Bane Rises

Bane Rises

Wait a minute. I'm a little confused. I thought Batman was suppose to be the good guy. And yet Nolan made Bane the good guy in the film. I certainly was empathizing with Bane far more than I did with Batman or Catwoman.

I mean, let me get this straight. I'm not suppose to cheer for guy who clearly suffered as a child and was abused in prison. That alone is a start. But he moves into robbing Bruce Wayne of all of his cash, which we're suppose to feel really badly about because he can no longer ive it to chari- Wait. What do you mean he's been ignoring his business for the past eight years, so the company didn't make any "excess" profit to give to charity? What the FUCK?!

Again, so Bane builds a god damned underground resistance against capitalism and civilization, manipulating the greed of the rich to accomplish his own plans. He then overtakes the city with a relatively bloodless coup using looted DoD-Wayne Enterprises prototypes - using the bourgeois tools against them and then makes sure that the majority of the cops, while held captive, aren't able to really fight back. He even goes out of his way to ensure that they are fed and well-kept for their new prisons. In fact, NONE of the police officers walked out of the underground five months later unshaven or dirty.

Then all the actual prisoners arrested under the Patriot Ac.... my bad, Dent Act are released and given a choice to do whatever with their freedom (Might I note that the film unfairly paints all of these average "inmates" as a mean-looking minority who inevitably joins Bane). Best yet, the rich are forcibly purged, their property re-taken for the people.

The best thing that Bane does is read out the Police Commissioner's confession-speach on live television exposing Harvey Dent as the monster he was, unlike Gordon, who thought that the best thing to do was keep quiet and maintain his perfect image.

But of course, the movie then invokes historical Communist tropes like long queues, empty stores and desolate streets, but it gets really strange at this point: In one very brief scene that is only a good quarter minute long, people are overjoyed to see the rich overthrown; maids pop open champagne bottles, a doorman eagerly drags a resident out onto the street for the Bane Gang to see, etc. It was like the movie was asking. "How could our serfs betray the rich like that? Shame on them! Feel bad, moviegoers!"

The streets are desolate, yes, but it is clearly the middle of winter; the one scene in which we do see what it looks like indoors, a crowd of people are talking with one another, playing board games and seemingly having an alright time.

Then you have Batman, who really is never even likable as a character. I mean, as this review puts it...

Batman, as a character, is a miserable, broken human being that no one should ever actually want to be like. Batman is, essentially, a spoiled brat who claims that he grew up too quickly, but in fact, never grew up at all. It doesn't take much to determine that Bruce Wayne has spent his entire life trapped in that moment [...] He is essentially selfish and deluded with false notions of nobility."

So Batman is just troubled because he's still traumatized by his parents murder. We can't claim trauma for the villains but Batman? That guy's actions are totally justified by his issues. He's basically a broken human being and yet children want to be him.

Then you have Bane with the mask thing. Like, the guy's clearly dying as soon as he gets his mask broken. And yet Batman continues to demand answers from someone who can't even breathe. But hey, why not keep yelling and wondering where the bomb/villain or whatever else Batman doesn't have time to google the answer for.

Maybe he should ask Alfred where all those things are considering how much Alfred magically knows about everything.

Shit, everyone is a better human being than Batman in the film. I mean, even the ghost of Ras al Ghul has a better personal philosophy, which is radical environmentalism. Who would have known that Bane and Ras were both heroes after my heart?

If you were to take all the dialogue of the film and remove it from the scary masks, you would probably think that Bane was the most reasonable, compassionate character in the movie.

I haven't even gotten to Talia. Who is probably second to the worse in the film. Even if she's just doing it because of Daddy issues and M. Night Twist-syndrome. How else can you explain the turn? Just look at how terrible and convoluted her plan is. If you see the film again you'd notice how fucked from the very beginning is her plot to blow up Gotham. It boils down to one simple thing - If she wanted to blow up gotham, why the fuck didn't they just get a different nuclear bomb?

Though all this only points back to Bruce Wayne being an awful piece of shit character. You see, his rationale for not turning on the fusion reactor - a device which could literally cure the world of poverty and famine forever because it is an unlimited energy source - is that it could be turned into a weapon. And it is turned into a weapon. Except the weapon it can be turned into is a 6 megaton nuclear bomb. But you realize that there are already thousands of 6+ megaton nuclear bombs in the world.

So Bruce Wayne, a man who went into seclusion for 8 years and let his company run for shit, not giving much of a damn to his charities, is depriving the world of an actual systemic crime solution and justifying it because he's worried about creating a weapon... that.already.exist.

What a fucking douchebag.

Let's touch on the Dent Act. In the beginning of the film Gotham's crime rate is at an all-time low thanks to the Dent Act. Named after the late DA Harvey Dent and implemented because people think that Batman killed him. So the city has been victorious against crime because of it. Except that act was based all on a lie of Dent's supposed heroism and the evil still lingered beneath the surface.

You have to realize that the Dent Act is clearly analogous to the Patriot Act and what the film apparently takes away from it was that the ends were correct, but the means were suspect. HA! So the patriot act was totally okay, guys. You just need to actually find some WMDs first.

I'm also not sure I get what the point of the prison. Who built it exactly? Who the fuck runs it? And why do they keep letting people escape? I mean, even with the whole keeping hope in a man's mind being a worse prison mentality, you still have a prison. Shouldn't there be some guards and who exactly is feeding these people? Then again, who gives a shit, it's Batman and if I haven't planted more seeds of how this film was awful, then I don't know what.

During the whole montage of people Eating The Rich and Batman stuck in a prison hellhole, I can honestly say that the film could have ended there and I probably would have been better pleased with the way it ended.

Then again, he was going to destroy the city, so I guess that's not good.