The first time I watched ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, it blew me away. But on watching it for the second time, it didn’t appeal to me as much. I found it far less enjoyable. Was I in a ‘Hollywood-marketing-machine-induced’ euphoria when I watched it the first time? Was the euphoria of my own making? I’m not certain.
The unintelligibly edited hand-to-hand fights, that had held a sliver of appeal for me before, didn’t appeal to me at all, this time. Perhaps Nolan and crew should have hired master fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping (The Matrix, Fearless, True Legend; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon etc.) and asked him to tone down the awe-inspiring, gravity-defying moves that characterise a great deal of his work! I’m certain that master Yuen, even with his wings clipped to suit Nolan’s ‘realistic’ style, would have done a superb job.
The sound effects and score seemed to drown out the
dialogue. Was it a result of poor sound-mixing on the part of the filmmakers?
Was it the theatre’s sound system that was faulty? Was it my ears? I don’t
know. Although, I doubt very much that it was my ears – they are still in
fairly good condition you see. The other two are more probable.
I still don’t know how Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) had what
seemed to be close ties to Bane (Tom Hardy) or how she knew so much about him.
I know that the answers lie in the film’s dialogue – if only so much of it
wasn’t so difficult to hear!
The epic scale of ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, demands that one
be in awe of this film. Its scale is epic indeed; a marvel. One example is the huge
vehicular chase involving Batman as the pursued and almost all of the Gotham
Police Department as pursuers. But I’m
currently of the mind that there isn’t that much mass/substance to this colossus
of a film. Ah, the epic proportions of this film, the spectacle of it.
In some instances, the film – the moving images – relied too much on the score, to generate excitement, to the point that the score overshadowed the images. The score made grand promises of excitement while the images failed to deliver. An example is when ‘The Bat’ flies the ‘nuclear bomb’ out of Gotham so that the ‘bomb’ detonates out at sea. The music in this sequence is grandiose, but what’s happening on screen isn’t grandiose.
It’s annoying to watch a film that was partly shot on IMAX
film and be unable to see, fully, the grandeur of the IMAX shots, because
you’re watching the standard-sized print, on a standard-sized screen. Such was
the case with ‘The Dark Knight Rises’.
The theatre screen wasn’t large enough to accommodate the
whole film image. The film image exceeded the boundaries of the screen, such
that part of it could be seen on the area around the screen. That was very
annoying. Are movies nowadays being shot in a wider aspect ratio than before?
Is it because ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ was shot on a variety of film stock sizes
– IMAX, 35mm and I-don’t-quite-remember-what-else. Did the projectionist not
know what he was doing? I don’t know.
I don’t think that this film would have been any less
enjoyable without Talia al Ghul (Marion Cotillard), Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway)
and Robin John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). These characters felt a little
tacked on. I felt that their presence wasn’t integral to the story. It was as
though they had been added at the last minute, when the filmmakers felt that
there weren’t enough characters to keep the audience interested. ‘Batman’ films
have always been an ensemble piece, after all.
The idea of a prison with a shaft leading up to the surface
seemed rather too implausible this time. So were the prisoners chanting the
phrase “deshi basara” and a TV installed in prison, especially for Bruce Wayne
to witness the destruction of Gotham.
Jodhpur, India, which was chosen to represent the landscape outside the prison, because of its ‘desolate look’, didn’t look foreboding to me at all. Instead, it looked beautiful. The rustic colours were absolutely majestic.
