Tenet

 

Welcome To The Palindrome

Tenet
UK/USA 2020
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Warner Brothers

Warning: This one will have big  spoilers so, you know,
if you don’t want to know then please don’t read.

Regular readers of my blog will know I’m not the biggest fan of Christopher Nolan. I’ve seen nine of his feature films now but was generally disappointed by most of them and truly baffled by the bizarre impression that they’re somehow high brow and almost impenetrable in their construction (pedestrian and obvious would have been my thoughts). I’ve been disappointed by hopeful expectations almost every single time and, the only films of his I’ve really thought were worth a ticket purchase, were the second and third installments of his Dark Knight Trilogy (after a fairly shaky, fumbled first installment with Batman Begins). I’m never really wanting to go into his films expecting them to be bad but I’ve almost resigned myself to that now and... now that I’ve finally seen Tenet... yeah, I have to say that, okay, it’s not as bad as Inception but, it’s still a bit drab, in all honesty.

Tenet has a nice central concept but it’s a whopper of a suspension of disbelief in terms of the fantasy element of the movie and, frankly, I’m more likely to be on board with fire breathing dragons and magical swords than I am with what he’s done here, which is to hijack the concept of the flow of time as, crucially to the plot, something of an alternating current that you can ride both ways and, well, ridiculing the science while, to his credit at least, remaining totally poe faced about the whole thing.

It’s somewhat strange and a bit of a dud as far as I’m concerned because... I’ve never really believed in the passage of time. I don’t have Alzheimers yet (as far as I know) but, if I did I think I might well be perceiving the universe as it really exists... as a single playing field which, due to the limitations of my standard ape brain, I can only perceive in a linear fashion, to the point where the whole human race participates in the measuring of this fictional thing known as time and begins to see it as something beyond the huge convenience which that specific measure was invented for... to synch up various actions and events with each other. So the idea that you can run backwards and forwards through time as though it’s something that can be viewed from differing viewpoints kind of misses the point, for me. Also, one of my favourite ideas when I was growing up was the metaphorical use of entropy to describe the chaotic, moral decadence of human nature but, when you get down to it, I’ve either completely misunderstood the concept of what entropy is all my life or... Nolan’s just not using it in a plausible fashion. Entropy isn’t something that can be reversed folks so... yeah... like I said, a fantasy film. And I don’t mind a fantasy film, for sure but... it just felt a bit flat for me.

So the main premise of a secret organisation which literally wears the name of its underlying strategic tactic on its sleeve, so to speak, seems to me to be a little overly silly. Actually there’s a scene in the film which popped me out of the movie because it features two of the central protagonists hatching the details of their upcoming ‘heist’ on a crowded bus and I was like, “Seriously, you’re supposed to be a secret organisation, do you imagine none of your fellow passengers are listening in on your plans?” Now that I contemplate the full extent of their ‘special word’ though, I found myself thinking... well, yeah, what do you expect of such people. They need to recruit some professionals instead.

That being said, Tenet isn’t a bad movie... it’s watchable and holds your interest. The main lead,  John David Washington, holds the attention and he did a really good job in this. Despite the limitations of his script he brought a certain confidence to the role and I’d like to see him in something similar but, perhaps, something less overtly fantastical. Ditto for Robert Pattinson who, frankly, I often have a hard time taking seriously but, I think he does an excellent job here. Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh are equally watchable in their roles and, in terms of actors and on screen chemistry, the whole thing works rather well.

The film looks quite good in terms of the 'cleanliness of shot' which I tend to associate with this director. He seems to have a penchant for symmetry and a lack of clutter which, honestly, gives everything a kind of polish and layer of shininess which doesn’t always help the credibility of the milieu but, well, it’s easy on the eye, at least. The music by Ludwig Göransson is also pretty good although, I have to confess, if I hadn’t known he was scoring this picture I would have assumed, on hearing it, that Nolan’s regular composer, Hans Zimmer, was on the job. Honestly, it sounds pretty much the same as what I would expect him to compose for a movie so... yeah, great score and I’ll definitely try and grab a copy on CD before long but, well, I certainly couldn’t pick up Göransson’s personal signature from this one (mind you, it doesn’t help that so few of his scores have actually made it onto CD, instead of a useless electronic download, so I don’t exactly have an opportunity to listen to his stuff properly).

My real disappointment comes, perhaps, from my expectations for the film about half way through. I was sure that Robert Pattinson was going to turn out to be an early version of Kenneth Branagh’s character but, instead, the implication from the final shot of the movie seems to be that he’s Branagh’s son. At least, that’s the obvious conclusion I came to from watching this and, yeah, it might be that I’m wanting to cheer the film on to at least some sense of a twist or slightly more interesting denouement because, frankly, Kenneth Branagh quoting the old chestnut about the world ending with a whimper rather than a bang could well be equally applied to this film itself. It’s just a bit dull and, although the film was apparently made in a very clever and impressive fashion, frankly, I’ve seen film being reversed through a projector since I was a young boy and it failed to impress me then too (doubly so when Superman somehow managed to break established temporal mechanics... such as they are... and reverse the world at the end of Superman The Movie... that made no sense). So, if your trick to attempted spectacle is to have various things in a shot running backwards and forwards at the same time... I’m really not that impressed, to be honest.

All I can conclude, I think, is that Tenet has its moments but is not my idea of a truly great action movie and it just felt a little lacklustre in places. Not unwatchable though, for sure... although I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. As for me, I think I’ll stick to The Dark Knight, thank you very much.

Dunkirk

Dun-roamin’

Dunkirk
2017 UK/Netherlands/France/USA
Directed by Christopher Nolan
UK cinema release print.

It might be pertinent, perhaps, to mention at the very start of this review that I am not the biggest fan of war films. That being said, there are a few which I think work really well and I’m sure that if I could just bring myself to see a few more of them, I’d probably embrace the genre as much as I do any other. However, I’m also not the best admirer of the work of director Christopher Nolan either, although I did like the second and third films of his Batman Trilogy quite a lot.

So why did I go and see this movie then?

Well, I’ve mellowed a lot to the music of Hans Zimmer over the years (and seen him twice in two incredible concerts, one of which is reviewed here) and I really wanted to see what he’d do with a score set in the Second World War which, I assumed (rightly, as it happened), would eschew the traditional but quite effective, Ron Goodwin style approach to the onscreen antics of its protagonists and instead deliver something much more... um... Zimmer-like. I wanted to see if this kind of scoring would hold up to the subject matter. It does so admirably, as it turns out but, that being said, it’s not a typical war film either. Even so, Zimmer meets it more than halfway. I’ll get back to the music in just a short while but let me tell you a little more about the film itself.

Well, it’s a bit of a visual treat and that’s good because, as I said, it’s not your typical war film and there’s not a lot of dialogue in it... the main chunks of speaking going to Kenneth Branagh as an officer but even his dialogue is minimal compared to most other movies. It’s also not a film which captures, in any way, the epic scale of war... at least not in the same way that most directors would do it. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s more like watching an intense, dramatic thriller than a big patriotic celebration and I think the reason for that is because the film doesn’t focus on big units of men moving around... well it does have that element, obviously but, it doesn’t focus on it...

Instead, it tells a story from the points of view of four main protagonists in different parts of the skirmish. We have a young soldier called Tommy, played really interestingly by a guy called Fionn Whitehead and he is on the beach at Dunkirk. He just wants to get off the beach and onto a boat, somehow, to escape all the killing going on around him. He’s one of those characters who any person would really want to be around because, just like Sandra Bullock in Gravity (reviewed here), wherever his character ends up, that’s where the most trouble and peril is going to hit. Stay away from this guy... he’s incredibly unlucky. We also have Kenneth Branagh as an officer on the same beach, waiting patiently for some kind of help to arrive to get his soldiers off to safety.

Then we have Mark Rylance playing Mr. Dawson... a civilian mobilised to take his boat out on a rescue mission to get the soldiers and who takes his son and another local lad with him plus... we have Tom Hardy as a spitfire pilot who sacrifices his best survival options in order to pitch in when it counts. I thought it was kind of interesting that Tom Hardy played the Batman nemesis Bane in the same director’s The Dark Knight Rises (reviewed here), mostly behind a mask and in this film he also, almost the whole time, plays a character hidden behind the mask of his flying outfit. Interesting that Nolan picked himself an actor who he knew, from previous experience, could deliver a performance with most of his face hidden from the audience. Good call.

As the little storylines unfold, the main dramas leave the Branagh officer part more as an anchor point which is not really going anywhere but which has this important character because you get a sense of ‘establishing info’ from him whenever we cut back to him. So the main dramas are Tommy trying to get away from conflict with every path he chooses seeming to get him closer to it, the noble spitfire pilot who is running out of fuel and needs to figure out when to turn back and we have the drama of Mr. Dawson and his companions after they pick up a shell-shocked soldier filled with the horrors of war, played by Nolan regular Cillian Murphy.

However, what’s really interesting... and I didn’t really realise this was happening straight away, is that the linear track of the film is chopped into little bits and we are crosscutting continually to bits of the action which are happening in a totally different part of the timeline. So, for instance, we can be watching an action or suspense scene cross cut with another scene which was occurring a day or so before but without any warning and, I have to admit, it took a little while for me to realise what was going on until I started noticing things like days scenes cut against night and the different characters looking at other scenes from a different point of view. It’s actually very clever in this regard and, as the film progresses, you get the sense of time zones speeding up to meet each other, somewhat, so that by the time you get to the end, you can place all the characters in roughly the same area at more or less the same time and see how the actions of one person in one place has consequences to another character in a slightly different chronological space.

Nolan also has a way of sometimes ‘hanging back’ in a shot and giving the camera POV a certain voyeuristic kind of feel. For instance, he might follow a character only so far into a shot and then stay put so you can see the character from afar interacting with a new environment... almost like using an establishing shot in reverse. Now I have seen this technique used before, most notably in Isabella, Duchessa Dei Diavoli (aka Ms. Stiletto, reviewed by me here) and Nolan does it really well here. It’s a great way to place your main protagonists into a situation while detaching you and letting you see a slightly bigger picture at the same time.

Now, I have to say that I did find some of the editing, even following this deliberate method of structuring the story, a little clumsy in parts. Things occasionally felt disjointed and popped me out of the narrative at some points but... Nolan is lucky in that he’s got Hans Zimmer suturing up all the little visual discrepancies that some of the audience might feel are there. Which, okay, is a standard role of film music anyway... it brings continuity across the cuts... but Zimmer really earns his keep here.

I was thinking about the relationship between composer and director as I left the cinema on this one because the music is a big factor in the success of this film, I feel. If you think about the huge impact made by the partnering of Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann you will perhaps remember the latter’s famous score for the former’s Psycho. A score written entirely for strings but which has a vast impact on the way the film was perceived. Even Hitchcock himself, before that score was written, was contemplating cutting Psycho down to an hour and using it as an episode of a TV show before Herrmann told him to hold on until he’d written something. The result was a score which many people regard as injecting pretty much all of the tension and unease you feel in Psycho when watching it. Without Herrmann’s music, the film would not be the powerful classic it is widely regarded as being today.

And I think, without doing Nolan a dis-service because his visuals and scenarios are quite intense in some places... that this is exactly the same thing happening here. I believe Zimmer’s score for this movie is responsible for, maybe, over 90% of the unbelievable ‘edge-of-your-seat’ moments in the narrative. There’s a really strong set of sequences near the start of the film where Tommy and a French soldier grab a wounded soldier on a stretcher and make a very long, fraught and suspense filled run to get him on the one leaving ship... in the hopes that they can get on it themselves. Even from this section, Zimmer’s music is full on tension filled suspense and it’s, wisely, mixed into the foreground of the audio track so that it can do its job as effectively as it does. And it continues to do it throughout, with a score which uses a recording of Christopher Nolan’s pocket watch ticking transcribed into a synthesiser and used, perhaps in a clichéd way, like a metronome’s heartbeat on the soundtrack which synchs with your own biology and ramps up and down with your emotions once you’ve got it in your head. I’m really looking forward to listening to the CD of this one away from the movie, I can tell you.

So yeah, that’s my take on Nolan’s Dunkirk. There’s excellent acting in a truly visual style... it’s the looks, pauses and reactions, not the words, which make for most of the drama. There’s some beautiful cinematography and some well designed sequences (such as a truly suspenseful part where Tommy is on a boat being slowly riddled with bullet holes... I won’t describe the whole scene and spoil it for you here, though) and there’s Hans Zimmer’s truly phenomenal score (which I was surprised to hear commented on by a random audience member as they were leaving the screening... more people are actually listening than I thought, perhaps). So, yeah, this one counts as my third favourite Christopher Nolan film, I think and, as such, gets a strong recommendation from me. War is hell... but it can also look and sound pretty nice with the right people behind and in front of the camera... so maybe give this one a watch.

Interstellar

Before The Paradox Passes By

Interstellar
2014  USA/UK
Directed by Christopher Nolan
UK cinema release print.

Hmmm... yeah, okay. I’ll say up front, for any readers who might not make it to the end of this one, that I actually quite liked this movie... but I also have issues with it too.

The thing about the director, Christopher Nolan, is that I don’t usually like his movies, even though I somehow seem to have seen most of them at the cinema. The two I really liked were his second and third Batman films, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises and, though I really hated Batman Begins when it first came out, I’ve learned to have a grudging respect for that one too... mostly only as a “set up” movie, though, because I find it tonally wrong for Batman.

The main problem I always have with Nolan is in his role as a story teller. To me it seems he either dresses up a really simplistic plot and tries to pretend it’s in some way “more” than it actually is (Inception anyone?) or, he’ll make the plot line and ending of his pieces really, very obvious and telegraph it all ahead, more or less, within the very early parts of a particular movie so you’re sitting there wondering why all the characters are left playing catch up for the rest of the, often considerably long, running times (The Prestige, for example). Quite often this annoys the pants off me and I really have a hard time dealing with the way in which everything is so decodable right from the outset and can’t seem to see why people like this, obviously very popular, director so much.

Now, it has to be said, that Interstellar is guilty, to a large degree, of both of these major problems I just identified in Nolan’s work. The difference here though, is that he somehow made me not mind about it so much because he’s also managed to make the obvious seem much more entertaining in this movie. Corny, perhaps, but definitely entertaining.

So let’s get the negative stuff out of the way first, preferably without any spoilerage.

The film does, indeed, telegraph itself way too much. Right from the start we have trouble with a poltergeist in Murph’s room. Murph is the daughter of lead protagonist Cooper, played by the always watchable Matthew McConaughey. The first thing I suspect most of the audience are going to do is draw a very specific conclusion as to Murph’s “ghost” and, by the time you get to the end of the film, the audience may find themselves a bit disappointed that they were right all along.

It doesn’t help when a specific “gravitational message” is kinda “skipped over” and discarded during the opening narrative set ups, once the thing has served its purpose and got Cooper in touch with the people he needs to be in touch with to ignite the plot. The writing and misdirection during these sequences is almost, it has to be said, like watching the film crew realising they’ve painted themselves into a corner and about to reveal the ending of the movie, so they quickly run through the wet paint and hope nobody in the audience notices. However, I’m willing to bet maybe at least half the audience notice this sloppy sleight of hand so... there’s that.

A third ingredient you’ll get which allows you to quickly solve the “riddle” element of the movie is probably something you’ll get just from the marketing for the movie, to be honest. As soon as anyone starts talking about wormholes or black holes, there's a specific phenomenon associated with those that most people will probably think about. Which is, also, kind of a shame. But there’s no escaping that... just like there’s no way of escaping a black hole, right?

One last negative, before I get onto the good stuff... the movie starts off with cross cutting talking heads that speak about a time in Earth’s past when the dust started. Anybody will be able to gauge, right away, the success, or lack of success, of the central mission of this movie from these little clips. You need to contextualise them and, as soon as you do that, you realise just what’s going on there.

Okay... sorry about all that. There’s one more big negative but I’ll get to it in time. Now for all the good stuff, okay?

Interstellar is a pretty good movie. It deals with big issues of a doomed planet Earth and a mission launched to go through a wormhole which has been suddenly “left” by us by “others” and the search for a planet which the population of Earth can either be moved to or colonised with. There’s actually a little twist to that which you’ll probably half guess but which turns out to be false anyway, so that’s quite nice and, without mentioning what it is, serves to increase the dramatic tension and turn a scene of grief into a scene of almost conflict... so there’s that. The film concentrates on Cooper’s mission with his companions and the disaster that’s hitting his home world while he goes about his business trying to save mankind. It has a whole host of really good actors on board for this film in addition to McConaughey, including John Lithgow, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon and they’re all, as you would expect from such a top notch bunch, absolutely believable and convincing in their performances.

There’s also a nice structure to the first third of the movie in that, during the end of a message transmission from Earth to Cooper’s spaceship, we finish with the Earth part of it and we are left to pick up the story back on Earth. We only get back into Cooper’s mission when a similar message is sent and we end back up on the Cooper side of the message as it closes. So that’s a really nice structural thing and, when the director later discards this technique in favour of dramatic and metaphorical cross-cutting between the Earth and the mission, I couldn’t help but think that he was using the nature of the final solution of the movie to move away from that neat style of presentaiton to match this more, seemingly chaotic presentation of the footage. Possibly not but I’d love it if they actually thought about that while they were editing this movie... hopefully that will be addressed some day in future retrospective interviews about this movie.

The film has been compared to Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey by a lot of people at the time I’m writing this but, I have to say, Nolan’s no Kubrick. I say this not to diminish all his good work on this movie but to point out that the use of camera (there’s a surprising amount of hand held work in this) and editing style (often quite jarring) seem to me to be less close to Kubrick than most people have been saying. So, yeah, not actually a good comparison to make, people. In terms of the epic feel and the subject matter, however, then I can see why people are all jumping on and making that comparison, in some way. Certainly, the absence of sound in space is something to be celebrated as making a return to the art of cinema, in my book, anyway.

Actually, the film reminded me more, in one of it’s early sequences, of the great director Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Solaris... in that it jettisons the bits which can be best used in indirect metaphor and discards them in such a way that it gets you to your narrative destinations quicker. For instance, in Solaris, you have a view of a road from a car windscreen as a car goes on a journey and it lasts for many, many minutes without doing much else than look at a moving road. The first time you see the movie, in fact, it seems like maybe a half an hour of nothing happening although, I can assure you, it’s a lot less time than that. After this, we see the main protagonist of Tarkovsky’s film already arriving at his destination at a space station and it’s as though the feel of the previous scene of a car journey was a metaphor for the journey across space. In Interstellar we have a much quicker scene of Matthew McConaughey leaving his daughter on bad terms and then, as we cut from that scene, he is already in space. This works because of the emotional weight of the previous scene and its effect on the lead protagonist as a sense of going on a journey. It’s enough and it also gets us quickly to where we want to be with no unnecessary build up of pencil pushing theories and spaceship construction, training etc. So this approach really works well for Nolan.

Another great thing about the movie is the robots used by NASA that accompany Cooper and co on their mission. When you first see them they are very much presented as a sinister, threatening creation and, I suspect, this is Nolan’s way of trying to deal with the inevitable 2001: A Space Odyssey comparisons he knows would be a pre-conception in the audience and use the plot of that movie as misdirection here. All the way through you’re wondering when one of the robots is going to get all “psychotic HAL 9000” on everybody’s collective ass and Nolan fans these flames by letting you know the robots in question are programmed for 90% honesty. All I will say about that preconception is that there’s certainly an element of  an antagonist in the movie but, it doesn’t necessarily come from where you think it will... well, until you actually come in to contact with a specific character and Nolan starts telegraphing it like crazy on first contact with that character but, hey, that’s maybe one of the least successful but strangely entertaining bits of the movie so... not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing to be honest.

In terms of these robots, though, all I will say is that I suspect they’ll be remembered for a long time in the future history of science fiction cinema... long after Nolan is dead, I’m sure. They are very simply designed and as easily iconic as Huey, Duey and Lewey in Silent Running, Brigitte Helm in Metropolis, Robby The Robot in Forbidden Planet (and many other appearances over the years) and the droids in George Lucas’ Star Wars saga. You are certainly not going to forget these robots in a hurry... that’s for sure.

Interstellar works best, for me at any rate, because it delivers a hugely optimistic message about the final fate of humanity. Admittedly, it’s one a lot of people will figure out from the first ten minutes or so of the movie but, hey, it’s still a breath of fresh air in its broad strokes and, although obvious, the twists and turns of this movie are, at least, honed to a very fine and over-the-top level which you maybe won’t be expecting in terms of the details of the film’s final destination. So there’s that too.

Frankly, despite a whole spaceship cargo full of faults, I really quite liked this movie and even though I found Hans Zimmer’s score to be a little too reminiscent of certain sections of the Philip Glass score for Koyaanisqaatsi in a lot of places, even that was quite listenable (I love Philip Glass anyway) and I look forward to hearing the score CD sometime on Christmas day (I suspect)... although I’m apparently not allowed to buy the 2 disc super duper version of the score unless I happen to live in America, which I find to be hugely discriminating and insulting of the publishers, Watertower Music, in terms of omitting people who would love to import and hear this version for themselves. That’s inexcusable in my book.

There is one more big problem with the movie, for me, and I’ve been putting off writing about it because I wanted to make this review spoiler free and... it’s hard to talk about without being specific. As a result the next paragraph is going to seem extremely and unnecessarily cryptic to people who haven’t seen the film (possibly even to those who have) and, frankly, if you’ve not seen it you might want to skip this next paragraph anyway, in case there are inadvertent spoilers in my words. I’ll do my best to sum it up though.

The identity of the “helping hand” and the placement of the wormhole and the so called twist ending of the movie creates an awful paradox. The entire narrative could never have happened without the main events of that narrative already having taken place. Since the advanced and evolved nature of a certain collective identity can justify that paradox by actually bypassing the physics that such a paradox is created by, then there was no need to actually go back and do that stuff anyway. So if you look at the problem from one end of the equation you have a massive paradox which can’t happen or, from the other end, you have a completely irrational event taking place because, frankly, this stuff doesn’t need to have happened to create the series of events that gets us to that paradox in the first place. So it’s a bit rubbish in terms of the whole film really meaning nothing and is a completely pointless exercise, if you choose to look at it in those terms.

There you go... that paragraph will hopefully make a lot more sense once you’ve seen the movie and, that being said, the level of the art and craft of this particular movie outweighs, as far as I'm concerned, this same old mistake as it is made time and again by movie folk. So, yeah, it’s guilty of the same crimes a lot of science fiction movies in the last 20 years or so have been guilty of... and I won’t name them because the titles could constitute spoilerage of this movie for a lot of people... but I would normally condemn a movie hard for making just this kind of mistake (and have done so this past year with a very popular franchise movie) but I’m gong to let Interstellar off the hook because the message is one of hope and there’s always a justification for this kind of mistake somewhere along the line when the broad strokes are this big, I suspect.

And that's that, I think, for my review of Interstallar. A more or less spoiler free look at a movie which relies relatively heavily on relativity and uses it for both dramatic tension and resolution. It’s almost three hours with no interval, so that’s a problem in itself... but ultimately it’s worth the butt numbing trial to take a look at this one on a big screen. It definitely needs to be seen large, that’s for sure. Although I suspect I’m still going to find Nolan a bit hit and miss on future films because his modus operandi seems to be the same as it always was. Here’s to hoping he proves me wrong... I like to see good movies as much as the next person.

The Dark Knight Rises

Knight My Fire


The Dark Knight Rises 2012 USA 
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: This warning is pretty simple people... there will be major spoilers in here because I want to talk about my relationship to Batman over the years. You really won’t want to read this if you haven’t seen the movie or are interested in seeing it at some point. It also has some spoilers for The Prestige thrown in for good measure, to make a point. For those of you who are not worried about such stuff... please proceed.

Okay then. If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that when I first review a movie or a book with a character who I’ve had a lifelong relationship with over the years, I like to first contextualise the review by explaining my relationship to that character. So, for the record... here’s what the Batman character means to me.

When I was about 2 years old I learned to read by my parents giving me Superman comics. Starting reading by thrilling to the exploits of the four colour superheroes really put me way ahead in terms of reading and writing when it came time for me to start infants school. As well as Superman, I also used to like Spiderman, The Original Captain Marvel (SHAZAM!), The Flash, Aquaman, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Justice League of America and, of course, Batman. Now I can’t pinpoint when I started reading Batman but it was either from an issue of Justice League of America or it was from, and I’ve managed to track it down on-line, Worlds Finest Issue 207 from 1971 (pictured above). On the cover, Superman is dead (yeah, right) through the intervention of magic and Batman is trapped in some netting and about to be machine gunned to death. This was exciting stuff for a... well it would have been a hand-me-down from my uncle so I would have been about three years old by the time I read that issue. After that, the Batman was on my “hit list” for sure, although I didn’t have that many comics and the trips to the comic stall in Silver Street in Edmonton where, if I was lucky, my dad would be able to afford to buy me a new comic, and the trips to my Uncle where I might also require some new reading material, weren’t all that frequent to be honest... at least not in my memory at any rate.

I remember first seeing the Adam West TV show on television repeats (we had a black and white set right until the 1980s so I never even imagined these had been made in colour when I was a kid) and really getting into them and really loving the Batgirl outfit. Batman was a really big deal for me and I also loved the movie version spin off from this TV show. Of course, at that age I didn’t realise they were “camp” classics... to me they were as serious and sombre as the dark strips in the Batman Annual (or sometimes it was called the Batman Bumper Book) that my parents bought me once a year at Christmas. For any readers outside of the UK, unlike the US “annuals” which were just thick comics, UK annuals were actually hard bound books of reprints and accompanying features which would be published every year just in time for Christmas... and they were a big deal to us UK kids.

I used to watch The Super Friends cartoon series specifically because I like Batman and ditto for that other wretched cartoon series, I don’t remember what it was called exactly, but it featured a character called BatMite which really de-clawed the show.

Jumping further on a large number of years, I remember when Tim Burton’s first Batman movie came out in 1989. It was a big event movie. Not nearly as big as the original Star Wars movie had been in 1977 (and its first two sequels in 1980 and 1983 respectively), for sure, but big enough that I remember being in a very long and winding queue for a cold Saturday midnight screening of the movie outside Barnet ODEON. Unlike a lot of overhyped blockbusters these days, that new Batman movie really was a movie you could go back and watch again and again.

The sequel, Batman Returns, was also a big deal and, again, lived up to its promise. The casting of Michael Keaton (which had inflamed the Batman community prior to the first film's release but calmed down instantly once everyone saw how good he was in the role) was already accepted big time in the title role and his on screen chemistry with the new Catwoman, as played by Michelle Pfeiffer, took everything to new heights. Even Danny Elfman managed to top his already amazing score to the first movie with a beautiful, wintry choral feel and a tie in song, which really did subtly tie into the main Batman melody in the movies, performed by Siouxee And The Banshees. I actually preferred this sequel, with it’s less than subtle nods to both German Expressionism and the Max Fleischer studios, to the first one.

And then came Joel Schumacher and the bomb of two, less than mediocre sequels to the Burton films with Val Kilmer donning the cowl for Batman Forever and George Clooney taking over for Batman And Robin. I hated these two movies at the time (it didn’t help that Billy Dee Williams was replaced by Tommy Lee Jones as Harvey Dent, after he’d done such a good job as the character in Burton’s version) and I couldn’t believe a Batman movie could be this bad... twice over. Seriously, the only good thing about these two movies were the absolutely superb scores by esteemed composer Elliot Goldenthal. They had a completely different feel to Elfman’s scores... like Carl Stalling on acid, and as a stand alone listen away from the horrible movies, they’re good music to get excited about.

There was a break of about 8 years then, before Christopher Nolan’s first attempt to bring the character to life. I think it was in this time that I first got to see the two original Batman theatrical serials from the forties. These were pretty cool as I’ve always been a fan of movie serials from the 30s, 40s and 50s... my childhood was filled with TV repeats of the three Flash Gordon serials, Buck Rogers, King Of The Rocket Men, Undersea Kingdom, Daredevils Of The Red Circle and Hawk Of The Wilderness. The first Batman serial from 1943, only four years after the Batman’s first appearance in a 1939 issue of Detective Comics (which is what the company name DC actually means... which is why referring to them as DC Comics is as silly as referring to AC Current), is actually pretty cool. The villains left for the police are marked with little bats in their foreheads, if memory serves, and it’s a great little serial all round.

Unfortunately the second serial, Batman And Robin from 1949, has a completely different cast and is a bit of a lacklustre affair compared to the first serial. Columbia, who produced these, weren’t exactly known for their vigour and energy in their serials (I much prefer Universal and Republic serials, truth be told) and that first one seems to have been a bit of a flash in the pan. Still, it’s not terrible and a fun watch. Both serials are going to be revisited again in my future, I’m sure.

Oh... and while we’re at it. I was reading a lot of Batman comics in the 80s. My favourites were The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke, Batman: Year One, Batman: The Cult and a whole raft of DC Elseworlds incarnations of Batman (my favourite one being Gotham By Gaslight where a Victorian era Batman tracks Jack The Ripper). These comics were better than any movie version made so far, it has to be said. Non comics readers underestimate just how subtle and how great and “uncensored” (when dealing with edgy issues a movie wouldn't touch for commercial reasons) comics can be. Some of them are truly great literary experiences and, if you know which ones to read, you should certainly check out the whole host of great literature in the comics world (and do yourself a favour and start by reading The Ballad Of Halo Jones).

So, okay. Then came Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins... a movie I went in to, to be fair, with high expectations. It would be fair to say those expectations were not met.

I’d been hoping for a Batman closer to the gritty yet noble splendour of the original 30s and 40s comics. Instead we had... something else with extremely confusingly edited... to my eyes... action sequences. At first I thought it was just me but when, a week later at the regular Camden Film Fair, I asked a bunch of stallholders what they had thought of the movie... it turned out that the general feeling was of disappointment. People, including myself, were likening it to the Schumacher movies. Now, to be fair, when I was in a position when I had to rewatch Batman Begins a few years ago, I actually enjoyed it a whole lot more than I had the previous time... so I’m guessing if I go back and look at it again now (which I intend to do just before this new movie is released on DVD) I will probably wonder why I ever hated it so much. One of the things I hated about the movie was this though. How could you have the Ras Al Ghul character in the storyline without even mentioning his daughter Talia (pictured above), who had meant so much to the Batman in the 70s in the classic storylines by the likes of Neal Adams (I hope I’m remembering the right artist for that era). This really annoyed me at the time but... more on her later. ;-)

Okay, so I wasn’t exactly dragged to the cinema to see Nolan’s sequel, The Dark Knight, when it came out. It’s my business, since he helped me learn to read after all, to watch all of the Batman movies. But I didn’t rush to see it either... leaving it a week or two into its run to muster up the courage to see how Batman was going to let me down this time. What I saw surprised me greatly. Here we had a very long movie which was... frankly... an absolutely fantastic addition to the Batman movie universe. Possibly the best Batman movie to date, I think. It whizzed by and I saw it a few more times before it finished its run. I was really into it. Nolan finally made a good movie (I don’t have a good track record with liking Nolan, especially after Inception - shudder). It’s a movie which, I think, will be one of those truly iconic classics that will be looked back on in fifty years time and still thought of as a great movie. I truly believe this.

But, after the disappointment of the first movie in the sequence, and the fact that the villain touted for the new one was Bane who had appeared as a character just after I stopped reading the comics but who had, I remembered, been one of the terrible villains in Schumacher’s Batman And Robin, well... I think it would be safe to say that I wasn’t exactly expecting anything other than more disappointment from the new movie. I’d heard the reviews of it were all pretty negative in their verdict. Added to that, the day I saw it was on its opening night, and I’d just heard news a few hours before of the awful massacre of innocent cinemagoers by a guy dressed as Bane in Denver. So I was also a bit wary of going to an opening night performance, even in my country, to be sure.

But I went anyway and you know what? Despite what the critics say, and I think some of them do have a point in that there are a few little problems in this one, I’d have to say that The Dark Knight Rises is a pretty good little movie.  Not as great as The Dark Knight, I would have to say, but certainly a worthy sequel which concludes the dramatic arc set up by the first movies in a logical manner.

The plot is dark... Batman has not been seen in 8 years, following the events depicted in the previous movie, and his alter ego Bruce Wayne has become a recluse. But then Bane surfaces and shuts off Gotham from the world with the threat of a nuclear bomb in a city seized and controlled by him. Like an extreme social experiment, he is going to destroy the city anyway, because he is a follower of Ras Al Ghul from the first movie. Like the character did in the original Knightfall story in the comics (which I confess I haven’t read), he breaks Batman's back and, in this version, imprisons him in an inescapable prison (only one person ever escaped before and the movie implies it was Bane who did this... but as you’ll find at the end of the movie, it wasn’t Bane it was the person who he is the real mastermind behind the whole dastardly plot). While fixing his back and building himself up in “the pit”, Bruce Wayne has a ghostly vision of Ras Al Ghul (played again by Liam Neeson) who gives him some more of the back story, but not the whole thing. Then, with the majority of the police force trapped under ground for a month and with only hours remaining before the bomb goes off... the Batman returns to Gotham allied with Catwoman (Anne Hathaway), James Gordon (Gary Oldman), Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Fox (Morgan Shepherd) and someone called Miranda (Marion Cotillard) who, it turns out, it not what she seems.

It’s a nice piece of moviemaking. Clichéd as hell, to be sure, but exciting and intriguing... which is not bad for a Batman movie where, frankly, Batman is hardly in it. It’s a sleek, powerful tent peg movie and it won’t let the studio down. It should easily make its money back and then some as its easily the best superhero movie of the year (even if Batman has never, technically, been a superhero).

However, like I said... I do have some problems with it.

One of the things about Nolan, and his The Prestige demonstrates this to it’s detriment, is that he always somehow manages to telegraph any twists coming a half an hour, or even over an hour, before they actually happen. This is not a film-maker who knows how to take his audience by surprise... which is a shame because The Prestige could have been a great movie if he’d not given you the solutions to all the twists right at the start of the movie, before it was even apparent there were any twists (for example, showing you the obvious side effect to Tesla’s later invention right at the start of the film and having two Christian Bales together a lot of the time... no use trying to disguise him in the shots, he’s there).

Similarly, it seemed fairly obvious by the time we meet Marion Cotillard’s character a second time in The Dark Knight Rises, quite early in the film, that she’s probably playing a villainess. Nolan tries to throw us off the scent a little by having a blatant female "bad girl" character in the film, Catwoman, to distract us... and to be fair, Anne Hathaway can be quite distracting, she plays it beautifully... but it just doesn’t serve to throw the audience off the scent. And, of course, as soon as the characters start talking about the legacy of Ras Al Ghul and the The League Of Shadows, it doesn’t take much to figure out that Cotillard is actually playing Talia, the character I’d complained about not being in Batman Begins. She is the one who escaped from “the pit” and she is the one who sleeps with Bruce Wayne but then stabs him near the end of the movie. Now I love Cottilard normally. Been keeping an eye on her since the original French Taxi movies (I especially liked her as the vengeful assassin in Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement) but I don’t think she does such an epic character as Talia justice here.

Now it’s probably not her fault, to be fair. The script is such that she is, I suspect, supposed to be some kind of surprise... but the Talia I remember of old was more of a “Caroline Munro in The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad” exotic type (in fact I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the original drawings were based on her) and this is just not the way Cottilard is presented in this movie. But... it’s a minor criticism since, after all, the Alfred Pennyworth portrayed in the Nolan trilogy (and played brilliantly by Michael Caine as an ex-military butler) is absolutely nothing like the character as he appeared in the comics either... another “in name only” version but, to be fair, Caine’s creation of him is a good addition.

But what about Alfred?

He’s not in this one much because he leaves Bruce Wayne. Quits on him. Alfred would never have done that in the comics but, since it’s not really the same Alfred, I guess I can forgive Nolan the use of the character to give a dramatic twist of the knife and add more gravitas to the proceedings. So well played on that front. And you mustn’t completely give up on Alfred on this one because one of the stories he tells is of the time when Bruce Wayne had left Gotham in the first movie, to find himself and train to become Batman. The story is of Alfred’s holiday/vacations and his fantasies of seeing Bruce Wayne and his girlfriend alive and well and not going back to Gotham... you’ll need that information for the end of the movie.

Another thing I have a problem with is about various characters knowing more than they possibly could. If Ras Al Ghul is merely a hallucination from a recovering invalid, how can he tell him the full backstory (to be fair, he could have got this finally from another prisoner but this little hole is left unexplained). Similarly, when Batman finally returns to Gotham, how does he know how many hours they have left until the bomb explodes. I suppose Bane could have told him... but, really?

And Nolan also resorts to dragging out time in a manner which doesn’t work. Showing a time bomb ticking down intercut with action sequences and then cutting back to find either not many seconds have actually passed during that part of the action or, conversely, too much time has passed. This is an attempt to ramp up suspense while the audience are supposed to be “lost in the action” but it rarely ever works when that kind of tactic is employed in film and it certainly doesn’t here.

It’s small details like this that drag the movie down a little under its own weight. Some of these things may well have been answered in the rough cut and edited out for length (it’s currently almost a 3 hour running time) but it makes the difference sometimes between a great movie, which this is not, and a really good one... which this kinda is, actually.

Having said that though... there’s a lot of positive stuff in this film. The relationship between James Gordon and Blake, the future Robin in this story arc, is really great stuff and even minor characters who start off bad or misguided actually do have a built in progression to them. Mistakes are admitted. Allegiances change. Just like people in real life. This movie, like the previous two, embraces the traits and personalities that live in the grey area... it’s not so much a series about dark and light, good and evil, but shades of grey. That’s what makes the characters matter to the audience. Because even the villains can be empathised with... to a certain extent.

There’s also the nice device of setting up a neat solution to the “saving of the city” only to have that solution snatched away only minutes before it’s too late. This is a nice Nolan trick which really works here.

Make no mistake, this is an exciting and dramatic story, solidly backed up with Hans Zimmer’s excellent score. James Newton Howard did not collaborate with him on this third part and it’s not as good a score as the last one... but it’s still pretty gorgeous sounding to my tin ears. And it all leads up to the point, once battle is done, to the rising foreshadowed in the film’s title. Red herring time again because the Rise of the Dark Knight is not Bruce Wayne climbing his way to freedom from “the pit” and saving Gotham. The rising here is a biblical metaphor.

Because Batman dies.

Except he doesn’t... only to the world.

He tows the atomic bomb which can now not be aborted out into the ocean and saves Gotham and dies in the process... leaving Bruce Wayne’s estate to his former butler, Alfred... who is racked with shame for not fulfilling his promise of taking care of young master Bruce to his dead parents. But by this time, the very inclusion of this scene at the funeral will be enough to tip most people off that the dark knight is, indeed, about to rise.

There’s a little thing about the discovery that the flying batwing actually did get the autopilot fixed six months prior to the events at the end of the film. And evidence suggests that it was Bruce Wayne who figured out how to fix it. Which means he knew he could leave his aircraft on autopilot. To quote Adam West’s incarnation of the character from the 1966 movie... “Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.” Except, if you fix the autopilot... sometimes you can and stage your own “retirement death” in the process.

Which is where Alfred’s story about his time spent on vacation comes into play... and which he will finally see fulfilled at the end of the movie with Bruce Wayne and his new girlfriend Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman).

And as I said earlier in the article... we also have the set up for Robin. It’s a nice little touch to know that Blake will carry on the fight against the crime in Gotham, but there is also a little tinge of regret in my heart.

This film is almost set up for a sequel. But they’ve said it’s definitely the final installment of this trilogy, which will be a shame. I would like to see what happens to these characters ten years down the line. A new super threat facing Gotham, Robin attempting to put things right and failing... he needs help... enter Batman and Catwoman (now Batgirl) coming out of retirement as the three fight fire and save Gotham once again. I doubt it’s a movie that would ever get made... but it would have been nice to see it.

If you’ve read this far I’m assuming you’ve already seen this movie... so you know by now that you either liked it or didn’t. It would get a fairly positive recommendation from me but, like i said, you’ve already seen it, right? But if you liked it as much as me, of course... there’s no reason why you can’t go and see it again. Same bat time... same bat channel!

Is all that we see or seem...

Inception 2010 US

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Screening now

I really don’t know where to begin with this one. If you’re reading this and you’ve been following me on Twitter you’ll know that I’ve been putting off writing this review since seeing the movie on Saturday. Why? Because I don’t want to annoy the bizarrely large number of people who actually liked this film.

I could warn you of possible spoilers which come up as I’m writing this but, to be honest, the opening title at the top of this page is a spoiler if you know your Edgar Allan Poe... and if you don’t know Edgar Allan Poe and you want to know a spoiler which, to be fair to me, is pretty obvious from the start of the movie, then don’t look to the right and down of this page where the rest of that verse is always prominently displayed near my user profile.

I’m not a big Christopher Nolan fan. The only movie I really enjoyed by him was the second of his Batman movies (The Dark Knight)... while nowhere near as dark or sophisticated as key issues of the Batman comics... it’s certainly the closest anyone’s come yet to capturing something close to Batman in a feature length film.

Another one of his I found entertaining but mostly dissapointing (every twist was telegraphed to you way before hand... sometimes over an hour beforehand) was The Prestige. In fact, I’m going to have to read the source novel on that one because I understand there’s an extra layer of revelation which didn't make it into the movie and maybe the exclusion of that last reveal is what could have given that movie some edge (still, it’s got David Bowie playing Tesla... so it’s not all bad).

Oh rats... you can tell I’m stalling here can’t you.

Ok. Let me give it to you straight. I don't have a clue why so many people liked Inception because, frankly, it was very much a dumbed down attempt at doing something which was probably ransacked from an old 50s sci-fi short story and would probably have best been served as a ten minute short... not a two and a half hour movie which, in the end, says “Hey! Make your mind up audience. Is he dreaming or isn’t he? You decide.” I knew he was going to truncate the last, all important shot of the movie like that... it’s similar to the serendipity moment Hal Hartley had in the editing room when he was working on Henry Fool and realised that by cuting a shot down early he could leave a completely ambiguous ending. In Inception’s case though... doesn’t work if you can see it coming. To be fair to Nolan though, he's effectively written himself into a corner at this point and a reveal to either one of the two possible endings would have divided the audience.

What more to say?

The special effects were nice... or perhaps that would be better phrased as... the imagination behind some of the efffects was okay. I especially liked the part where the dream architect is folding up bits of the city as she walks about it.

And the acting was okay too. I’m really not that familiar with DiCaprio (seen very few of his movies although I liked him in Shutter Island) but he seemed competent enough. Ditto Ellen Page who was absolutely amazing in both Hard Candy and Juno. And, of course, Marion Cottilard and the rest of them were all fine too.

And a servicable score by Hans Zimmer although I liked the last three albums I bought of his a lot more than this one.

So... nice effects, great performances, not so bad score... but to me it really means nothing unless you have a good solid idea which hasn’t been done to death before (in many ways this is almost a remake of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ... but instead of having virtual layers of reality within a game you have them within dreams). And although I believe that a movie is at least trying if it shows you something you’ve never seen on screen before (as this one does in a few places) I’m afraid that the most this one was doing was trying my patience.

I guess for me the true test of a film is whether it's got repeat viewing potential. I can repeat watch films like Blade Runner and The Third Man forever. I certainly don't think I could sit through Inception ever again.

Should you go and see it though? Yes. Absolutely. I’m one dissenting voice where thousands of others are shouting the absolute opposite. Go see it for yourself and make your own mind up. I didn’t like Avatar either... so what do I know?