darth_ender said:
17. But then he sleeps with Talia.
No argument there. If they'd developed this further, it'd be more believable as he tried to finally let Rachel go, but instead it comes off as a high school rebound when he finds out about the letter. Besides, I imagine most know about my distaste for sex outside of marriage in films anyway. They could have simply shown Talia and Bruce kissing in the room with the sheets covering all the furniture, then let people draw their own conclusions. I suspect this was to make her treachery more painful for the viewer, but that didn't work for me. We needed to see a relationship more than [JohnAdams]sexual combustability[/JohnAdams].
I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that Bruce Wayne probably banged a few chicks when Rachel was still alive. While we never see him do it, so it's easy to believe he's this chaste hero, waiting for Rachel. But I think it would be entirely in keeping with the Bruce Wayne playboy character.
Probably the main place I'll disagree with you. Bruce Wayne's playboy persona was only an act, and not one that needed to be kept up with superficial girls in the bedroom. He was deeper, inside he was...he was more. I think he really maintained such chastity till that point. Remember, we're talking about an obsessive man here. I could see his obsessive loyalty to Rachel as equally powerful as his obsession with fighting crime.
This is tough for me because I completely understand your point and I almost agree with you. The problem is there was never any mention of chastity or sex or anything like that before hand. So while part of me doesn't think that the real Bruce Wayne would do that, the other part of me thinks the fake one totally would. It's really tough for me to think this is a problem because it technically doesn't go against what we've seen before.
And this is probably the final kicker for me: Bruce was Batman for how long before the end of TDK? 2 years? Can it be that long? Could it be as short as a couple of months? And then he goes into 8 years of retirement. He reappears for a couple of nights and then disappears for 5 months... and is back for one more day before he's "dead" again. There’s no room for any more Batman stories. No other villains. Nothing. I understand that Nolan and company wanted to tell the end of the Batman story
Of course there was plenty of room, but I think Nolan's justification for not leaving this one open for a sequel was quite reasonable...better to end on a high note than to have a final, franchise-crushing failure like Spider-man 3. I think the greatest error in the three films that led to your complaint was the timeframe between the first and second film (6 months later), which left little room for imagined in-between stuff (or that horrible Gotham Knight interquel, if you accept that). Fix that 6 month gap, make it like 3 years, and it'd be better pacing for the whole arc.
I don't see how this is even a critique. Am I missing something here? I've never seen anyone criticize a movie before because you can't make any more stories.
I'm with you that I didn't want it to be left open to sequels. I'm more bummed at the way the timeframe worked out. With more than six months between the first and second movie, I could believe that Batman had more time to clean things up, maybe met a few other tough baddies in between, really gained a reputation as a permanent piece of Gotham, and then disappeared. But even that's not enough of a complaint for me to dislike the movie. It's simply a point to be made.
Yeah, I didn't think you were criticizing. Did they say the time frame between BB and TDK? I don't remember. I always thought it was something like a year.