Dark Knight Rises - Now that we know the cast — Page 9

Bingowings said:

What ruined Batman Begins for me was the microwave weapon.

Somehow this was supposed to atomise the water supply in the pipes underground but not cook the people on the ground?

In a silly Batman film you can get away with that sort of thing (just look at the powdered ambassadors in the 60's Batman movie) but in the sort of film Nolan was supposedly making it stuck out like the collapsing Venetian palace in Casino Royale (2006).

The Dark Knight had very little of that (even if Dent's injuries seemed too extreme to be taken seriously in that universe).

It was said that this was a "focused microwave emitter" by one of the Wayne Enterprise board members.  Microwaves can be focused, just like a laser, and just as laser is actually an acronym (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation), there is actually a microwave equivalent called a maser.  Lasers/masers keep their light/radiation so focused and coherent that it could travel miles in a beam with no noticeable widening of the beam (unlike a regular light beam like your flashlight).  Therefore, a high powered maser could pass within inches of you without you noticing.  However, if it passed directly through you, the water in your body would have cooked you instantaneously.  Now it seems to me that the weapon does pass directly over some people without harming them, and visually there is no indication that a small beam emitter pointed downward is ever used.  However, perhaps this will ease your conscience as to the realism of the film.

Maybe that tank is not the Bat's.

Maybe that is now being deployed by the police or the military against Batman and the crims and he has to use a new toy.

timdiggerm said:

Well, he did do that ridiculous thing with the bullets and the bricks in TDK.......

Yeah, I was pretty disappointed about that part.  I remember hearing that he would do some detective work in this film, and this is the closest he really came.  All his detective work relied on unrealistic hi-tech gadgets.  Don't get me wrong, I like the film, but I actually prefer the first, and felt the second succumbed to a number of the flaws of other comic book films instead of relying on the *ahem* greater believabality of the first film.  I want to see real detective work.

darth_ender said:

Bingowings said:

What ruined Batman Begins for me was the microwave weapon.

Somehow this was supposed to atomise the water supply in the pipes underground but not cook the people on the ground?

In a silly Batman film you can get away with that sort of thing (just look at the powdered ambassadors in the 60's Batman movie) but in the sort of film Nolan was supposedly making it stuck out like the collapsing Venetian palace in Casino Royale (2006).

The Dark Knight had very little of that (even if Dent's injuries seemed too extreme to be taken seriously in that universe).

It was said that this was a "focused microwave emitter" by one of the Wayne Enterprise board members.  Microwaves can be focused, just like a laser, and just as laser is actually an acronym (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation), there is actually a microwave equivalent called a maser.  Lasers/masers keep their light/radiation so focused and coherent that it could travel miles in a beam with no noticeable widening of the beam (unlike a regular light beam like your flashlight).  Therefore, a high powered maser could pass within inches of you without you noticing.  However, if it passed directly through you, the water in your body would have cooked you instantaneously.  Now it seems to me that the weapon does pass directly over some people without harming them, and visually there is no indication that a small beam emitter pointed downward is ever used.  However, perhaps this will ease your conscience as to the realism of the film.

Not as it was being deployed to hit the water in pipes underground that don't follow a completely straight line.

If it was meant to atomise the water supply from the train it would have to scatter the beam to hit it's intended target and also hit loads of water filled objects on the way (even if the beam was narrow it's source is still in motion).

If the train was an underground sewer/waterpipe repair vehicle there would be no problem (it could follow the line of the water supply and not over the heads of anyone else).

But as an overhead train network it just doesn't make sense, even if it looks good.

darth_ender said:

Bingowings said:

What ruined Batman Begins for me was the microwave weapon.

Somehow this was supposed to atomise the water supply in the pipes underground but not cook the people on the ground?

In a silly Batman film you can get away with that sort of thing (just look at the powdered ambassadors in the 60's Batman movie) but in the sort of film Nolan was supposedly making it stuck out like the collapsing Venetian palace in Casino Royale (2006).

The Dark Knight had very little of that (even if Dent's injuries seemed too extreme to be taken seriously in that universe).

It was said that this was a "focused microwave emitter" by one of the Wayne Enterprise board members.  Microwaves can be focused, just like a laser, and just as laser is actually an acronym (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation), there is actually a microwave equivalent called a maser.  Lasers/masers keep their light/radiation so focused and coherent that it could travel miles in a beam with no noticeable widening of the beam (unlike a regular light beam like your flashlight).  Therefore, a high powered maser could pass within inches of you without you noticing.  However, if it passed directly through you, the water in your body would have cooked you instantaneously.  Now it seems to me that the weapon does pass directly over some people without harming them, and visually there is no indication that a small beam emitter pointed downward is ever used.  However, perhaps this will ease your conscience as to the realism of the film.

Bingowings said:

darth_ender said:

Bingowings said:

What ruined Batman Begins for me was the microwave weapon.

Somehow this was supposed to atomise the water supply in the pipes underground but not cook the people on the ground?

In a silly Batman film you can get away with that sort of thing (just look at the powdered ambassadors in the 60's Batman movie) but in the sort of film Nolan was supposedly making it stuck out like the collapsing Venetian palace in Casino Royale (2006).

The Dark Knight had very little of that (even if Dent's injuries seemed too extreme to be taken seriously in that universe).

It was said that this was a "focused microwave emitter" by one of the Wayne Enterprise board members.  Microwaves can be focused, just like a laser, and just as laser is actually an acronym (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation), there is actually a microwave equivalent called a maser.  Lasers/masers keep their light/radiation so focused and coherent that it could travel miles in a beam with no noticeable widening of the beam (unlike a regular light beam like your flashlight).  Therefore, a high powered maser could pass within inches of you without you noticing.  However, if it passed directly through you, the water in your body would have cooked you instantaneously.  Now it seems to me that the weapon does pass directly over some people without harming them, and visually there is no indication that a small beam emitter pointed downward is ever used.  However, perhaps this will ease your conscience as to the realism of the film.

Not as it was being deployed to hit the water in pipes underground that don't follow a completely straight line.

If it was meant to atomise the water supply from the train it would have to scatter the beam to hit it's intended target and also hit loads of water filled objects on the way (even if the beam was narrow it's source is still in motion).

If the train was an underground sewer/waterpipe repair vehicle there would be no problem (it could follow the line of the water supply and not over the heads of anyone else).

But as an overhead train network it just doesn't make sense, even if it looks good.

 I don't have the exact line, but doesn't the film say that the train follows the pipes exactly?

But you make some valid points.  What's more, there are at least two occasions where clearly these microwaves do not shoot directly into a source of water below, specifically on the boat when the weapon is first introduced as well as when Liam Neeson activates it himself.  In both cases, the water in all the surrounding area becomes vaporized, but the ~85% H20 humans remain intact, with none of them ending up like Frink's lovely little man above.

darth_ender said:

 

valide points

Uh-oh... :p

I have no idea what you're talking about, Frink!  What are you doing, tampering with my quotes?!

I just looked something extra up.  I read this on a blog and it seemed to make sense.  Here is a slightly edited quote:

some dude on the Internet said:

The microwave emitter is based loosely on an actual military "microwave" weapon. That weapon was capable of very directly focusing itself in terms of direction and distance. If someone walked in front of it, they weren't automatically hit with the force of the weapon the way someone at the designated distance would be. Those standing nearby likewise were unaffected, because of the directional accuracy of the weapon.

It's reasonable that a weapon specifically designed to only vaporize water in a city's water lines would have directional and distance controls. The microwave emissions would be such that they are aimed precisely in a single direction (in the case of BB, downward from the train, toward the ground) and would reach their peak effect at a specific distance -- namely, the distance from the train to the placement of the water lines underground, which the film makes clear run directly beneath the train tracks. Figuring out the distance from inside one of the train cars down to the waterlines, for the entire distance to be traveled in this plot, would require some measurements and maps, but it's actually not all that hard to see how they could figure it out and program the emitter for that specific distance.

So the microwave emissions would thus not affect anything except what it is aimed at -- the water mains directly below, at a specific distance from the train. The controls could easily have been set based on knowledge of how deep underground the water lines were placed, with a bit of leeway (perhaps half a foot above and below, and horizontally from the water lines) to compensate for any bumps or imprecision in the blueprints showing where the lines are (in case of ground settling, or other things that might've shifted the exact location of the lines). This would easily explain why the microwave emitter only affected the water lines without vaporizing water in the air or in people.

Added from comments to his blog:
It's not literal "microwaves" first of all, it's called that because of the comparison to the simple "common" explanation of how microwaves work (exciting the water in stuff).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dir...
http://www.onr.navy.mil/en/Media...

I think the wavelength plays a significant role, and if the emitter were designed to use waterlines themselves -- the pipes -- as a sort of parabolic antenna (except all around the water) that concentrates the waves and directs them into the water that way. Yeah, it's a stretch and the details would be left intentionally vague, but the concept of a directed energy weapon focusing energy into pipes to use the pipes as a way of further concentrating the energy around and into water within the pipes, is something I am willing to accept as a vague answer for why the emitter worked on the waterlines but didn't cause people and cats to cook beneath the train.

We could also point out that in the film, there's no shot beneath the train itself, so how do we KNOW whether it boiled anybody or cooked anyone? There might've been a dozen homeless people and graffiti artists and people out for strolls etc under the train track who were all killed by it. The energy is aimed
downward, and directed energy weapons definitely are fully capable of aiming in a specific and narrow direction, so the only question is really whether it happened off-screen since the film merely failed to show what happened beneath the train where any people might've been.

Sew mabee it iz pheezabull. Aye donut no.  Aye jest lyke thuh moovee.

darth_ender said:

I have no idea what you're talking about, Frink!  What are you doing, tampering with my quotes?!

Last edited on August 11, 2011 at 10:12 AM by darth_ender

Last edited on August 11, 2011 at 10:08 AM by TV's Frink

Nice try ;-)

Aagh!

I mean...who hacked into my account?  There's going to be some heck to pay!  Who did Anthony Weiner hire again to investigate the hacking of his account?  I want those guys.

More on track, I too feel some concern regarding the earlier posted promo pics, particularly Catwoman.  But I have to be even more honest, the moment I heard she was to be included, I was not happy.  What I like about this Batman series is that it's sense of grandeur does not come from introducing excessive and superfluous characters.  Take the previous Batman franchise.  First movie: one main hero, one main villain; second movie: one main hero, one anti-heroine/villain, one eccentric villain, and one more subtle villain; third movie: two heroes, two villains; fourth movie: three heroes, two primary villains, one stupid background villain.

"What about escalation?"  That's what that whole series felt like to me, and I enjoyed each film exactly half as much as the previous.  Much could be said to the same point about Spider-man 3's failure to capture the magic of the first to.  To me, the new series is more successful by not overdoing it with too many new primary players to learn.  Introducing Catwoman worries me, as she is complicated (usually portrayed neither entirely good nor evil) and we just don't need any allies for this version of Batman in my mind.  Furthermore, she seems too eccentric for my tastes, and she has no insanity pleas to justify her bizarre style.  Furthermore, Ann Hathaway made a cute princess of a non-existent European country, but I have a hard time picturing her as an athletic, seductive gymnast.  These pictures indeed confirm my concerns, particularly her silly mask.

That being said, I personally really enjoyed the teaser trailer (my favorite part of Harry Potter).  And I had many concerns about TDK, and in the end it was obviously a very successful film, both to the world at large and to me personally.  I have yet to be disappointed by Nolan.  Every artist makes a dud now and then, but hopefully this genius director doesn't do so here.

xhonzi said:

TV's Frink said:

Ziggy Stardust said:

I have a feeling TDKR will have the same fate as ROTJ and The Last Stand. Part three of anything is never any good.

*cough RotK cough*

 http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Is-Part-3-of-Anything-Ever-Good/topic/12912/

*cough*cough*

*cough cough cough*

darth_ender said:

Much could be said to the same point about Spider-man 3's failure to capture the magic of the first to.

The Dark Lord of Grammar, Knight of Syntax, Slave of Spellcheck ;)

I think he might want to change that usertitle,lol

Oh stob.

Yes, but it's easier to swallow coming from a face.

...

That sounded much better in my head.

Someone missed an ot.com meme,lol.