The Dark Knight Rises Trailer #3 Breakdown

Logos: Warner Bros., Legendary Pictures, DC Comics, SYNCOPY.  Usual stuff

We open with a shot of the Gotham skyline.  Looks pretty darn similar to the one from Trailer #2.

Ebeneezer Scrooge slumps about.  With the facial hair and burgundy bathrobe, you'd think Bruce Wayne was doing his best Lebowski impression.  What day is this?

Big Bane plane close in on puny CIA.  "There's a storm coming," Selina warns.  This looks like it was taken directly from the IMAX Prologue that played in front of MI:4.  Granted, my memory's not perfect.  But my bootlegged copy is pretty accurate.

Dissolve to Alfred walking down a corridor in (presumably the rebuilt) Wayne Manor.  Also presumably to present Master Beaver Face with his soup and animal crackers.  No.  Dunkaroos.

It's worth mentioning that in the wake of Inception, so many trailers popped up with that trademark BWOOOOOOOM sound.  So how do Nolan & Co. decide to open here?  Softly.

We've seen this scene back in Trailer Numero Dos, but the cut is different.  And the way she's wearing that hat looks like she's trying to lay low.

More bits from the Prologue.

Bane is revealed.

Another angle of the ballroom sequence between Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne.  "You sound like you're looking forward to it," Bruce responds.

Even more bits from the Prologue.  The CIA plane gets hijacked.

"I'm adaptable," Selina says.  Gonna go out on a limb here and guess that applies to multiple areas...

Bane falls toward the camera.  Proooooologue.

"FROM CHRISTOPHER NOLAN"

"Who are you?"  I believe this is Ben Mendelsohn (of Animal Kingdom fame) but he isn't credited on iMDb as starring in this.  Is he a government mole? A mob boss?  Animal masturbator?  Probably, that last one.  "Gotham's reckoning."

Some douchers have already started bitching about how Bane's voice now sounds too intelligible.  Damned if ya do, damned if ya don't I guess.

On a related note, "reckoning" is an interesting choice as it suggests a kind of settlement, a payment for past debts.  What does Gotham owe, though? I pulled that definition from Dictionary.com because as an English major, I've gotten to be pretty damn qualified to look up words I should already know.

A recall back to Bane detonating the Gotham Rogues' stadium.  That's definitely a shot of Mayor Garcia staring longingly into an explosion of light, broken glass and popcorn.  Is he in some sort of pressbox at the game?  Nolan wasn't afraid to axe the old commissioner in The Dark Knight, so I wouldn't put it past Bane at this point.

Those explosions with the SWAT team start making more sense now, too.  Perhaps Bane leads police on a cat-and-mouse chase underneath the stadium only to have it explode and crumble on top of them.

I'm not sure where this raid is taking place exactly, but some of it looks to be pulled from those same Trailer #2 shots of Gotham's elite getting ransacked and dragged away from the comforts of their mansions and Jell-O palaces.

Arguably the biggest surprise in this trailer is how much John Blake features in it.  Here, JGL stares in shock as the Gotham bridges collapse in succession.  Remember how in Begins the police sealed off the Narrows from any outside help?  Apparently that was nothing.  CGI or not, this shot is pretty eerie.

Bare feet?  Apparently Tarantino has a guest director's spot in this.

"Did they kill him?" John Blake asks.

Shots of Bruce scaling that wall.  I might have been wrong last summer when I assumed this was Bane climbing out of here.  I'm guessing Bruce gets tossed in along with a bunch of Gotham's fat cats.  And now he has to climb out on his own.  Without a suit.  Suck on it, Stark.

"I'm not sure."  Still hard to tell if these two are talking to each other.  Judging by that furniture it looks like Selina's in a waiting room of some kind and seems to be upset.  Hospital maybe?  Let's not forget that Gordon will be bed-ridden for at least some of the film as well.

More of battered Bruce.  Those blurry closeups of Bane make more sense now.  "Why didn't you just kill me?"  Why is Bruce such a buzzkill in this?  And why so serious?  No?  Fine.

"Your punishment must be more severe."  This isn't a profound guess, but I'm assuming this is right around where Bruce receives Bane's "permission to die."

Is this Bruce falling?  I don't know what to believe anymore.

"HOPE IS LOST"

Batman graffiti.  This is the same symbol WB used on Monday for its viral marketing campaign which actually lead to the release of this trailer.  Irrelevant?  Definitely.

"Do you think he's coming back?"  One can only hope, little orphan cherub.  One can only hope.

That's a broken cowl.  Falling water in the background looks like the same location as the teaser trailer.  This also explains where that badass poster came from.

Who's Selina looking at through these bars here?  There was a similar shot featured in the IMAX sizzle reel but she appeared to be on the outside of the cell.  Check out that hand.  Is it gloved?  Is it Batman's?

Camouflaged Tumbler in the snow.  But whyyyyyyy, maaaaaan?

That's John Blake getting shoved off some sort of ledge by what appears to be one of Bane's men.

Hard to tell if that's still Blake in the second shot, though.

"Why would you run?  Bane?" A shot from that stock exchange sequence.  Warner Bros. released this still of Bane in a similar place, so I'm assuming these coincide.

"You should be as afraid of him as I am."  That's definitely Catwoman on a Batpod.  Or should I say... Catpod?  I'll stop.

Blake doing his best Gene Kelly impersonation through some deep puddles.

Things a bit chilly, Bane?  Some shots have him with no coat, but in others he's all bundled up.  Either this movie runs through quite the seasonal change or severe global warming exists in comic books too.

"FAITH IS BROKEN"

More tank-ness, and explosion-ness.  Goodness

"I won't bury you," Alfred says.  Apparently automatic weapons are no good against a Bat-clothesline.

"I've buried enough members of the Wayne family."  Bats is on the wrong side of some kind of fencing or gate.

This is easily my favorite moment from the trailer.  Gordon lights a flare in the night, looking for something or someone...

"A FIRE WILL RISE"

HOOOOOOOOOOO MAAAAAAAAAAN

But this shot is a close second.  Batman atop a Gotham City bridge, cape flowing in the wind.  I tend not to drop the "e" word but I'll allow myself to use it here.  Epic.

"You don't owe these people any more."  I kind of agree, and I'm guessing this is the philosophical dividing line between Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne.

Blake is on the wrong side of... something.

"You've given them everything."  Looks like that epi- err grandiose showdown between Batman and Bane is here.

Our first (and only glimpse) we've gotten of Lucius Fox.  Not sure what he's computering at there.

Bane and Bats duke it out.  Batman looks slow as shit.

"Not everything.  Not yet."

Batpod.

Gordon, presumably watching something take off judging by that hair.

"ON JULY 20"

Selina Kyle drawing from her knowledge of Shawn Johnson-ian martial arts and breaking this doucher's hand.  I have no doubt Rises will feature its fair share of "Holy Shit" moments along the lines of Joker's disappearing pencil gag, and I suspect this is one of them.  The question now is, does Selina escape?  Or is she released?

This film has constantly been described as a war film.  I'm assuming this is why.

"THE EPIC CONCLUSION"

Now, our first (and only) shot of Miranda Tate.  Batman may be on the DL, but Bruce is clearly cranking some homers.

Nondescript military vehicle drives through explosion.

Selina with a sweet kick/takedown.  And who's that fighting with her in the background?  Boom.

"TO THE DARK KNIGHT LEGEND"

As you can see, this shot reminds me of Inception.  Inceptionesque.  And no, that's not a word.

Explosionzzz.

That shot of the Bat from Trailer #2

Weird flashlight gun.
  

BOOM.

FIRE.

"THE DARK KNIGHT RISES"  We get a new logo here. No more of that rising into the Gotham sky like the previous two trailers.  I like the ice (glass?) theme WB has been working with here.  The Batman logo in front of the Prologue also showed cracking ice:

Kinda neat, right?

"My mother warned me about getting into cars with strange men."  Interestingly enough, she mentioned nothing about armed robbery while wearing stilettos.

"This isn't a car."  And we don't need roads, Marty.

FUCK.

THE.

BATPOD.

* * *

Ten months ago, I toyed with the idea of the death of Bruce Wayne.  I may have been wrong.  Firstly, and perhaps obviously, The Dark Knight Rises suggests a triumph of some sort just in its title, and it'd be pretty hard for that to happen if Bruce bites the big one by the end of it.  At the same time, I could most definitely see a metaphorical or implied death.  

In Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Bruce Wayne publicly fakes his own death before retreating to a hidden underground base of operations.  Oh, and the story takes place after a long absence of Batman, which is nice since there's quite the time lapse in Rises, too.  

Miller also includes a battle for Gotham's soul between Batman and a powerful force...

So there's also that similarity.  Now I still find it very unlikely that Rises will do anything but loosely play with some of these ideas, but if you're convinced Nolan's scripts are 100% original, pick up a copy of The Long Halloween or Batman: Year One.

What I can be sure of is that Nolan has repeatedly shown a fondness for riffing on the thematic elements of his previous films.  After all, the irony of the Batman character has always been that "Bruce" is really masking the righteous humanitarian that is Batman.  Mrs. Cruise touched on the idea back in Begins, maybe a bit too obviously, but it never hurts to call this kind of thing back into play.

Begins focused on the act of just one man.  The League of Shadows groomed Bruce Wayne into a one-man force to be reckoned with.  Fortunately, Bruce isn't a dick, so that ended up working out in the end.  With Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, we saw what can happen when this burden is extended beyond just one man.  Judging by the massive flippin' chaos that's run amok in Gotham's streets here, I'd say that one man has changed to many, many men in The Dark Knight Rises.  It's even moved past that secretive partnership between Gordon and Batman.  We don't have Harvey Dent anymore, but it seems a certain number of Gotham's finest still fight for what's right, including one, John Blake.

On the subject of chaos in Gotham, one of this trailer's shots confirmed what I had already suspected.

Those Wayne Tech tumblers are angled toward the charging officers.  Back in December, I wondered how those tanks got into the wrong hands in the first place.  That still seems like a relevant question here.

We also get a better idea of Selina Kyle's place in this trailer, too.  She's definitely the wild card, but I've got a sneaking suspicion that Rises will inch toward an unsteady partnership between her and Bats by the end (especially considering that she fears Bane on some level, judging by some of those lines).  Along the vigilante/crusader line that Batman so deftly straddles, Catwoman is more of the former, but likely with fairly good intentions.  At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if she hotwired that Batpod.

What's really interesting is that Batman is out and about during the day.  It seems he really has transcended from just a man into a symbol, a banner for the good people of Gotham to follow into battle, to whatever end.

I'm starting to think that maybe Bane was onto something with all this "reckoning" business.  Maybe Gotham has to pay for its corruption and wrongdoings before it learns to move forward.  And I don't see how that means removing Batman from the picture.  As I said before, Harvey Dent kind of already made that sacrifice.  

Beyond this though, I've just got blatant speculation.  Where does Miranda Tate fit in?  And what about that rumored Liam Neeson cameo?  If anything, this final trailer raises more questions than it answers.  As it should.

An Indictment of Potter Geekdom

Let me start by saying my original intentions with this post were to catalogue the various geek subcultures, not attack just one.  The more I wrote however, the more I found myself coming back to Harry Potter fans.  I can't explain why.  Perhaps it's because Triumph has already seen to dismantling the credibility of Star Wars  nerds.  Maybe it's because sports geeks come off as mind-numbingly one-dimensional excuses for human beings.  Or maybe it's simply because I don't know anyone who actually plays Dungeons & Dragons un-ironically.

Whatever the reason, in keeping with my never-ending quest to rip-off Cracked articles, I shall air all grievances l'esprit de listed crap:

1. "Not my Potter, you bitch!"

Maybe I've got a perceived bias, and that's why this point is the first -- and admittedly the weakest -- on this list.  Harry Potter fans are obnoxious.  How many Facebook invites to Harry Potter marathons have you received in last year?  Let's sit around for two nights drinking and crying about how we should all feel bad for Snape.  I'll pass.

My theory is it comes down to quantity with so damn many of those people.  To Rowling's credit, there's a wide-ranging appeal to this material. My mom likes Harry Potter for Christ's sake.  But perhaps it's best to let this zealotry phase itself out.  That Death Eater symbol's gonna look like a skull puking out a wiener after twenty years.  So live it up, bra.

2. It's glorified Young Adult fiction.

I am by no means undermining J.K. Rowling's success.  She's managed to craft a hugely successful fantasy franchise with memorable characters and moments.  Not to mention Rowling's prose is considerably more accessible than someone like Tolkien's.  And that's because Harry Potter is middle school fiction.  Really, really great middle school fiction at that.  The juvenile qualities of the series, especially in the first three, fade away as both Harry and the larger story arc matures.  Hey, wait a minute...

On the other hand, there's absolutely nothing profound or literary about that Epilogue.

Rowling apparently had the ending planned out for years and (presumably) crafted the resolution of the story to match that endpoint.  Drawing from my two semesters worth of creative writing experience which is clearly paying off in dividends, that strikes me as a very flawed system.  The thing reads like a piece of fan fiction.  I mean come on. "Albus Severus?"  Yeeeesh.  It's wish fulfillment at its most pungent.

Then again, J.K. Rowling is the one sitting on her silk-covered toilet, wiping her ass with rolls of crisp Franklins.  So what do I know?

Nah.  It's still pretty awful.

3. Harry Potter has all the womenses.

This isn't as shallow as it sounds.  Off the top of your head, I'd bet twenty galleons you could name five females who've gone to a Potter screening at midnight.  Now do that same exercise, except replace Potter with Star Trek.  How many females went and saw Revenge of the Sith premiere?  Thor?  I'll take "Not Too Fucking Many" for 200, Alex.

Run a Google Image search on this.  Not only will more females pop up on those Harry Potter results, but they'll likely be more attractive.  Obviously this doesn't qualify the strength or weakness of anything, but it certainly doesn't hurt either.

I think I know why, too.  Harry Potter does a better job of integrating the romance stuff.  No, not that all women need requited love in their successful multi-billion dollar franchises, but for the more casual viewer, my maternal unit for example, it certainly helps.

Second -- and this is going to sound bad so I'll make things even worse by letting it hang for a while -- being a Harry Potter nerd doesn't require a great deal of commitment.  Consider other areas of geekdom with extremely high numbers of female fans like Twilight or The Hunger Games.  Maybe I'm trying too hard to make this work but the breadth of content is pretty limited in terms of any commitment.  Harry Potter provides a geeky outlet for those people who don't have the time or patience for all the extra stuff. It's the toilet travel kit of pop culture franchises if you will.  'No, no.  I don't want to hear about any Headmaster succession.  I'll take my happy ending and be right on m'way.'

As promised, I'll qualify this more in a bit, but for now: THASS SEXISSS

Just to be clear, I'm not counting the throngs of half-models that weasel their way into Comic-Con every year with metal bikini outfits.   Posers, I tell ye.

You disgust me. 

4. The costumes suck.

Quality costume design does not concern how "sexy" you can alter something for a Halloween frat party, but this naivete has got to stop.  It's time to admit there is absolutely nothing appealing about long black cloaks and pointy hats.

Anyone else notice that, at least as the films progress, the role of the hats sort of just disappear?  All the Prefects from Sorcerer's Stone -- including Percy Weasley in all of his prissy doucheness -- tried and failed to rock the shit out of that.  And for good reason.  They look fucking stupid.

What is that thing?  It looks like a blackened flesh sock permanently locked in some sort of mind-controlling erectile death grip.  Even 'ole Proffy McGonagall, whom you could argue has the most central relationship to this odious headgear, presumably tosses hers in some charming magical version of a back alley dumpster.

I will give the 'ole Warner Bros. execs their due credit for clearly realizing how fucking stupid those costumes would look on anyone over the age of 15.  The last three promotional posters are proof:

Last time I checked, there wasn't a Hot Topic in Diagon Alley.  What this costume business really boils down to is fans trying way too hard and still failing.  The wizard cloak and hat thing isn't anywhere close to being as cool as Klingon armor or an ensign's Enterprise uniform.  


But more to the point here, in the great equalizer of sex, the location of either of those Trek costumes is likely in the complete opposite direction of a boob.  

5. Canon? What canon?

The central part of geekdom involves becoming ridiculously well-versed in a very specific subset of pop culture.   Sports nerds don't just who know the Hartford Whalers were; they know the fucking jersey numbers of the 1993 roster. In other words, there's a real heft to obsession in geekdom.  And Harry Potter doesn't fit the bill.

Like Twilight and or The Hunger Games, you can read all seven HP books (and maybe that fairy tale spin-off thing) and be done.  Take a week's worth of sick leave, and you'll have mastered the Wonderful World of Hogwarts by Friday.  It's worth noting that Suzanne Collins and Stephanie Meyer also write young adult fiction, too.

To better illustrate this, just look at how WB stretched out the last book as much as possible.  Some might argue it was done for artistic reasons.  I can see that. But eight films also lets you make a shit ton of money.

To be fair, Lucasfilm has been pulling this exact same stunt since 1997.  The difference is that the Star Wars Universe doesn't stop there.  After Luke, Leia, Han and their army of midget teddy bears defeat the Empire forever, there's a continual volley of poorly-written novels, video games, and one (soon to be two) television programs to follow.  One might say it's a constantly expanding universe (ha!). Harry Potter fans have seven books.  That's bush league.

Then we come to the topic of originality.  J.K Rowling's infraction?  Language, dear readers.

Let's take what will assuredly be the first of many, many theoretical linguistics tangents to come in future posts.  The following is a list of selected curses and spells from Harry Potter:

Crucio
Descendo
Engorgio
Erecto
Flagrato
Reparo
Avada Kedavra


Now just taking a cursory glance at that -- excuse me, casting a cursorio charm on that list -- you can probably make a solid guess as to what most of them mean.  "Crucio" inflicts severe pain for the receiver of the spell.  Like a crucifixion, maybe?  "Avada kedavra" kills you i.e. turns you into a ca-daver.  See what she did there?  Sadly, "erecto" is not what you're thinking.  It's actually much more disappointing.

Those spells read like a failed Latin midterm, and they're just the examples I happened to choose.  There be plenty more.  Professor Remus Lupin turns into a werewolf (canis lupus is the Latin identification for wolf species).  Sirius Black has the power to transform into a dog (and the star Sirius is nicknamed the "dog star").

In the interest of fairness, virtually every franchise suffers from something in this regard.  George R.R. Martin has an infatuation with re-spelling common European first names.  And let's not forget that "Darth Sidious" is about as shitty of an alias you can think of for a corrupt Senator to hide behind.  Star Wars rips off Joseph Campbell and virtually every modern myth that loosely follows the hero cycle; Battlestar Galactica rips off Star Wars, etc.  It's a horribly vicious circle of redundancy.

I am well aware that this could all be misconstrued as one giant lamentation about hipsterdom, but I think the honest form of geekery died around ten years ago.  Or it was always just a pretentious way of living in the first place and the "original" geeks are just a bunch of closeted, self-righteous pricks.

That's enough ranting, Potter fans.  Please resume all sexing and fun-having.

* * *

The Blessings of Happenstance

A song came up on my iTunes shuffle the other day.

This one.

"Yub Nub" - John Williams (1983)




In the original 1983 release of Return of the Jedi, "Yub Nub" signals the finale of the Original Trilogy.  It wraps everything up and gives the audience a sense of closure.  There's that great sequence of Luke at Vader's funeral pyre with Williams' "May the Force Be With You" echoing in the background.  We don't just get a sense of how far Luke has come in this story, but also how far he's changed as a character.  The camera pans up to the Endor skyline as starfighters and fireworks dance across the sky in equal measure.  And then... stormtrooper helmet drum solo?

It doesn't work at all.

Forget the song's terrible title.  Almost seven hours of sweeping galactic space fantasy and this is what they settle on for resolution?  Bad bad bad.  Meeting Chewie's family during the Holiday Special bad.

I wish I could say this was Photoshopped.  I really do.

What's the deal with the creepy man-child chorus?  Who is singing this anyway?  This is less "Ewok" and more "neutered group of estranged choir singers forced at gunpoint."

Context is key here.  The Rebel Alliance just blew up the Death Star.  Again.  Luke resisted the temptations of the dark side and with the help of his newly redeemed father, destroyed the Emperor.  The film should end with something that reflects that.  "Yub Nub" sounds like Rogue Squadron stumbled home after a kegger and immediately started banging on the contents of their trash compactors.  Imagine Aragorn's coronation ceremony being held in the Green Dragon instead of Minas Tirith.  "Yub Nub" is not quite at this level of inappropriateness, but it's pretty damn close.

Fortunately, things get better.

"Victory Celebration" - John Williams (1997)

George Lucas gets a lot of shit for messing with his movies.  That's no secret.  Despite that, "Victory Celebration " stands as his one (and likely only) change that makes sense.

The err... original version, which came attached to 1997's VHS Special Edition release, featured a brand new piece written by John Williams along with a slew of digitally-rendered cityscapes.  That meant we got to see the crucial planets of the saga.  Yes, that inevitably meant adding Naboo at some point, but hey we also get Tatooine, Cloud City, and of course Coruscant.  The scourge of the galaxy has just been vanquished.  It stands to reason that we should revisit some of the saga's more memorable locales.  It's our right, dammit!

And then there's the score.  This new version keeps that same tribal inspiration from "Yub Nub" but doesn't make it corny.  And whereas the former is essentially everyone singing one melody, this has layers.  It's a bit more complex, and while I won't try arguing there's a whole mound of subtext to unpack with Return of the Jedi's ending, "Victory Celebration" is clearly a change for the better.

None of which is to say I endorse the slew of implications the updated scene brings with it.  The most obviously caustic is slapping Hayden's mug on Anakin's ghost with the added defense that all Jedi spirits appear in their true form.

But that doesn't make any sense because Anakin fucking repented as an old man anyway.  GAHHH now I'm mad again.