I am not leaving out any steps.

That’s right, kids: even your parents can be fixed by turning them off and then on again.

The pivotal scene in which Elinor has her change of heart as Merida distracts the crowd is… fine, I guess. If pressed, I might even call it enjoyable, and the moment itself is played very nicely, with Merida ending up genuinely surprised by the words she’s speaking on her mother’s behalf. The trouble is that it all comes out of nowhere. Virtually nothing about their relationship has changed, and certainly not in regard to the issue of Merida’s marriage. But Merida is rewarded anyway, maybe because Elinor sees that she’s a pretty good public speaker? I couldn’t tell you. Either way, the whole thing reeks of a missed opportunity; Merida complains time and again that she could convince her mother that she’s right if only the queen would listen. Now, here Elinor sits, as captive an audience as she will ever be, and rather than make her case, Merida decides to talk about the power of friendship. It’s all very confusing.

I think the hole the writers dug themselves into here was crafting the story in such a way that Merida is completely in the right – can you imagine if she still had to marry Wee Dingwall in the end? – but pursues her desires in a way that demands some sort of retribution. You change someone into an animal, that’s no bueno. At the very least, you need to become an animal yourself. This is basic Arabian Nights stuff. (Or Emperor’s New Groove stuff. Take your pick.) Ultimately, though, Merida can’t be punished, because the argument between her and her mother is pretty black and white: either she gets married or she doesn’t. Unless Brave wants to take a stance in favor of arranged marriages – which I’ll admit would be a bold move – Elinor has to be the one to concede. That all adds up to only one possible outcome: the queen is forced to undergo a horrible and traumatic experience, and then essentially apologizes to the person who did it to her. If Merida were a man – or anybody besides Elinor’s daughter, for that matter – this would be all kinds of messed up. Even as it stands now, the princess doesn’t come out of the movie looking very good.

Why, then, do I seem to be the only one who noticed any of this? It’s the emotional disconnect I mentioned. Brave is so caught up in the machinations of its plot that the characters stop mattering. They’re basically just cogs, being led by the hand from one objective to the next until the story resolves itself. It’s not really Merida’s fault that Elinor became a bear. She just did what the witch told her to! And it’s not like she went looking for the witch, either. The Whisps led her there! Blame them!

Oh, I do. Believe me, I do.

Brave’s use of Will-o’-the-Whisps is the element that finally broke me. They are literally a dotted line connecting the film from scene to scene, foregoing any pretense of cause and effect. It utterly fails the Parker/Stone 'therefore' test, that's for sure. Would Merida have known about Diane X. Machina’s cottage if the Whisps hadn’t shown her the way? Of course not. But she had to get that bear spell from somewhere! Would Merida and Elinor have had any conceivable reason to visit Mor’du’s castle if they hadn’t been led there? Nope! But they still hadn’t figured out what ‘mend the bond’ meant, so fire up that trail of breadcrumbs!

The Whisps are an implicit admission from the writers that the characters would never do any of what they’re doing unless instructed, and that they couldn't be bothered to come up with a better alternative. Pixar movies are so widely lauded because every single thing that happens in them is driven by character - their fears, their desires, their relationships. But in using the Whisps like it does, Brave completely robs Merida and Elinor of their agency. They follow the glowy lights not because they want to, but because they're magic, and because they know their fate (read: the next plot point) will be waiting for them at the end. King Fergus is easily my favorite character in this movie, and only in writing this post did I realize the reason why: he’s basically the only character whose actions are consistently informed by his personality. Meanwhile, our two heroines are reduced to video game protagonists by the film’s end, rushing to do the thing the movie told them to do, but only so that they can undo the thing that Merida did, which she only did because the movie told her to. It’s an ouroboros of motivation, and not in a good way.

So there you go. Upon rewatch, maybe I am being just a bit too hard on this movie; it’s not like there aren’t hundreds of other films out there with similar flaws, and many of those are probably films I have an affection for. But to see a studio like Pixar make so many rookie mistakes, and to have those mistakes go completely unrecognized by the majority of audiences – it hurts. I just want Pixar to be great again, instead of only being told that they are. I can only hope that when I go to the movies tonight, I’ll get my wish.

I have a feeling I will.

Honestly, though? Give Brother Bear another try. It's underrated.

The Broken Bat

Oh boy.

Okay.

Here we go.

I’ve discussed my fair share of controversial movies in the last few months, but never has my own opinion of a film been more difficult to pin down than in the case of The Dark Knight Rises. I want to like it; I really do, because The Dark Knight is one of my favorite movies ever, and on top of that, I absolutely adore Batman.

[citation needed]

In fact, I saw the movie on opening day, and as I walked out of the theater, I thought it was Bat-mazing. But after I went home, and I started to mull things over, it all began to unravel. First came the little observations: things that just didn’t add up. Then there was the issue of complexity for its own sake: twists and turns that made the film seem more epic in scope – and certainly made it longer – but didn’t get us anywhere a straight line couldn’t have. Worst of all, try as I might, I couldn’t quite pinpoint what the movie was trying to say; be it about Batman, about heroism… about anything, really.

It took two full years for me to watch the movie again – because, honestly, who has that kind of time? – and on my second go around, I was fully prepared to hate it. I caught the tail end of a rerun on HBO, and much to my surprise, I found that it worked a lot better than I remembered. Then I watched it a third time, actually starting from the beginning, and got all kinds of confused.

The things I take issue with in this movie aren’t even complaints that would come exclusively from a Batman fan. They’re simply the complaints of a person that enjoys coherent, consistent storytelling and characterization. To be sure, there are all kinds of nitpicky surface details that are just terribly handled in this movie – weird editing choices, horribly clunky exposition, Bane’s voice being mixed as though we’re listening to him through headphones – but I’m going to overlook those for the most part, and really just focus on what’s wrong with the story.

In the interest of fairness, The Dark Knight Rises isn’t necessarily a case of Nolan and Co. balking on a slam dunk*. From the first second the film was announced, TDKR found itself in a very tricky position. It was, after all, the long-awaited conclusion to an extremely popular, extremely well-received, and extremely influential trilogy. So riddle me this, true believers: which word in that sentence would you say is the source of the problem?

 * I don’t sports. 

If you guessed ‘conclusion’… then, wow. Color me impressed, because I was really going all-out on the misdirect there. But you are correct! In my humble Bat-pinion, Batman just isn’t the sort of hero that lends himself to finality. He’s driven by rage, but it isn’t targeted at anyone or anything specific. His only long-term goal is ‘abolish crime,’ something even he knows is functionally impossible. He has over a dozen iconic, fantastic villains, but he refuses to kill any of them. And unlike his fellow hero Green Arrow, who considers street-level crime to be a symptom of a larger social disease, Batman is more than happy to treat every symptom that he comes across, with extreme prejudice. Everything about the Batman premise is tailor-made to never reach a satisfying end. I don’t mean to suggest that Chris Nolan was wrong for wanting to put a nice little bow on his Bruce Wayne saga – I definitely respect the desire for dramatic catharsis. But in making that choice, he was forced to retroactively turn the excellent yet episodic stories of his first two Bat-films into the beginning and middle of one big story, something that proved surprisingly difficult, or at least difficult to arrive at organically.

Looking at them from a strictly functional standpoint, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight have almost no significant relationship to one another. We have an origin story, culminating in a villainous plot… and then another, completely different villainous plot. The only thing that really carries over from one story to the next are the characters, which is fine, if not outright preferable, but it also means there are no fruitful plot threads to stretch across a whole trilogy. It seemed like things were going to start picking up speed at the end of The Dark Knight, but the third film, incredibly, starts up a full 8 years later, an endlessly frustrating choice that brings any possible momentum to a screeching halt. By the time we learn that Bane and Talia’s goal in the third film is basically to re-do Ra’s al Ghul’s plan from the first one, things start to feel really muddled. If the franchise had been longer, the bookends would have felt like a nice callback, but with only TDK to fill out the middle of this League of Shadows sandwich, hindsight makes it hard not to view the second film – undoubtedly the series’ best – as unnecessary filler. And while I get that the intention is to come full circle, when the circumference of said circle is that small, it really just comes across as a retread. We already watched Batman beat this level on Normal. Cranking the difficulty up to Hard Mode doesn’t make the objective any more interesting than it was the first time. You can’t squeeze Bat-blood from a Bat-stone.

What the hell is he talking about?

Now, most of that could have been fixed by making TDKR a third standalone story, or at least by following up more actively on the events of The Dark Knight, but even then, there’s still that ugly word that we have to deal with: Conclusion. It was known pretty early on that Chris Nolan and Christian Bale wouldn’t be making more than three Batman movies together, and that’s perfectly understandable. As more and more news came out about the film, though, and certainly by the time you were sitting down to watch it, it became evident that when they said they were done, they meant that they were done. One way or another, Bruce Wayne would not be Batman at the end of this movie. In fact, Bruce Wayne isn’t even Batman at the start of this movie. And that’s kind of a problem, because as Man of Steel showed us, the context in which a film’s core conflict is presented can dramatically change the stakes, and make the overall movie less engaging. Seeing Batman brought to his knees while he’s at the top of his game is visceral and horrifying, but a Batman that comes out of retirement for the sake of the painfully cliché ‘one last job’ dilutes that drama quite a bit. The question we ask ourselves isn’t “can Batman ever hope to bounce back from this?” but rather, “can Batman do this one important thing before he goes back to not being Batman?” While the answer to that first question is “probably, but maybe not fully,” the answer to the second is a straight “yes.” And that’s boring.

I want to take a minute to talk about the whole retirement thing, because it’s quite possibly the part of the film that bothers me most. Any Batman fan will tell you that the real Bruce Wayne would never retire willingly, and if he did ever have to leave the crimefighting game, it would be out of a physical inability to continue*. The fact that Batman retires not once, but twice in this movie is inexcusable to me. There’s a full half-hour stretch at the core of the film that focuses on Bruce pushing himself as far as his body can go so as not to abandon Gotham. But then, once Bane is taken care of and the city is safe again, he totally abandons Gotham by faking his own death. It turns a moment of total selflessness into one that is, at the very least, a little selfish, and is completely out of character for not only the Bruce Wayne of the comics, but also the Bruce Wayne of the previous two movies, and even the Bruce Wayne of the first 160 minutes of this movie.

 * See Batman Beyond for a good example of that, or this movie for a bad one. 

I’m not one of those people that thinks having Bruce survive in the end is a cop-out. Secretly fixing the Bat-autopilot to fake his Bat-death is a totally Batman move. But I dare say, if I may hazard a Bat-guess, that instead of using that fake death to get out of the game, the real Batman would use it as a means to get back into the game, this time as an even more terrifying presence than usual. After all, the only thing criminals would fear more than the Bat is the ghost of the Bat. If the final shot of TDKR had been a slow pan over the Gotham City skyline, coming to rest on the shadowy figure of the Batman, ever the watchful protector, even in death, everything that was stupid about that bomb plot* would have been forgiven. Sure, he does leave John Blake behind to take his place (I refuse to call him Robin), but that guy doesn’t have a fraction of the training or resources that Bruce had. I think we can all agree that he’ll be dead within a week. I bet you it’s not even a criminal that does it. He probably breaks his neck trying to glide off a rooftop or something dumb like that. What an idiot.

 * a.k.a the entirety of the bomb plot. 

As far as the first retirement is concerned, that’s written off as a result of the citywide manhunt at the end of The Dark Knight, and the need for Batman is later negated by a long stretch of tranquility in Gotham. I think both of those reasons are a load of guano – there’s no level of crime that Batman would consider “acceptably low” – but whatever. What I simply cannot get over is the fact that Bruce’s health problems in the film are completely disingenuous. We’re told early on in the movie that Batman retired literally moments after Harvey Dent’s death, which – and I hope you’ll forgive me for harping on this – is itself a hugely wasted opportunity.

"We'll hunt him. Because he can take it. Unless he decides he doesn't want to be hunted and just disappears. In which case, I guess that's fine."

And yet, the Bruce Wayne we see at the beginning of TDKR is in much, much worse shape than the one in the final scene of The Dark Knight. What the hell happened to him in the meantime? Because according to this film, the answer is nothing. Bruce’s limp and physical weakness are clearly shoehorned in as an attempt to stack the odds against him once Bane arrives, but the thing is that Batman doesn’t need to be at a disadvantage to lose to Bane. Bane can just be better than him. Bane is better than him. That’s kind of Bane’s whole thing – he’s the one who broke the Bat. By forcing qualifiers onto that fact, you change Bane from a terrifying, brutal force of nature into some weird-voiced, civics-obsessed asshole that just likes to kick people while they’re down.

Of course, as you may have guessed, Bane has his own share of problems aside from that one. Even though the first two Nolan Batmen weren’t strictly connected, they both found a thematic richness by exploring exactly what it means to be the Batman. Batman Begins, for instance, featured the Scarecrow as one of its main villains, prompting a comparison between himself and Bruce in terms of the way they each use fear as a tool. Following that, The Dark Knight delved into the questions raised by Batman’s moral code, placing Bruce and the Joker at opposite extremes, and allowing Two-Face to split the difference between them, as it were.

Heh.

Finally, The Dark Knight Rises has Bane, whose whole shtick really is, as I said above, just kind of being better than Batman. (And also having a life-threatening dependency on a super-steroid. And also looking like a luchador.) That wouldn’t allow much of a give and take with Bruce, though, so Nolan and Goyer decided to give their Bane ties to the League of Shadows – a move that does have precedent in the source material – and a tendency to speechify about anything that pops into his head at the moment. Hope, despair, sacrifice, torment, darkness, dishonesty, vengeance, citizenship… the list goes on. Through Bane, the movie becomes about so many things that it basically fails to be about anything, or at least not anything quantifiable.

"I will destroy you, Batman, and everything you hold dear… But first, I'd like to shay a few words about the Social Contract."

Bane’s ideological grandstanding does make sense from a character perspective, if we’re being charitable. He wants to prove that Gotham is a bed of degeneracy before he destroys it, which is in keeping with what we know about the League of Shadows from Begins. But, wait. Why is Gotham still on the League’s hit list all? After the Dent Act put away all of the city’s high-ranking mobsters, crime rates dropped so low that the police force was barely even needed anymore. Normally, I wouldn’t buy that claim for a second, but that’s what the film explicitly tells us, and within its first ten minutes, at that.

Pictured: All crime in Gotham, apparently.

I think the reason this all sits so poorly with me is that Bane turns out to be right. Without their police force – which was described just over an hour before as glorified babysitters, mind you – Gothamites resort almost immediately to looting and murder.  Is that really the kind of place we even want to see saved? Granted, it’s possible, because the movie evidently has no desire to make this clear, that all the dystopian stuff is coming at the hands of Bane’s men and the Blackgate prisoners… but if that’s the case, isn’t he cheating? Either way, it all rings false, and the film’s third act boils down to a lot of wheel-spinning, all couched in themes that it doesn’t even come close to earning.

Honestly, the only logical way I can manage to read Bane is as someone who’s self-important and principled, but not all that bright, intentionally spewing out shallow, conflicting rhetoric in an effort to appear authoritative. That’s disappointing, because the character was conceived by his creators to be a legitimate genius, and if there’s one thing Bane should never, ever have to resort to, it’s posturing. Still, I don’t see any other options here. He is, at the very least, proven to be a liar when he claims that he didn’t see the light until he was already a man.

Seems legit.

Ultimately, that’s what I think this whole film is: posturing. It works like gangbusters the first time around, but when it’s all over and we’re able to look back at the big picture, all of its drama – and a not insignificant amount of its logic – starts to fall apart.

That’s heartbreaking to me, not just because I love Batman, but because there are moments where greatness genuinely starts to shine through. The film’s version of Selina Kyle, for instance, is a fantastic interpretation for this more grounded universe, and is fantastically acted by Anne Hathaway. Sadly, she’s largely pigeonholed into the film’s pointless B (C? D??) plot, in which the Wayne fortune is stolen out from under Bruce’s nose. The whole thing is a convoluted mess of reasoning and motivational gymnastics that culminate in Bane gaining access to the generator/bomb, but I feel like that’s something that he easily could have achieved by force, and if you watch the scene where it actually happens, he pretty much does exactly that. If it weren’t for Selina, I wouldn’t be able think of a single justification for leaving any of those scenes in the script. Even her relationship with Bruce is underdeveloped; it seems like the only reason he comes to her for help over anyone else is because she’s Catwoman. Still, she’s electrifying every moment she’s on screen, and while I guess it’s neat that Goyer and Nolan created an entire subplot for her, it’s disappointing that they couldn’t be bothered to find something a bit more straightforward and important for her to do.

So, I hope it’s come across at least a little bit that I am genuinely conflicted about this movie. On the one hand, it’s a moving story about a hero past his prime who returns in his beloved city’s hour of need, giving everything he has to rid his home of the demons that he himself inadvertently created.

On the other hand, it’s about a crazy retired vigilante who un-retires, fails miserably, hangs in a sling for five months, flies around in a plane for a few minutes, and then re-retires.

The film isn’t unsalvageable by any stretch, but I honestly wouldn’t go so far as to call it entertaining, and it certainly isn’t as successful as its Bat-brethren. It’s very, very close to good, but it’s completely in the dark about what it wants to accomplish thematically, or even how to finish its own story. And boy, is it long. It is too gorram long. It is, like, a full hour too long.

Speaking of which…

I will wrap this up now, but I want to go out on a positive note, and that means talking about the one part of this movie that made me happier than any other.

This Guy

I freaking love what the Nolan trilogy did with Jonathan Crane, because its treatment of him felt like one of the few genuine depictions in a movie of how comic books actually utilize their characters. He just won’t go away! He brings nothing to the plot in any movie besides the first, but he’s still there, committing crimes, because he is a career criminal. Supervillains don’t invest all their energy into one evil plan and then give up. They keep coming back, even after Batman no longer considers them a threat. Sure, Goyer and Nolan could have had Batman bust Oswald Cobblepot at the beginning of The Dark Knight, or have Edward Nigma preside over the kangaroo court in TDKR. That would have been amazing, but they didn’t do that. They also could have had nameless thugs in both roles, which would have been disappointing, but they didn’t do that either. Instead, they made it the Scarecrow, and I really, really love that they did.

Well... that’s it, true believers. With this post, the Summer of Superheroes is officially over. The blog will keep going, but it will be returned to the hands of CineMike Matthews, and will no longer update on a weekly schedule. As for me? I’m going to take a page out of Bruce Wayne’s playbook and go spend some time in Italy canoodling with Anne Hathaway. Thank you so, so much to everyone who’s followed along this summer – it means a lot to me. And don’t worry. I’ll be seeing you again soon: same Bat-time*, same Bat-URL. 

- SuperMike Matthews 

 * Actual Bat-time TBD.