Kevin Smith and The Dark Knight Returns

Kevin Smith and The Dark Knight Returns - Opinion

Kevin Smith often points to the plot holes in Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises and repeatedly states that Warner Animation's The Dark Knight Returns is the best Batman film you'll ever see.

Whilst I don't disagree that Rises has plot holes (though the ones Kevin often highlights aren't really plot holes), it could be argued that Nolan is simply continuing a tradition of plot holes that starts in the film's source material.

Nolan's films are heavily inspired and informed by a number of comic series including Frank Miller's comic book series, The Dark Knight Returns. Rises in particular shares many of the same themes.

Warning: This blog post is not a review. It's an opinion piece so I can write my thoughts about specific scenes in the film. If you haven't seen The Dark Knight Returns or haven't read the comic book series then stop now as from here on in there will be spoilers.

Kevin says of the comic book series that it opened his eyes to what Batman was really about after having only really known the Adam West version of character. I haven't read the comic version of Returns but Kevin talks about it like it's the bible of Batman stories.

In watching the animated version I'll agree with Kevin, it is a great story. It's filled with plenty of great ideas and, without this story, Nolan's Batman may well not have been as good as it is.

But, if you want to point out plot holes as a reason for Nolan's Rises to be 'just okay' here's my problems with Miller's story...

If you're a retired Batman heading back into the field and you have a suit that gives you the strength to take on Superman, why wouldn't you wear it to hand the Mutant leader his ass the first time you go up against him? Both times Batman goes up against the Mutant leader he sustains some pretty serious injuries. Even when he does defeat the leader he's pretty beat up.

Why not wear the suit when going up against your arch nemesis, The Joker. In this movie Joker's no slouch when it comes to hand to hand combat. Wear the suit. If it's good enough to go up against Superman then Joker would be little more than a rag doll.

If you have developed your own kryptonite to combat Superman, why not lead with that instead of wasting your time trying to defeat him in hand to hand combat in a super suit (that Superman could probably punch holes through or melt with that heat vision).

Wouldn't it have made more sense for Batman to construct kryptonite knuckle dusters rather than a kryptonite arrow that someone else had to shoot? At the very least, the kryptonite should have been part of the suit - in case the kryptonite didn't work he'd still have the suit as back up.

Robin? I have no issues with a female Robin however, in this movie, Robin goes from a cos-play school girl to fantastic gymnast, Batman tech hacker and all round bad ass in record time. She's barely even affected by the carnage she sees around her as Robin. (Kevin bitches about how Bruce got back to Gotham so fast after escaping the prison in Rises? More easily explained than this girl's amazing transformation into Robin).

In this movie Batman's an old man and he's still grappling with the death of his parents. Every time this movie brought up his parents I was thinking 'Fuck, he's still not over that yet?' Real people experience similar tragic deaths and, whilst it'll always be part of their psyche, many find a certain level of peace that allows them to move on and be functional again. Someone with Bruce Wayne's intelligence would not take a life time to come to terms with what happened to his parents.

The Bat suit in Returns is clearly not body armor yet we're led to believe that Batman is fast enough to dodge bullets from multiple automatic weapons in several different stand offs against the police. Either that or the police have all the accuracy of Storm Troopers in every single Star Wars film.

In what world does the Mayor of a city get let into a room by himself with murderous mutant leader completely unsupervised? I hope there was an internal investigation into that stupidity.

The local Police are sufficiently useless and equally as incompetent in Returns as any you saw in all of Nolan's films. Just once can we have a police department in a Superhero film that wasn't trained by the Keystone Cops Academy.

Anyone who complains about Christian Bales Batman using a leg brace to fix his knee problem... it didn't go unnoticed by me that Miller's Batman constructs a similar arm brace so he can continue to be Batman. Neither is really a plot hole - I'm just saying, Bale's brace is probably a nod to Miller who used the idea first.

Whilst we're on the subject of cheesy plot devices used in The Dark Knight Rises... Nuclear bomb? Used in The Dark Knight Returns by Harvey Dent to hold the city to ransom.

Okay so not all that list is plot holes either but to say Dark Knight Returns is the best Batman movie you'll ever see is a little over the top when compared to Nolan's Trilogy. Both are great stories with plenty of interesting ideas and, I'll say again, Nolan's Trilogy probably would be very different without Miller's story to inform it.

Returns. Not the best Batman story ever though. I still like Nolan's take better and his Batman isn't really quite there as the Batman I'd like to see on screen.

Comments

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices. My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe? Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...

Boom Crash Opera Born Classic But Not Again

Boom Crash Opera are an Australian Band that reached the peak of their popularity in the mid to late nineteen eighties. They are a band that I knew about at that time but was never really excited by until they released their ill fated double album Born and Born Again in 1995 (Album cover pictured). At the time of its release I was very much into emerging Australian musical acts and was also looking out for new sounds that were different and had kind of a futuristic/electronic sound. Artists that I was buying at the time included; Swoop , Nine Inch Nails and Pop Will Eat Its Self . As well as a really interesting release by David Bowie, the concept album, Outside . Born was a fairly radical departure for Boom Crash Opera (BCO). The first single, Gimme , was often compared to the sounds of Gary Glitter, particularly his single, Rock n Roll part 2 , because of the pounding drum loops. Watch the video below. My favorite single from the album is dissemble which probably went now...

Second Sunday Skateboard Session Ep 2 - Some Improvements

TET heelflip - looking better but still not a land. A s of writing this I've stuck to my plan of filming myself skate every second Sunday. By the time this post goes up I will have three episodes done. As part of that goal I am also skating more between episodes, about every second to third day for an hour, practicing Braille's Skateboarding Made Simple, Volume 1. That said, I'm not posting these videos here immediately after they're posted to my @TETLife YouTube Channel because I only post an article once a week, and that would make every second article a Sunday Session post. These posts are really so I can add some additional thoughts after the fact, and, of course, because this blog is about all things that interest me, of which skateboarding is one of them. In episode two I had intended to speak to camera more than I do but my driveway is right next door to my neighbor's shed/workshop, and I get a little self-conscious if I'm not too sure whether he's th...

Australian Federal Election 2025 - The Australian Democrats (Please Like Us Again) and The Greens

Image: Reve AI T here's not much to be said about the current Australian Democrats other than in 2025 Australian election, in May, they'll be out there hoping they win a seat... any seat... 'please like us again!' The Australian Democrats For just over two decades, from the late seventies onward, the Australian Democrats were the third most important party in the Federal government (if you don't count the National party since they've been on that coalition ticket with the Liberals for as long as I can remember). In fact, once I moved away from the Labor party, they were my top pick until the party slowly imploded in the early 2000's from a series of unfortunate events like leaders defecting to other parties, and a highly publicised incident of drunkenness, bullying, and abuse from a male party leader to a female colleague. It's been two decades since then (and that guy's with the Greens now)... please like us again! That aside, the party is still t...

The Australian Federal Election 2025 Could Be a Win For Independents

Australian Democrats founder, Senator Don Chipp, embodied the role of minor parties holding the balance of power with his quote of "keep the bastards honest." Photo Manipulated Caricature by TET. A s of writing this, the actual Australian Federal Election date has yet to be announced, as our Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, attempts to keep the focus on the fallout of severe weather events in Queensland, however it's looking likely that some time in May is the safest bet. Despite this, all parties have been hard at campaigning, with smaller parties, and in particular, conservative independent candidates, seemingly rallying together to make sure people know how much influence they can have just by preventing the two major parties (Labor and the Liberal/National coalition) from having a majority in either (or both) houses of parliament. They're also doing their part to make sure voters finally understand that preferential voting works in everybody's favor over one ...

Movie Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) No Spoilers

T his is another film that I would have liked to have seen in a theatre but, for whatever reason, didn't get to. Having now seen Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) almost a year later I'm glad I didn't. Which is not to say it's bad. Like its predecessor Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which I enjoyed in a cinema immensely, this film would definitely benefit from being on a big screen for the spectacle and epic visuals of it all. However unlike its predecessor there is so much going on, with back and forth between the waring parties, and Furiosa's story as well, you can't just sit back and kind of enjoy the ride. It's like writer/director, George Miller, wanted to cram in as many of his ideas as possible for the post apocalyptic world of Mad Max, because it's not likely he'll make another one, but whoever does, has a rich, detailed world of on screen source material to draw upon. The story begins with young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) and her journey from the ...

The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Image to Video Generator to Animate Art That Started as a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch

B ack in October of 2023 I used Prome AI's Sketch Rendering feature to color a 23 year old rough pen sketch I did of a princess watching butterflies, sitting next to a waterfall in the forest. You can read more about that in my previous article, The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Art Generator to Color and Enhance a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch The three images I used to create my final image (bottom right). Notice how closely the AI has followed my line art sketch (top left) but in the first image (top right) has misinterpreted the waterfall as some kind of large tree stump. Prome's render of the artwork was pretty good but I did end up creating a composite image myself from two of the best renders, to get my final image. Since then AI Image to Video has come a long way, particularly when it comes to creating animation from artwork and maintaining the art style for the whole generation. AI still does much better with turning photographic images to video but I found ...

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog