The Dark Knight Rises and Mechanical Filmmaking

I am deeply ambivalent about The Dark Knight Rises, and that's more frustrating than it should be. This is from a guy who thought Batman Begins was refreshing, and The Dark Knight was the closest thing we've had to a masterpiece of comic book movies. Also, I like Nolan enough to have thought about which is his best film, and I've decided that it's Inception... a puzzle box wrapped around a vivid emotional core that debunks every talking point about how Nolan is a "mechanical filmmaker" who doesn't understand human feeling.

While I don't think Nolan is a mechanical filmmaker, I think that The Dark Knight Rises is an example of mechanical filmmaking. Or, to put it more precisely, it's film engineering, rather than organic filmmaking, and the result is a collection of calibrated gears and interlocking parts that add up to empty clockwork.

I think it worked out this way because Nolan was trying to recapture the power of The Dark Knight, but by identifying that film's many merits, which originally evolved organically, and trying to reproduce them intentionally, he lost sight of his third movie as a whole. It's an easy mistake to make, especially for a director who's controlled and calculated and cerebral. Unfortunately, in this case, he basically relied upon his targeting mechanism and it caused him to miss the target. That's a Luke Skywalker reference, in case you didn't catch it.

There were a lot of things that were great about The Dark Knight... like any serendipitous event, they sprung up spontaneously and he captured them all in the emulsion. The principal merits:

1 - An extreme, visceral, compelling villain with endless depths to plumb, and an actor at the top of his game, digging deep into the role.

2 - A compelling side-character who toed the line between hero and villain

3 - A broad, open-ended theme of human nature and the power of the symbolic hero as a way of purifying the corrupt human soul

4 - Political references that were somewhat timely, but not forced (cell phone surveillance, for instance)

5 - A couple major twists that radically altered the trajectory of the plot, involving betrayals and sudden shifts in loyalty

6 - The sense that Gotham City, as a macrocosm for its citizens, is sort of a character in itself, a populist gothic metropolis with a sinister underside

Those six things fell together so perfectly in The Dark Knight. It was a film that revolved around the slow rise and payoffs of two major action sequences, each with two or three parts: the lengthy introduction to the Joker and Gotham's underworld, proceeding through a series of plays and counter-plays that plateau with Gordon's "death"... the first major ascent and climax as the Joker chases Harvey Dent through Gotham, gets caught, and escapes while Rachel Dawes is killed... another tense, extended low-key sequence, as Harvey is corrupted and The Joker lays plans for a final showdown... and the climactic battle sequence, the fight for Gotham's soul in the rooftops, on the river, and at Gordon's home. Nolan orchestrated the whole thing like a grand symphony, tuning and conducting the rises and falls until every demand of the viewer was sated.

Those six things are all there in The Dark Knight Rises. The problem is, they're rushed together, glued into a kludge of ideas and sucker-punches that doesn't seem to have any rhythm at all. Tom Hardy almost makes Bane genuinely inspiring (I didn't really mind the voice much), but he's undercut by the need for a cheap twist at the end of the film. Anne Hathaway does justice to her role as Catwoman, but she is sabotaged by the populist theme and the conventional crisis-of-conscience device, which undermine her integrity. Nolan gets caught between the closely-linked wheels of the populist Gotham and the timely Occupy references, and he doesn't end up fleshing out either idea sufficiently. The Batman-as-symbol theme is draped over this whole structure, but it never reaches a moment of real clarity, as Nolan is caught up in the need to make Batman a traditional action hero and Bruce Wayne a winking playboy survivor.

This is the basic failure that motivates so many of the further complaints about TDKR. The plot is full of holes and the motivations are often indecipherable, because each character was trying to fit into a grand mosaic of elements that just weren't left any time to fall into place. Because Nolan was trying to get so much stuff in, the film felt rushed, even though it was a full one hundred sixty minutes. It could be reverse-engineered and put back together much more organically, and you could probably still keep most of the writing and plot developments... you would just have to extract a few threads to give the rest more space to breathe. You'd need to let go of some of the abstract ideas, some of the Occupy references and current-event set-pieces, and you'd need to give more love and attention to Bane, Selina Kyle, and Catwoman... those characters need space to stand on their own, to make decisions that seem meaningful within their particular moral arc.

Even without the substance, you can see the plot engineering going on. The fights between Batman and Bane occur at the correct times... right in the middle, and at the moment of maximum crisis... but they have no soul, looking less like tactical encounters and more like games of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. Bane's build-up is hasty and obscure, but we're good at responding to Nolan's rudimentary cues, so we know he's supposed to be terrifying and malevolent... but even as we buy into his evilness, we're cheated out of a gratifying defeat, because the guy is just blasted off-screen by a battery of guns. And it's a lovely setup that Bane treats Gotham as a doomed revolution, so yes, we want to experience Gotham as a chaotic locus of resistance poisoned by a petty tyrant. But that experience never gets fleshed out, because we don't spend any time among the citizens of Gotham. It doesn't look like a police state, nor like London during the 2011 riots. It just looks like a bunch of cleared streets, a big controlled set for furtive encounters between our protagonists.

The moments with Bane, Selina Kyle, and Scarecrow make it worth another viewing some day, and I want to congratulate all the actors for bringing these clumsily-scripted characters to life. But I'm eager for Nolan to make another film for his own edification, because this one is his biggest stumble, in my opinion. Nolan knows the art of cinema, but I think, by acting as an engineer in this last entry, Nolan neglected his role as an artist.

The Avengers compelled me to write this review immediately after seeing the film, which is totally not my style

I've read the backlash against The Avengers by the Serious Movie Advocates like A.O. Scott and Andrew O'Heir, and at my most disenchanted moments, I sympathize with them. However, it's a mark of the success of The Avengers that when I came out of the theater, I had turned into a fan of the purest, most obnoxious order... I wanted to go back to their reviews and post snarky responses about how they obviously didn't give it a chance, and they just didn't get it, and no matter how even-handed they sounded, I felt offended by the sneering subtext in their meta-criticism.

And as much as I find Samuel L. Jackson's snap at A.O. Scott to be childish, I understand where it came from. Just watching the movie made me want to stand up and cheer for it... I'd imagine that working on the film, acting the part of inspirational supervisor, can turn you into an unequivocal defender of its honor and integrity. Even the "splatter" graphic beside some Rotten Tomatoes reviews was enough to piss me off when I got home from the cinema. This is a testament to the very primal effectiveness of Whedon's film.

If I listed all the great things about the Avengers, I would certainly mark myself as a partisan. But I can't go and write a detached, ruminating reflection on its strengths and weaknesses, either, because I would severely understate its appeal. It's a film that feels great, even through all the spoilers, all the predictable twists, and all the formulas. So I'll take an entirely different angle in reviewing it: I'll list all the ways it COULD have gone wrong, and didn't.  All the pitfalls it managed to avoid.

NOTE - Minor Spoilers Below

1 - sidelining any particular character, either in terms of plot-significance, or in terms of screen time

With Captain America and Tony Stark as the two sides of guiding authority, and Hawkeye and Black Widow acting as sharpened but compromised tools of team cohesion, the other Avengers are free to take on rogue personalities and profound narrative significance. In fact, arguably, Banner and Thor are both the best-rendered characters and the most interesting individual stories within this omnibus. Reegardless, all six Avengers are absolutely given their due, which is a lot to ask in such a broad ensemble film.

As other critics have pointed out, the dialog is also written with remarkable agility, giving each character a unique voice that becomes clear immediately and remains refreshingly consistent. I won't harp on it. Joss Whedon knows how to handle characters.

2 - failing to create sufficient tension and chemistry between the protagonists

A number of critics point out how important it is that the Avengers have to face one another for a while before they get around to saving the world. It does indeed entertain the old comic book impulse of asking, "Who would win? Thor, Iron Man, or the Hulk?" But saying it that way makes it sound like a gimmick, a mere necessity, checked off a comic book fanservice checklist. It's not.

These moments showcase the primal appeal of comic books and give it a platform to become universal. In particular, when Thor's hammer strikes Captain America's shield, or when Iron Man starts showing signs of distress in Thor's grip... these moments are the small climaxes and reactions that keep the adolescent male imagination engaged.

For the record, the writers of The Avengers also manage to create a surprisingly subtle ecosystem of emotional relationships between the heroes. By the end of the second act, tensions within the group have risen to dangerous levels, but this tension is always ambient, an inexact collision of big egos and cross-purposes. If the writers had reduced it to simple binaries at any time -- authority versus renegade, confrontation versus surrender, interpersonal vendettas, etc -- it would have cheapened it. Instead, the characters' relationships retain their complexity and ambiguity throughout the film.

3 - failing to create a central, compelling antagonist

Loki was not thoroughly sketched out in The Avengers. A good deal of this work was left to Thor; The Avengers treated him as a fairly generic fascist supervillain. Nonetheless, Tom Hiddleston does justice to the role, giving Loki the burning, resentful self-importance that the character needs to set the end of the world in motion. His sheer malice gives a special endearing significance to all his confrontations and evil speeches, and it makes for a whole array of great moments.

4 - failing to raise the stakes enough for us to care

Throughout the course of the extended climax, there are a whole range of things for us to be vicariously protective of. The world as a whole... New York, which is a focal point for an alien invasion force, threatened by both the invaders and by its own supposed protectors... Tony Stark's life, which he offers as a chip in an intergalactic gamble... and Tony Stark's love for Pepper Potts, which is tapped as a corollary to his potential sacrifice. There is a great deal on the table by the end of The Avengers, and the film insists on our continued investment.

5 - not giving us enough huge, city-blasting special effects

Okay, so they obviously weren't going to make this mistake.

A good deal of the credit for The Avengers goes to the film for reasons that are hard to nail down. In particular, it balanced dialog and action in an elusive way -- somehow it functioned as a "screwball comedy" tucked within a constant stream of combat set-pieces, as if a personable, charismatic virus had infected a Michael Bay film. To fans of comic books, this creates a universe in cosmic harmony, because we're used to a medium where people manage to make long expository speeches in the middle of hectic combat. Its overstated dramatic moments (big speeches, flashes of sentimentality) also resonated with that comic book artificiality, which becomes a worthy aesthetic in its own right when it's applied with conviction.

The Avengers was so committed to its audience and so respectful of its constraints that it might feel disappointingly pedestrian if it's not taken in a certain spirit. However, pedestrian it is not. For a 2.5-hour film, it moves incredibly fast. For a massive high-flying actioner, it's amazingly human. And for an obvious ensemble franchise entry, it's strikingly intimate. Whedon was given a pile of bricks and mortar, and out of it, he fashioned a sculpture that respects the materials, and at the same time transcends them, and all our expectations.