On the Big Screen: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)

"S AFETY NOT GUARANTEED" read the marquee of the Spectrum Theater, but the exhibitors were only advertising the indie time-travel picture that was playing alongside the venue's typical arthouse fare and the new Christopher Nolan film. For one night, at least, those lines might give a moviegoer pause, for not since The Warriors, I suppose, has a motion picture seemed to drive a nation mad, from the hysterical threats made to critics, through Rush Limbaugh's baroque interpretations of it, to the horror of Friday morning in Aurora CO. You could almost believe that the film was evil, that something about the idea of it -- its own apocalyptic agenda and the corporate hype of an ultimate movie event -- was exerting a malignant influence on people. My screening didn't live up to those implications. The Spectrum is an old neighborhood theater far from the malls where most people went to see this picture. A 9:40 p.m. screening last night was about one-third full, though many more probably turned out for the 8:00 show on another screen. I don't know if you're better off watching it with a bigger crowd, though you probably are better off paying extra for the IMAX show at Crossgates Mall, but the picture can be judged separately -- it has to be, eventually -- from this disturbing week in pop-culture history in which it premiered. So here's what we'll do. The next paragraph will be a spoiler-free summary of my opinion, after which, in order to explain myself better, I must give things away.

As a comic-book fan and Batman fan, I enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises, but it probably has the worst writing of Nolan's trilogy. Most of the script's faults are inherent in Nolan's self-assigned task to complete a cohesive trilogy of movies; he could have told the same basic story much more effectively without most of the continuity baggage. On the other hand, Rises easily has the best action of the three films, and Batman's two principal antagonists in this picture are at least equal, combined, to Heath Ledger's already-legendary turn as the Joker in the previous film. Two other new characters, however, are anchors dragging the show down. The ending reinforces a major difference between Nolan's vision and the fundamental Batman concept that ultimately prevents Nolan's films, despite their many virtues, from ever being the definitive Batman movies. For now, however, they stand quantitatively, at least, as the most consistently well done series of superhero films from one director.

 And with that said...

WELCOME

TO

THE SPOILERDOME!

"Let the games begin!..."

We last left Batman fleeing from the police and taking the rap for Harvey Dent's brief crime spree at the end of The Dark Knight, and the first surprise of the new picture is that he apparently did not continue fighting crime after that escape. Bruce Wayne was apparently more injured, physically and spiritually, than we realized, and has made himself a limping recluse in the eight ensuing years. He has grown so out of touch that he seems bemused rather than indignant when a cat-burglar in a maid's costume raids his private rooms at Wayne Manor, steals his martyred mother's pearl necklace, and kicks his cane out from under him before backflipping out a window. He's still smart enough to notice something unusual: the cat-burglar, whom research quickly identifies as Selina "The Cat" Kyle, had dusted his safe for fingerprints -- his. Intrigued if not aroused, and also alerted by rumors of a mysterious masked man building an army in the sewers, he decides to don his costume once more despite the entreaties of a panicky Alfred, who fears for his master's life and will take any measure to deter what he sees as a pointless death wish. The cat-burglar and the masked man seem to be working for the same person, John Daggett -- a sinister businessman pursuing a hostile takeover of Wayne's financial empire. Bruce's only ally is Miranda Tate, an investment partner in a massive, money-losing clean-energy project, to whom Bruce turns over control of his empire to keep it, and especially Lucius Fox's arsenal of weapons and vehicles, out of Daggett's hands. Realizing that Daggett isn't dealing square with Selina, Batman tries to flip her to his side but his plan backfires when she delivers him to the masked man, Bane, who's been waiting for an opportunity to break him. Still, her increasing revulsion at the way Bane brutalizes the outmatched Batman leads us to think our hero's gut feeling about her isn't entirely wrong. For now, Bane dumps Bruce Wayne in a deep hole far away while he perpetrates a hostile takeover of Daggetts's scheme, converting it to a hostile takeover of Gotham City, enforced by his possession of a mobile, undisarmable nuclear bomb. Inevitably, however, the Dark Knight rises, joined by an eclectic assortment of allies, to take the city back -- but at what cost?

I hope I've described at least a potentially compelling story, and as filmed it is compelling much of the time. But if the plot seems labored even in my minimal description, bear in mind that I haven't told you everything. On its own, this has the makings of a good third Batman movie. The problem is, Nolan wants to make the last Batman movie. He wants to complete a trilogy by filling his third film with references to the first. That means we're reintroduced to the League of Shadows and to Ra's al Ghul -- Liam Neeson returns for some flashback and hallucination scenes -- when we might have thought that we'd never have to think of them again after Batman Begins. But to reinforce the trilogy nature of his story, Nolan drops two heavy shoes. First, he ties Bane to the League, in a bald burst of exposition from Michael Caine -- since Alfred somehow knows this -- that Bane is an ex-member of the League expelled for being somehow too mean. And the moment the League is invoked, the comics fans in the audience can start waiting for the other shoe, the one many had expected all along, to drop. Boy, does it drop. This plot twist is a dud in three ways. First, Nolan makes a tease of it as fellow prisoners tell Bruce a legend of the one person who escaped from their hole. From these accounts, Bruce assumes that the person was Bane and that he was an unwanted child of Ra's al-Ghul. He is, of course, wrong, and he has to get the correct facts explained to him by someone who's just literally stabbed him in the back back in Gotham. Worse, this backstabbing involves the revelation of a major figure in the Batman legend, but Nolan has actually done nothing to make the naming of this character the tremendous moment he seems to want it to be. The name is spat out, almost as an afterthought or a sop to comics fans who are presumed to be thrilled to hear it -- though they're not supposed to care if Selina Kyle is never called "Catwoman." Worst of all, the abrupt nature of this revelation, contrived so Nolan can have a late plot twist, instantly turns Bane into a stooge. This could have been avoided. If Bane had made clear all along that he answered to somebody, or did what he did in tribute to some mystery person, than there'd be some buildup toward that person finally taking a bow. But the better course would have been to skip the League of Shadows stuff altogether. Nolan's trilogy would be no less complete and cohesive; the films, after all, are about Bruce Wayne, not the League.

What is the story of Bruce Wayne, anyway? For all that The Dark Knight Rises ends with Batman once more revered as a hero, Bruce has spent the last two pictures struggling to squirm his way out of the costume. For him, to live a real life means to be rid of Batman. This was the tragic core of The Dark Knight. In that picture, Wayne selfishly tried to shift the burden of heroism onto other shoulders so he could get the girl, and get her from the very man he appointed Gotham's white knight. The results were disastrous on every level. In the new movie, he can be reckless about re-donning the cowl because, with Rachel Dawes dead, he feels he has nothing to live for. Yet we've already noticed that he's become Batman again at least in part to pursue a woman, one with whom he's also willing to flirt as Bruce Wayne before snatching that necklace off her neck. This woman is also the only person on Earth who dresses in any way like himself -- though Nolan is at pains to deny that Selina's work clothes, if you will, are a superhero costume. A soulmate, perhaps? An ideal woman who would not force a choice between love and crimefighting on him? Not quite, because Nolan's Selina Kyle is also looking for a way out of the life. She expects payment from Daggett in the form of a "Clean Slate" program that would obliterate her criminal record and allow her to make a fresh start -- doing what, exactly? Later, Bruce Wayne (and his "powerful friend") dangle the same enticement before her. If Bruce and Selina are soulmates in this picture, it is not so much because they both enjoy romping on rooftops in hot costumes but because they both want the clean break and the fresh start. This only reinforces Nolan's message that a happy ending for Bruce Wayne is when he is no longer Batman. A comics fans can't be blamed for balking at that idea, though on the alternate-universe level it is well-executed here, thanks largely to the chemistry between Christian Bale and Anne Hathaway and the Nolan Brothers' efforts to condense the classic long arc of redemption that has left Catwoman no worse than an antihero in the comics. That may be strange to say given that Nolan's Selina is an unrepentant killer, but the movies have never been as big on the code-against-killing thing as the comics. Batman snatches a gun from her hand in one scene, but I think he grows more forgiving after she saves his life with extreme prejudice later in the picture. Well, I know he grows more forgiving because I saw the end of the movie, and let's leave it at that. But while a happily-ever-after finish for these two is many fans' dream, it can be said that it also misses the point of Batman, and Bruce Wayne, for whom the pursuit of justice is his life -- a fact that Selina Kyle, paradoxically enough, may be the one woman capable of appreciating.

As Nolan's Catwoman picture, Rises is a success. It also succeeds as an action movie, from the bludgeoning brawls between Batman and Bane to the epic chase scenes through the streets and skies of Gotham in the final act. Visually the film's as fine as the others, though there's some choppiness in the editing, especially early on, that creates the bizarre impression of a 165-minute movie that feels truncated -- I wouldn't be surprised to see a considerably extended edition at some point. Rises is worst in its writing, both in bad dialogue and bad ideas. Sadly, much of the bad stuff focuses on Michael Caine's underutilized Alfred, who's burdened with explaining Bane to the world and with an awful, mawkish scene in which he tells Bruce the truth about the Rachel Dawes breakup letter he burned at the end of Dark Knight. That's part of this film's confused attitude toward lies, the big lie being the legend of the martyred Harvey Dent. Nolan seems to want to deplore a resort to "noble" lies yet also to affirm their occasional necessity, the need for someone to dirty his hands so another's can stay clean. Certain lies are among the film's necessary evils, but they also give occasion for the film's more sanctimonious characters, including Bruce Wayne himself, to throw snit-fits. The worst offender in this regard, and nearly the worst major character in the movie, is its most mysterious, the much-speculated-upon policeman John Blake. Played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Blake reminds me of the sort of character fan-fictioneers call a "Mary Sue," a too-good-to-be-true personality with privileged access to legendary personalities. All you need to know about Blake is that in his youth, as an angry orphan, he pegged Bruce Wayne as Batman because he recognized a certain look in his eyes. Yes, indeed. But Blake has only just begun to be insufferable, and the end of his arc seems supremely unmerited. The film could have done without him quite nicely, just as it could have done without many things. Rises is overstuffed and rushed at the same time, which is more likely than it sounds because that simply means it's doubly flawed -- too much of the bad and not enough of the good, or the good done too quickly or abruptly. Someone who isn't a comic-book fan or an action-movie fan could easily and understandably dismiss it as a bloated trifle; they certainly have a right to do so without facing threats of bodily harm.

Even if Rises seems bloated, Nolan still manages his neat trick of not having the epic scale of the action dwarf his strong personalities. Bale has been consistently good, Hathaway and Hardy are terrific, and even the more mundane characters portrayed by Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman often shine. I can't close without defending Hardy from both the "you're not Heath Ledger" and the "I can't understand what you're saying" critics. His Bane is a tremendous physical presence as well as a classic pompous ass of a villain; he's like Goldfinger and Oddjob rolled into one. I didn't mind the muffler effect of his muzzle, because Bane is so self-absorbed (except when he's ultimately revealed as a loyal puppy) that I felt that he didn't really care whether anyone understood him or not. I found his brutal nihilism not much inferior to the Joker's lethal anarchy -- though I must add that the vaunted political subtext of the new movie isn't all it's cracked up to be. That may be a good thing, since it'll make Bane a more timeless villain down the line, and it'll be in the future, when the madness of this sick week is long past, and perhaps after there are more Batman films for comparison, that Nolan's achievement will get the fair appraisal it deserves.

The End of Something

Twenty years ago, give or take a few weeks, I took a day off from work to see a matinee of Tim Burton's Batman Returns. This year I felt no need to take time off so I could go to a midnight show of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. That's no reflection on Nolan. I'm eager to see the picture, but can't justify skipping work even if I'm entitled. I'll see it sometime this weekend, barring unforeseen circumstances, but the film is the real event, not the time you see it. If its arrival has the air of a historic event, that's not all hype. Rises is likely to be the last film of its kind: a big-budget brand-name superhero film that takes place in a director's "universe" rather than a comic-book publisher's. Between the premiere of Batman Begins in 2005 and tomorrow, Marvel Studios has changed the game for the genre and altered expectations for fans of comic-book movies. Warner Bros. is expected to emulate Marvel in the future when developing film treatments of its corporate cousins at DC Comics. Next year's Man of Steel will be transitional, brandishing the Nolan brand name while probably aspiring to transcend it.

The film Warners and DC really want to make, everyone believes, is Justice League, the super-team saga that, ironically enough, drove Stan Lee to initiate the "Marvel Age of Comics," including The Avengers, because Lee's boss wanted a similar book for his line -- he got The Fantastic Four. How soon Justice League will get made is unclear, but it seems more certain that the next film adaptation of a DC comic after Man of Steel will be set in someplace recognizable as the "DC Universe." Such a place will be defined by its multiplicity and diversity of superpowered beings, and as such it'll be the antithesis of the imagined worlds of Batman in the seven films made since 1989. The closest any of those movies has come to acknowledging even the possible existence of other superheroes is George (Batman) Clooney's crack in Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin, "This is why Superman works alone." The irony, of course, is that it's Batman who's worked alone in movies, whose franchise has failed, or rather refused to fertilize a universe of crimefighters and superheroes. Superman has worked alone as well, of course, and much of this compartmentalization was a matter of rights, different producers like Michael Uslan claiming individual characters rather than seizing or receiving a universe. That situation has changed, but it's arguable that Nolan has held back the evolution of a cinematic DC universe by claiming auteurial rights over Batman. If so, he was only claiming his due, much as Tim Burton did. If neither was a household name at the time of his first Batman movie, by each man's sequel the director's personal vision had become a major selling point, and The Dark Knight Rises is being sold primarily as the climax of Nolan's vision. By comparison, how much of Iron Man was Jon Favreau's vision. Whatever the fraction, it was probably greater than Kenneth Branagh's visionary contribution to Thor, or Joe Johnston's to Captain America, or even Joss Whedon's to The Avengers. Marvel has embarked on another series of films, with none of the aforementioned directors returning -- except perhaps for Whedon down the line. Marvel does not want a Christopher Nolan, and while Warners seemingly offered the entire DC Universe to Nolan, one suspects that they wanted the name more than the man.

There really can be no place in the future of superhero movies for an auteur who balks in any way at his characters interacting with characters from other comics or their movie adaptations. Superhero cinema is becoming a corporate art in more than the obvious monetary ways. Making superhero movies will be a collaborative, editorially-supervised practice. The age of the auteur -- the Nolans, the Burtons, the Sam Raimis -- is almost certainly over. Some comics fans will welcome this. The multitudes of superbeings is an essential part of the comics reading experience for these people that only the Marvel movies have begun to translate into film. Even some admirers of Nolan protest that his quasi-realistic vision limited the cinematic possibilities for Batman compared to what can happen to him in comics -- that you're not getting the true Batman experience unless the more outlandishly powerful characters like Mr. Freeze of Clayface can cut loose, or unless Superman or Green Lantern can drop into Gotham for a visit and a team-up. A lot of Batman fans feel differently, but many DC fans are not so committed to Batman's isolation and would welcome a Justice League film. To be blunt, I see no artistic imperative to make that film, but there's nothing automatically preventing such a project from being at least as good as The Avengers. But why couldn't there be a Justice League jamboree and more individual films, in any sense of the word, at the same time? I can't help thinking that one option will preclude the other, however, in a way that makes another Burton or Nolan franchise unlikely -- and that would be a real loss. The imminence of that loss makes The Dark Knight Rises more of an event than it already is -- more than most people watching may realize.

The Dark Knight's Lady

My earliest memory of Batman is also a memory of Catwoman. Maybe I'm misremembering; I probably watched lots of the old Batman TV show without specific incidents making strong impressions, but I remember it being unusual for one of his enemies to die, and still more unusual for him to regret it. The episode was "Scat, Darn Catwoman," from the second of the show's three seasons. I later learned that it wasn't the first time that Catwoman had seemed to die; she'd fallen into a bottomless pit in Julie Newmar's only appearance of the first season. This second death -- Catwoman had lives to spare -- is still unusual for its build-up. There's nothing like the foot chase, with Newmar and Adam West apparently doing their own running, in the entire series. Maybe it was a form of padding, with no one able to come up with the usual melee gags. But it seems more like a build-up to a dramatic moment, though the moment itself is capped in camp fashion as Batman's mourning is made into a typical Bat-gag.



Newmar's persona isn't fully formed in the "Purr-Fect Crime/Better Luck Next Time" diptych from the first season. In those shows Catwoman is a less appealing (though still undeniably attractive), more ruthless figure, backstabbing her own gang so she can have a whole treasure for herself. It's not until the second season -- and after Lee Merriwether coldly replaced her in the big-screen version of the show -- that Newmar and key Catwoman writer Stanley Ralph Ross came into their own. In that season, with the exception of a story where she was shoehorned in to support a lackluster new villain, Michael Rennie's Sandman, Newmar can do no wrong. Ross had figured out how to ring the changes on Catwoman's love-hate relationship with Batman and make the most of the comic chemistry between Newmar and West. The actors' best scenes together are paradoxically funny, emphasizing the sex-temptation angle while portraying both Catwoman and Batman as overgrown nerds and brats, playing out life-and-death showdowns like schoolyard games. Look at the climax of "The Bat's Kow-Tow," when Catwoman almost abashedly explains, with Batman's encouragement, how her voice-stealing device -- her own invention, apparently -- works. Note also the moment when Catwoman, maybe uniquely among the show's villains, seems capable of defeating Batman single-handedly, yet can't do it.



Newmar and West are at their bickering bratty best in their last teaming, "Batman Displays His Knowledge." Their comic timing over a long take is impeccable as Newmar careens from seductive mode to blustering claws-baring "katrate" stances. This two parter (opening with "Catwoman Goes to College") seems like a missed opportunity as Bruce Wayne becomes Catwoman's probation sponsor. It looks like a perfect setup for the Princess of Plunder to go after Wayne's fortune, yet she promptly plunges into a plot to frame Batman, while Wayne pays attention to his new charge only as Batman. Bruce is a disaster of inaction in his assigned role, but there's a payoff for that in the two-parter's closing scene, Newmar's final appearance in the series. Confronting her one last time in his civilian identity, an uncomfortable Bruce seems to realize that he's screwed up, while Catwoman is a portrait of serene desolation. Showing no defiance, she consoles the warden, reminding him that her recidivism is the exception, not the rule. Then, after telling Batman earlier that reform was hopeless for her without the love of a good man, she tells Bruce that there might have been something between them, except that her heart belongs to Batman. You might not hear it here, but on a proper TV you can hear her say "good-bye" as she exits the frame. The story may be that Newmar didn't return for the third season because she was tied up on a thankless movie shoot (McKenna's Gold), but when I watch this I sense that she knew she was done. There's a last bow quality about it that's undeniable, as if Ross, who would go on to write a very different Catwoman for Eartha Kitt, knew he'd said all he could as well.



These stories were my first meaningful exposure to romance, the first romances that had an impact on me. If there was an overarching story to the Batman series, at least in its first two seasons, his combative courtship of Catwoman was it. I watched those shows before I ever read a Batman comic book, without the comics fans sense of insult over travestied sacred texts. I went through that phase later, when I did become a comics fan and took the books seriously. But the very first Batman comic I bought had a surprise in it. It was Batman 320, if I remember right, from sometime in 1980. The Joker was kidnapping Batman's allies to make them candles in a birthday cake for himself, and one of his stops was Bruce Wayne's residence. I don't recall whether he was after Wayne himself, who was absent, or Alfred the butler, whom he captured, but there hanging out in the mansion was one Selina Kyle, helpfully identified for me by the Clown Prince of Crime as "the sultry Catwoman." I'd never seen or heard the name before. Anyway, resenting the intrusion on Wayne's behalf, Selina Kyle set about clobbering the Joker's minions until he kayoed her with some gag boxing glove. It did not occur to him to make her a candle; he was probably confused, as I was, about what she was doing there.

In time, I learned that Selina, claiming to have reformed, had approached Bruce Wayne, not knowing him to be Batman, in the self-interested hope that he'd fund a cure for some rare disease she'd contracted. Romance ensued. I was intrigued. Ever since then, through "reboots" that reset the DC Universe, Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle -- the TV character was never called by that name -- have been on again, off again. The tone as actually set slightly before Len Wein wrote the stories I've just described. One of DC Comics's ingenious ideas during the "Silver Age" of superhero comics (roughly 1956-86) was that the heroes of the "Golden Age" of superhero comics' origins lived on a separate planet in a separate dimension from the present-day heroes. DC could thus show slightly-different versions of the current heroes aging and evolving beyond what a monthly comic could tolerate. On "Earth-2," readers learned, the original Batman and Catwoman from the 1940s eventually did marry. After the Crisis on Infinite Earths ended the Silver Age and rebooted the DC Universe, this event presumably never happened, but following the most recent reboot, in 2011, the "New 52" universe once more includes an Earth-2 where a Batman married a Catwoman, or at least had a daughter together. Legends of this sort make a romance between the characters in the current monthly comics a matter of fate. It definitely becomes a temptation and at least twice in the last 30 years editors apparently decided that things had gone too far. After writers in the mid-1980s had made Batman and Catwoman too close -- she had practically become his crimefighting sidekick, a story was concocted in which Selina had her brain fried and rewired by a mad scientist, the results being that she reverted to villainy and conveniently forgot Batman's secret identity. No such contrivance was needed more recently; the 2011 reboot once more stripped Catwoman of that key bit of knowledge and restored some distance between the characters after Ed Brubaker, Jeph Loeb and succeeding writers had developed the Bat-Cat relationship over the past decade. These changes are artificial and jolting to longtime readers, not to mention "shippers" for whom relationships are all, but there's a reasonable argument for them. Unless you, like many other people, including one with a quarter-billion-dollar budget, propose to write "the last Batman story," some respect for basic archetypes are in order. If you bring Batman and Catwoman too close together, you risk losing much of the tension and pathos that made their stories compelling originally. If Catwoman becomes no more than a loyal supporting character or partner of Batman, you may miss what makes her interesting. The potential for a redeeming relationship may make for better comic book stories than a realized relationship. Tim Burton understood this and succeeded, when he used an unorthodox Catwoman -- a supernatural avenger rather than a charismatic bandit -- in Batman Returns, in taking the pathos occasionally invoked on the old TV show to a new level of romantic tragedy.

Art by Jim Lee

Christopher Nolan's work with Batman would not really have been done, in my opinion, if he didn't give us a Catwoman. With some cajoling, Nolan himself came around to that view, and the world will see the results this weekend. Not everyone may agree. Batman comics fans have diverse opinions about their hero's love life or his potential for one. The three largest factions might be described as "Team Selina," "Team Talia" and "Team Neuter." In the comics, Selina Kyle's great rival for Bruce Wayne's and Batman's affections for the last forty years has been Talia al-Ghul, the rebellious daughter of assassin-king Ra's al-Ghul. Talia, whom many people still expect to see in The Dark Knight Rises, is the ideal for those who idolize the writing of Denny O'Neil, the scribe who liberated Batman comics from the incubus of the TV show's camp legacy. Many fans find Talia's story more compelling than Selina's -- O'Neil came to the comics with an initial contempt for the costumed villains tainted by association with TV -- and the character simply more attractive. The fact (in current continuity) that Talia is the mother of Batman's only child would seem to make her the woman in his life even though present writer Grant Morrison portrays her as a more implacable enemy than Catwoman ever was. Talia has been central to several great stories over the decades, but for me she's always lacked that primal opposites-attract quality that Catwoman brings to the comics. A smaller fourth faction, represented most recently in comics by Kevin Smith, might argue for Silver St. Cloud, the romantic interest in the small late-70s run of stories by Steve Engelhart and Marshall Rogers that are still considered one of the greatest achievements in Batman history, while no one, I suspect, takes Vicki Vale, the star of comics, 1949 serial and 1989 movie, seriously as Bruce Wayne's great love. "Team Neuter," I hope, speaks for itself. Suffice it to say that some people are happy, or at least more comfortable, with Batman having no strong romance in his life. It's as valid a viewpoint as any, but also less interesting. Had Christopher Nolan a more exploitative mentality, he might have made his new movie a different kind of bonanza by pitching it as a kind of anti-Twilight, with a hero torn between two uber-women -- but for now it's still the official word that there's no such creature as Talia in his movie, despite irrepressible speculation about the role played by Marion Cotillard. The comic-book movie business being what it is, such a movie may yet be made some day.

While I want to judge The Dark Knight Rises on its own terms, I also have to admit that how Nolan treats Selina Kyle -- while he has no problem calling the character "Catwoman" in interviews, she'll never be called by that name in the picture -- will strongly influence my opinion. For the new film to succeed fully, Nolan has to get Catwoman right. That doesn't mean he has to match some ideal I have of the character; Burton and Michelle Pfeiffer triumphed with an interpretation resembling no previous version of Selina. Nolan and Anne Hathaway have deep boots to fill, but I've liked most of what I've seen in the trailers and commercials. Considering what I've just written, there's no point in my attempting a list of what director and actress have to do. They just have to not screw up one of the most important elements of the Batman legend. I won't know whether they have or not until I see the movie. Until then, I hope to have something to say about Rises's prospective place in pop-culture history tomorrow.

Bat-clips from The Bat's Kow-Tow and Batman Displays his Knowledge uploaded by captivebatfan; Scat! Darn Catwoman uploaded by Fanof Bats.

Idiots of the Week: Dark Knight Rises Critic-Haters

Idiot of the week is an occasional feature of my political blog, The Think 3 Institute. It's occasional rather than weekly because I feel no need to make a ritual out of it, and I want the idiocy recognized to stand out from the run-of-the-mill stupidity that's encountered all too often in political life. I've moved the feature to Mondo 70 for the first time as an unintended preface to a series of posts I've planned leading up to Friday's release of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Rises. As some readers may know, this film is a sequel to a 2008 Nolan movie called The Dark Knight and the conclusion of a trilogy the director began back in 2005, literally enough, with Batman Begins. As both of those films were successful, the second film more so than the first, the third film is rather highly anticipated in many quarters. Many people want Rises to be a good, even great film -- I wouldn't mind that myself. Some people, unfortunately, don't want to hear bad news, even though they strain to hear it amid a mounting volume of hosannas greeting Rises as if it were the Second, or rather Third Coming. Many professional reviewers have seen the film by now and have started to post their reviews on media websites. The Rotten Tomatoes website keeps a running tab of early critical opinion; as I write, it reports that 29 reviewers have rated it "fresh," while 2 have deemed it "rotten." Working with the reviewers' star-ratings, letter grades, and other appraisal systems, it gives Rises a 94% "fresh" rating so far. Impressive, no? No! -- as far as many people are concerned, for those two heretics, and for much of the day a lone heretic, Marshall Fine -- have ruined Rises's perfect score. As a result, numerous Nolan fans have flamed poor Fine, deeming his opinion, after seeing the picture, inferior to theirs, sight unseen.

Part of this results from presumptions of prejudice on Fine's part. He must hate superhero movies, or like Marvel movies better, etc., etc. Superhero-movie fans are perhaps especially defensive against any hint of prejudice against the genre. But so what? If you're a superhero-movie fan, or a Batman fan in particular, or a fan of Christopher Nolan's work in general, are you going to like Rises any less because Fine, whom I'd never heard of before today, disliked it? But perhaps these people are insecure in their anticipation and want no hint from anyone, no matter how prejudiced they assume the source to be, that the film might not live up to their eschatological expectations. My own expectations are pretty high despite my less than rapturous reception of Nolan's last picture, the heavy-handed dream fantasy Inception. My expectations probably differ from those of the people who would hear no criticism as well as those of the critics, since I liked different things about The Dark Knight than most people. Some of my expectations have less to do with Christopher Nolan than with my near-lifetime of Batman fandom. For me, there's a standard that Nolan has to meet, which I hope to elaborate on later this week; Nolan doesn't set the standard himself. That's why I can't accept this idiotic notion, from people who haven't seen the movie, that it's above criticism from people who have seen it, or that any criticism is automatically wrong in some way. It's still possible for Nolan to get Batman, and in this case Catwoman, wrong at the last moment. I don't mean that he might deviate from my ideal of either character. I do mean that he can still screw up as a moviemaker. I welcome any vision that's different but good, especially since The Dark Knight Rises may be the last mainstream superhero movie with license to be "different" -- but that's also a topic for later in the week. For now, let me say to anyone freaking out because they read a thumbs-down review that I hope you like the film better than Marshall Fine or Christy Lemire did, and that once you've seen it you can prove how they saw things wrong. Until then, you're idiots.