Comics gave up on the thought-bubble a while back.
Superhero comics took standard dialogue boxes, straightened the edges and sawed off the icicles pointing to characters -- giving us neat narrative rectangles, streamlined subtexty pizza-boxes, sometimes distinctly coloured for each flavour of character. Folks speak as they may, but the red box tells us what the red character thinks, the blue boxes do the same for the guy in the blue tights, and so on, this dynamic interplay of points-of-view allowing the better comic writers some thrilling narrative complexity.
As this is clearly not a technique suited to the screen, alas, these bits are often handled by filmmakers using voiceovers, omniscient narrators, or -- as should happen whenever a Deadpool movie is finally, inevitably made -- by characters breaking the fourth wall and communicating directly with the audience.
Not Christopher Nolan, though. The acclaimed director hangs up his cape by giving characters in his Bat-finale those very boxes: they speak like they're all narrating. It's constant exposition -- characters talking tirelessly to take the plot forward instead of characters speaking like they should -- and can be most exasperating. His characters have too much to explain and imply; where's the time to talk when dialogue will likely be accompanied by sudden, jarring flashback?
At one point when the film's bulky villain towers over Batman and theatrically asks if the caped crusader has returned to get beaten up again, the hero dourly and quiplessly says "No, I came back to stop you." Okay then. The Dark Knight Summarises.
Then again Batman has never been about the words. Nolan's trilogy has been all shadows and spectacle, and his conclusion has less of the former and far more of the latter, thankfully. It opens with an audacious aerial action sequence that proves beyond doubt that the director must rightfully be handed the reigns to James Bond, and goes on to stage several sequences of tremendous scale and extreme visual flair. It's a breast-beating behemoth of a blockbuster -- at times it does feel a tad gimmicky, a tad Emmerichhy -- but its punch to the mouth impact, aided by Hans Zimmer's bombastic, bass-heavy score drowning out mostly ill-chosen words, cannot be denied. It is big summer cinema at its biggest.
It's also the most depressing superhero film. Nolan's Gotham is Chicago no more, but a blatantly undisguised New York City, complete with a Saks Fifth Avenue. It's a post-Batman city sheathed in soot and sin, one buffeted from criminals by The Patriot Act (here named after Harvey Dent, the District Attorney who died in The Dark Knight) but with a growing percentage of dissenters unhappy with the 1% who have it all. Even billionaire Bruce Wayne's retired to his mansion and stopped supporting orphanages. There is, as Anne Hathaway's told us already in the trailers, a storm coming. The harbinger of said storm -- revolution, even -- is a musclebound mercenary called Bane who, lamentably, speaks like old Sean Connery with a mouthful of toffee.
His unintelligible manifesto is plain enough to see, however: he wants to blow up Gotham.
Here's the worry, though: when you slap a countdown clock to a bomb and say it's going to go off in 23 days instead of 23 seconds, it suddenly feels like forever. Christian Bale, who is in fine form as Bruce Wayne -- equal parts concerned, reluctant and effortlessly charming -- takes an hour to pull the Batsuit on. He then spends a majority of the film outside it, which is perhaps a blessing; two lead actors babbling back and forth for two hours would necessitate subtitling. Indeed, there are times Bale's Batman -- who persists with his gravelly Batvoice even with people who know his true identity -- looks physically uncomfortable in the suit, his mouth frequently hanging open between lines. 'The World's Greatest Detective' this ain't.
As is the norm with Nolan's films, the cast is uniformly excellent, even when not utilised as strongly. Tom Hardy, for a start, is wasted as Bane; any pro-wrestler could have been hidden behind that radiator-grill
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