The Dark Knight (and two other superhero movies)

Not too long ago, superhero movies were like Westerns are now. You'd get one every few years and it might be good (Batman) or it might be bad (Captain America). Now, in the age of CGI, when anything imaginable can be put up on the screen (not always to good effect), you can't throw a batarang in a multiplex without hitting someone in a skin-tight costume. Three of the biggest movies this year are about characters that began life inside a comic book. As a comic book nerd, this makes me happy.

The Dark Knight Rises

Ah, the threequel.  Unlike most sequels, superhero movies tend to be better in the second installment, perhaps because the origin story is out of the way. Batman Returns, X-Men 2, Spider-Man 2 and The Dark Knight are not only better than their predecessors, but among the best superhero movies ever made.

However, their success sets the third movie of the series up for a fall. Directors want to top what went before and as a result, the movies often get bloated with too many characters - as with X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3. Or the director decides to change the style of the films - the less said about Batman Forever the better.

Director Christopher Nolan set himself a hell of a high bar with The Dark Knight, the most critically acclaimed superhero flick ever. It's no surprise that The Dark Knight Rises falls short - but it's not by much. It's only Heath Ledger's staggering performance as The Joker that makes the earlier film superior.

Most of Batman's villains are evil lunatics, but Ledger's Joker could not be topped for evil lunacy, so wisely Nolan doesn't try. The chief villain here is the hulking, gas-masked terrorist Bane, who is ore Batman's evil twin than the polar opposite The Joker is. Bane is clever, methodical and a monstrously effective fighter. If The Joker is wildfire, Bane is an avalanche.

Batman versus The Joker was primarily a battle of wits.  Batman versus Bane is a brawl, with Bane holding the upper hand. Tom Hardy brings a huge physical menace to the role - and also gets a surprising amount of emotion across given his face is mostly covered. One scene in particular, when he bids farewell to someone without saying a word, is beautifully done.

It's just as well Hardy can act with his eyes, because you can't always hear what he's saying. Yes, he's speaking through a mask so his voice should be muffled, but we really should be able to understand him. It's an irritating flaw and one that should have been easy to fix.

That's one of quite a few faults The Dark Knight Rises has. I'll go into them below, but be warned - here be lots of spoilers.

Too many characters. In the first half hour or so Rises reintroduces Bruce Wayne, his butler Alfred, inventor Lucius Fox, Police Commissioner Jim Gordon, introduces Bane, Catwoman, cop John Blake and two important members of Bruce Wayne's company's board of directors. It also recaps the ending of the last film and sets up various new plotlines. It's too much, making the beginning of the film cluttered and rather slow. Some pruning would have helped tighten the movie and given more time to the slightly underused Catwoman.

The bad guys' motivations. Bane is the successor to Ra's al-Ghul (Liam Neesons' arch-villain from Batman Begins) and has the same goal - blow up Gotham. In the comics, Ra's is driven by environmentalism - people are screwing up the planet, so he wants to kill off most of us. Like Magneto in the X-Men, his cause has some justice, but his methods are awful. In the movies, Ra's goal is justice - of the capital punishment kind. He wants to destroy Gotham because it's irrdeemably corrupt. But while you could understand him wanting to kill all the criminals, or those on the top of the social heap, killing all the innocents makes no sense. Bane, following Ra's mission, is pretending to be an urban revolutionary liberating the 99%. It would be a lot more interesting and believable if that was actually the case.

The finale. The Dark Knight's biggest flaw was that the final battle was with the secondary villain, not the primary one. It's the same here - worse, as Bane is taken out too suddenly. Also, the Doom Machine that's counting down to Armageddon is a horrendous cliche.

The good news is that despite all these faults, The Dark Knight Rises is still an excellent movie. The cast is top-notch, with Christian Bale putting in his best performance of the series as the physically and emotionally wounded Wayne, and both Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Blake) and Anne Hathaway (Catwoman) shine. While it does take a while to pick up steam, it builds momentum and excitement, and does not feel as long as it is. The action is superb, with Bane and Batman's fights a highlight. These are not elegant, unbelievable kung fu duels. They're brutal and brilliant. The special effects are seamless - Nolan does not like to use CGI and I couldn't tell when he did, which added to the film's believability.

The script is smart, with the references to the financial crisis giving the movie a little bit of relevance, and has the odd flash of humour. Mostly it's serious business though, as we come to the end of Nolan's trilogy. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about The Dark Knight Rises is that it brings that trilogy to a satisfying end while also leaveing you looking forward to the inevitable follow-up.

8/10

The Avengers

It's a toss-up whether comic book nerds anticipated this or The Dark Knight rises more. Marvel (one of the two big comic companies - the other, DC, has Superman and Batman) has been building to this superhero team-up movie for years. The principal heroes (Captain America, Iron Man, Thor and The Hulk) have had their solo films - two in Iron Man's case. Add two other heroes to the team, plus overseer Nick Fury, and the odds of this being one of those overstuffed movies mentioned above were very high.

Fortunately, geek legend (Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Serenity) Joss Whedon directs and co-writes masterfully. Each hero - plus excellent villain Loki (Tom Hiddleston) - gets sufficient screen time doing cool stuff, and the interactions between them are the highlight of the film.

In some ways The Avengers is the opposite of The Dark Knight Rises. The latter is dark, grim and tries to Say Something. By comic book standards it's a model of realism. The Avengers is just ridiculous fun. There's fights, banter and lots of stuff blowing up. A couple of mildly cheesy moments aside, it's terrific.

8.5/10

The Amazing Spider-Man

Some more-than-mildly cheesy moments take some of the gloss off the new Spiderman movie. Not that it's a bad film though. I was one of the many people who thought it was too soon to restart this story, but The Amazing Spider-Man works surprisingly well. The villain is not the most compelling - he's rather too much CGI for a start - but the origin story packs genuine emotional punch, and Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone have oodles of likeability as the web-slinger and his girlfriend. Best of all the sequences where Spider-Man is hurtling around Manhattan's skyscrapers on his web really capture how cool being able to do something like that would be.

7.5/10

Lost: how I found the finale

Lost has been a part of Lauren's and my life since almost the beginning of the show.  We started watching it together during the first season, before we started going out. We've been glued to the screen when the Others took Walt, when Ben turned the wheel, when Juliet exploded the bomb.
So last week we were, of course, feverishly anticipating the final episode. But we were also a bit worried. We've loved the characters and their back stories, the humour, the weirdness, the tangled plots. After six years though, how could they tie up all the plotlines, reconcile the two 'alternate worlds' of the final season and explain the many mysteries? Would the end be one big fizzer?
Thankfully, no. The finale was flawed but satisfying - like the show as a whole.
The ending has divided viewers. A lot of questions were left unanswered. The sixth season answered a lot of the long-running mysteries of the show - even if the explanation of what the island was was all very vague and mystical - but off the top of my head, we still don't know why the Monster killed Mr Eko, why women died during their second trimester, the nature and cause of the infection, what the deal with the giant statue and all the other Egyptian stuff was, or the full story behind the Dharma Initiative.
My biggest disappointment though was the lack of Mr Eko, one of our favourite characters. It was great seeing almost all the other dead or departed main characters (except Walt and Michael - perhaps the ghost of Michael needs to get over his purgatory on the island before he can move on with his son, as Ben has to deal with his remaining issues) show up, and I expected Mr Eko to make an appearance. Perhaps as a priest in the church at the end - that would have been appropriate and satisfying. However, if you believe this piece of gossip from the E Channel, it was just a case of the actor and the studio not being able to establish a fee. Lame.
Hopefully the DVD's special features provide more answers and some Eko.
However, because the show became famous (or infamous) for its bizarreness and myriad of unanswered questions - which both put a lot of viewers off and while keeping the devoted hanging on for resolution - it's easy to forget that Lost was more about characters than plots. And in terms of characters, the final was a deeply satisfying.
The revelation that the parallel world was some sort of pre-afterlife afterlife where the characters would meet and deal with some of their issues really worked. There was always a lingering feeling that things were too perfect in that world, that lives crossed too much to be coincidental. And it made the reunions of the characters who had died tragic and sometimes pointless deaths more meaningful. Both the idea that we have to leave our baggage behind and move on - a recurring theme of the show - and the idea that it is the people we know best who help give meaning to our lives are well, really quite meaninful.
And all those reunions? Cheesy maybe, but I nearly cried a few times - particularly when Juliet met Sawyer by the candy machine. Wonderful. Especially as his 'constant' wasn't Kate!
The final season of Lost wasn't its best - that'd be the first and (Lauren argues) fifth seasons. There were some awkward plot shortcuts - like Widmore's hurried explanation that Jacob had made him see 'the error of my ways' - and it was annoying that Ilana didn't get a proper backstory. It felt like the season was an episode short.
But for all that there were some cracking episodes - the back stories of Richard, Jacob and the Man in Black among them. The deaths of Jin and Sun were deeply moving. Hugo was, as always, excellent. And Jack and Kate, who I thoroughly wanted dead by the end of the third season, continued their rise back into being good characters.  Despite my Eko disappointment, both the final episode and the final season have settled well into my head.
Now, like the plane, like Jack's soul, it's time to move on. At least until the DVD.

Watchmen

So, Watchmen. The Mount Everest of graphic novels, the multilayered masterwork that many (including writer Alan Moore) said couldn't be filmed. Well, director Zac Snyder has filmed it and the good news is he's done well.

First, for those who aren't comicbook geeks, a bit about Watchmen. Published and set in the mid-1980s, it is a dark, complex and emotionally mature work about a team of flawed and mostly retired superheroes dealing with the impact of the murder of one of their own and an imminent nuclear war. There's The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a cynical, cigar-chomping killer, Silk Specter, who is filling the slinky costume of her mother, Owlman, a flabby nerd, Ozymandias, the world's smartest man and a billionaire businessman, Rorschach (Jackie Earl Hayley) a brutal vigilante, and Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a former scientist who developed godlike powers in an accident.

Part of the genius of Moore and artist David Gibbons' work is that it manages to be a whole lot of things at once: a dissection of the psychology of superheroes, a story about stories, a character-driven drama and a compelling murder mystery. Along with the similarly grim and intelligent reinvention of Batman, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen revolutionised superhero comics by pushing the boundaries on sex and violence, having heroes with realistic personality flaws and showing that you can use people wearing capes and masks to make profound statements about human nature.

Watchmen does all this weaving together a lot of different stories about more than half a dozen major characters, including many, many flashbacks. Like Lord of the Rings, it's a heck of a tough thing to film - particularly when you need to strike that balance between staying true to the source material and adapting it for a different medium. The risk is that you will alienate either mainstream audiences or the fans, or both.

Snyder has stayed as true to the graphic novel as possible and (sacriledge!) has made some changes that are actually improvements. He's also ramped up the action, with some thrilling fight scenes. But it's certainly got flaws.

It's too long, the pacing isn't perfect and the graphic violence and sex doesn't really work. The problem with having both beautifully choreographed, balletic fight scenes and realistically bloody carnage is that the former tells you that violence is cool and the latter tells you that (unless you're a sadist) violence is awful. Together they jar. And I also (skip the next sentence if you're worried about possible spoilers) suspect the story may be too confusing and the end too unsatisfying for most people who've not read the graphic novel.

But there are many more plusses than minuses. There are some superb scenes, such as the trawl through the 'history' of the superheroes during the opening credits, great song choices and visually the film is lovely. Moore's story and themes remain powerful, as do Gibbons' images, and the acting is very good. Crudup, as the sad, detached Superman struggling to deal with the squabbles and complexities of humanity, and Wright, as the loathsome Comedian, are particularly good. Best of all is Hayley, whose sociopathic but sympathetic Rorschach is the character who will stay longest in the mind. He reminds you that the kind of person who would put on a mask and wander beating up criminals is less likely to be Bruce Wayne and more likely to be Travis Bickle.

8/10