The Dark Knight Rises is just about to come out on DVD and Bluray and I am sure many of this site’s users will get it, but as many of us will see it again at home there will also be a big amount of people who will start complaining about the horrible job Nolan did with The Dark Knight Trilogy.
I have to confess that I think Chris Nolan is a great film maker, but beyond that I am an old time comic book reader and a big fan of comic book movies, so I have never been sure where all that Nolan hate came from, but what I am sure indeed, is that he did a great job whit his Batman movies and I will try to explain why.
THE DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY IS HEAVILY BASED ON COMIC BOOK SOURCE MATERIAL.
Most of the complaints I have read about Nolan’s Batman movies are about how much he changed the Batman character and how much it was different from comic books. I kind of understand that perspective, and a lot of people may be right when they say we did not get the world’s best detective on the big screen, we did not get a great martial artist either and not even the master of disguise Batman usually looks like on comic books or regular cartoons most fans are used to; but either we like it or not none of the three movies we got required that.
Batman Begins was all about Bruce´s journey to become the caped crusader, his motivations and all he had to go through to stablish Batman as Gotham’s protector. Batman Begins does not have a specific villain until Batman finds the drug shipment which is his first appearance, and even then he was able to track down where they were being stored and who was storing them (scarecrow), but he did not mostly used his detective skills to do so, on the other hand he used one of the main Batman’s skills: INTIMIDATION. And that is when the source material starts being used. At the beginning Batman was all about inspiring fear in criminals, scaring them so they would think twice about going out at night, that is such a basic concept about Batman that even the SUPERFRIENDS cartoon series has an episode about it, and then almost all the movie moves around that, when Batman is at the docks beating all those bad guys, they cannot even see him, he was just a shadow, a monster in the dark, and from there when he gets to Arkham to rescue Rachel the word had already been spread. “Can he really fly?” one of the Scarecrow guys said because he was scared of the Batman! Correct me if I am wrong, but besides Tim Burton’s “who are you”? line I cannot remember regular bad guys being afraid of Batman on any other movie.
Most of us are getting used to the way Marvel uses easter eggs to conect their movies to the source material, but getting a Superman cameo is not what a Batman comic book is about, source material in my opinion is everything on a movie that can be directly or indirectly linked to comicbooks. The scene when Batman gave the little kid his night vision googles is obviously making reference to a comicbook relationship Batman has, and that is sometimes what makes me uncomfortable about complaints. Most of comic book movie fans are just that, they just watch movies about comicbooks, but they do not tend to read comics as much as a regular reader would, and that is why they do not connect things that easily.
The Dark Knight is full of comic book connections, my favorite one: when the Joker is hitting Batman with a lever bar one time after another, which just made me remember the death in the family story line.
James Gordon saying Batman does what 50 officers could do is literaly taken from a comic book. Batman fighting police officers in a semi constructed building was taken from Batman: Mask of the Phatasm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_vwPlWTrgo
. “I think you and I are destined to this forever” phrase has been depicted like a million times in all kinds of media not only comic books.
When Batman comes back on The Dark Knight Rises and the old police officer tells his young partner “Oh boy, you are in for a show tonight, son!” was taken from The Dark Knight Returns story line and It has ben used more than once.
So as you can see the three movies were obviosly written by someone who has read comic books all his life or at least by someano who did a deep research on Batman, I have to admit that Chris Nolan may not have had that deep involvement in the screen play, but at least he was not the classical all mighty director who thinks he has got the right idea of what o who the comic book character really is and just changues everything.
Batman has been around since May 1939 and has evolved a lot since then, so I belive it is almost impossible to depict him as everyone would expect or believes he should be. There is a comic book that was published some years ago and it is about a magazine one who killed some workers and ince he knows Batman will go after him he hires some writers and storytellers so they could tell him how they visualize Batman; and all of them come up with so different ideas about who Batman is that at the end the owner kicks them all out, but somehow they were all right!
And that is my point I guess that at the end Batman is different for everybody and it would be impossible to show what Batman is on three movies.
Now talking about film making The Dark Knight has gotten 67 nominations and more than 90 awards in different movie festivals around the world, so trying to deny that Chris Nolan did a great job with the dark knight is just going agains facts.
This is the first time I post something here so I hope I did not break any rules, excuse my English, it is not my mother´s language.