The Dark Knight Trilogy

IT BEGINS AGAIN

And so we are in the year of 2003 and WB and DC comics decided to take a ride in the comic book movie business train again and reopen the possibilities of a brand new Batman movie. That's where director (or I should say "savior") Christopher Nolan came in... accidentally.

Nolan was an unknown for the big public, he only released three films: Following, Memento and a remake of the 1997 film Insomnia, all of them, great flicks with very low budget. So Nolan was thinking next in making a movie about Howard Hughes, but Scorcese stepped in first and released The Aviator. That made Nolan reconsider making a movie about an eccentric rich man and to consider about making a movie about... another excentric rich man. One that dresses like a bat. Got it?

Jonathan Nolan, Chris' brother, is a huge Batman fan. You can see a subtle Batman sign in the door of the main character of Following, Chris' first movie. Coincidence? Chris himself said once he is very fascinated with the character, once that he and his brother grew up with it. Also, David Goyer, the writer of the Blade movies is also another huge Batman fan, and so Chris, with all that support and with a huge interest about diving into the Dark Knight's world decided to take the challenge. As we can see, this time the character would be in the hands of people who wasn't interested only in making a quick buck out of something, but real fans and people who really understand and believe in the potential of the character to have a great movie rendition.

Don't believe me? Then read what Nolan said in a Dark Knight interview:

"As we looked through the comics, there was this fascinating idea that Batman's presence in Gotham actually attracts criminals to Gotham, [it] attracts lunacy. When you're dealing with questionable notions like people taking the law into their own hands, you have to really ask, where does that lead? That's what makes the character so dark, because he expresses a vengeful desire." (Nolan, on the theme of escalation)

I guess that settles the question.

Anyway, no one was expecting a huge return to form of Batman on the big screen, everyone was thinking that the franchise was crippled enough, specially considering the Joel Schumacker mockery, so no one was interested to see another one of these movies. When Christopher Nolan and David Goyer was in the process of writing a script for a possible new Batman movie, WB already discarded the idea of several scripts so, Christopher Nolan, after voraciously research Batman, general ideas and read comics like crazy, finished his first sketch of a script called "The Intimidation Game" and stepped into WB to talk about his vision of Batman. And fortunately, it was accepted. Finally, after so many attempts, a new Batman movie was officially in the works.

The only thing that was missing was to decide the approach of the movie. Would it be a sequel, Batman 5? A remake? No, these elements wouldn't work, thanks to freaking Joel Schumacker and Akiva Goldsman who made Batman into a joke, so they had to come up with a complete different approach in order to restore the dignity that the character once had. A more down to earth approach.

It was settled. The new Batman movie would be a complete reboot of the old franchise, ignoring everything that happened from the 1989 Burton movie until the last and disastrous Schumacker movie. Everything would be remade and the origin story would be retold and expanded, so the Batman universe in the movies would be wiped clean and start fresh, with a new mithology and a new proposal. The characters would have real deth and the tone would be serious and epic, with some occasional humor, but not enough to rip the serious tone. And speaking about characters, much of the aspects of this new rendition would be as close from the comic books as possible. In other words, everything that Batman fans worldwide waited years to see on the big screen would turn to life in a movie.

The realistic approach of these new movies was targeting to experience with the idea of bringing the comic book characters more close to the definition of "our world", so obviously, some poetic license would be taken to built them to this new universe, but the real essence of each character would be kept untouched.

So, the question that we'll answer here now is: did all that live up to the hype? Short answer: YES, IT DID!

When all was said and done, in 2005 came the first movie, simply titled "Batman Begins".

The movie was a considerable hit in the box office and did well between public and critics. It was a good re-start to a franchise, bringing everything that the fans wished to see for so many years. The story was gripping, the atmosphere was dark, edgy and the characters were interesting. It was a good start. A nicely done "rise from the ashes" by a great superhero, specially considering it was the biggest box office of a Batman movie ever released to that time. The tone was more realistic, in fact the whole proposal of the movie was to be as realistic as possible, explaining lots of things about the nature and resources of Batman. A well made origin story and a great film that took the right influences and brought something unique to the table. And, as Hollywood is crazy about copying successful formulas, that realistic tone was implemented in other movies and franchises as well.

The movie even drank from the right sources of the comic books. For this one specifically, Nolan decided to take elements from the first Batman stories published in the Detective Comics magazine in the year of 1939 all written by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, the comics from the 70's, like the story "Daughter of the Demon" (by Denny O'Neal) that introduces the character Ra's Al Ghul as well as 80's classics, like the stories "Batman: Year One"

and "The Dark Knight Returns" (both written by Frank Miller) and The Long Halloween (by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale),

in fact the film drinks heavily from Year One, becoming one of the main influences in the conception of the plot. The Dark Knight Returns was even used as source of inspiration in the next two movies, I guess it was the only comic from Batman that the creative team, the Nolan brothers and Goyer used to link all three. In the last movie, The Dark Knight Rises, it was heavily used to compose key situations to the movie and tie loose ends.

And speaking of right influences and drinking from the right sources, there's a story about the whole conception of the movie. The tale is that one day, Christopher Nolan made a reunion with his creative staff to make an exhibition of Blade Runner, yes, Blade Runner. In the end of the movie Nolan turns and says to his team "I want something like this movie for Batman". And as it turns out, the atmosphere and tone of mistery of the movie, specially in the urban scenarios is very much similar to Blade Runner.

Also, Nolan reveals that when he thought about his own origin story for Batman, it came to his briliant mind to do something in the very lines of the first Superman, starring Christopher Reeve. And we can notice this very influence of the Richard Donner movie once we see Batman enduring a very long period training and preparing before finally wears the suit for the first time.

With all those qualities, Batman Begins turned out to be a hit and opened the path to other movies and sequels, pavementing the way of the trilogy and general superhero movies alike. It vanished that bitter taste that the last movies has left us and started fresh from scratch.

Batman Begins came in a time of desperation and controversy for DC/Warner and for the Batman fans that were very displeased with the path the old series took in the last movies. A time when fan-made culture started to spread and fan-films started to be considered countless times better than the official movies itself. And thankfully it put Batman again in the pantheon of the great superheroes from the movies. Everybody was pleased and satisfied with that new beginning. The movie even inspired a WB/DC animation of small films in the anime format, very much in the lines of what the first Matrix did, to connect and expand the new Batman mithology on the movies.

But Christopher Nolan was just wiping out the dust and putting things in order again, as the line "why do we fall?" in the movie clearly states. For no one could imagine it would become even better in a near future.

THE DARK TAKES IT'S PLACE

The fact that Batman Begins was a hit cheared WB executives to move on with the franchise. But not only that. After the movie, Christopher Nolan left his days of an independent low budget filmmaker that used to make excellent movies to go one step further to become a generous budget excellent movie maker. Or would it be several steps further? Whatever, the fact is that Nolan earned the respect of producers, executives and other hierarchies from the WB studios and authonomy, all of this things, enough to move on with the Batman franchise and to do his own movies the way he intended to do.

After the frustrated attempt of trying to bring his vision about Howard Hughes, Nolan was also planning to adapt a book called The Prestige, written by Christopher Priest, but this attempt was also halted by the production of Batman Begins. Now, with the confidence of the studio, Nolan managed to make his movie about The Prestige, released in 2006, and after that he felt ready to dive into the Batman world once again.

Nolan never knew if he would be making another Batman movie. And that's part of how he operates, as an authorial director that ends things. That happened both in Batman Begins and it's sequel. Not that he wasn't imagining telling another story, IF the right story came to mind. Nolan is not a "driven by sequels and franchises" kind of director. He starts a new movie project, he ends it, the story comes to it's conclusion, on to the next project. He doesn't think about franchises, he's a more Leoneish kind of director. With that said, we can safely say that his first Batman movie ended fine, with a twist of hope and a cheer in everybody's minds to actually seeing Batman rising again from the ashes of a fallen franchise. But that was just the beginning. As much as he introduced villains in his movie that never appeared on the big screen (Ra's Al Ghul and Scarecrow), he was eager to fix the messy stuff that the Burton/Schumacker franchise did with the old ones. Enter here the Joker and Two-Face.

Yes, the Joker. Nolan have balls that big! He would remap the Joker. He would make Jack Nicholson weep and piss on his pants, like a crybaby. He would spit in Tommy Lee Jones senil face and say he was nothing but a clown in an overproduced crap festival with bubblegum affected faces.

Ooor all that was a little bit harsh and I'm just making it more colorful, but fact is HE MADE IT!

Before this movie was released, two tragedies striked the production. The death of Conway Wickliffe, a special effects and stuntman technichian and the most important (but equally felt) of them, the death of actor Heath Ledger, who played the Joker on the film. That last event elevated the box office of the film to the billions heaven and brought to it a sense of legend never imagined for a long time on the film industry, not to mention that gave the late actor a posthumous Oscar for best supporting actor. Just to have an idea, the movie made more money than Batman Begins entire domestic run in only 6 days of release. It became huge from night to day, just like that. This was the last complete work from Heath, that came to die after complete about 70% of the work that he was doing in his next and last film "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus", by Terry Gilliam.

Initially, to hide from the public eye important information, Nolan named the script as "Rory's First Kiss", even referring to it by the initials RFK. According to the spoken legend, the name really refers to the first kiss of Nolan's son. Cute, huh?

The movie had six sequences filmed on IMAX, a format that Christopher Nolan came to master in his next projects.

Also, it generated the longest and more memorable viral campaing on the Internet, going from leads, hints, through promotions, videos, audio files, special websites and a web series called Gotham Tonight. It was the best example of how to market your movie on the Internet and call a huge attention to the public in general, keeping the interest of people in the movie until the day of release.

The episodes of this web series was like a news and talk show, bringing actor Anthony Michael Hall as the reporter Mike Engel, interviewing lots of important people from the city of Gotham, going from politicians to people like Lt. Gordon and Harvey Dent and also bringing some information about the city and it's celebrities, like Bruce Wayne and the Batman himself.

The show had 6 webisodes, being the last one the bridge that connected those with the movie. It was a very interesting tie-in.

I remember finishing to watch Harvey's interview, the last episode from the web series, moments before I go to the movie theater to watch the movie. It gave me a sensation of continuity and pleasure I never experienced in any other production.

As major influences from the comics, we can clearly notice being "The Long Halloween", Christopher Nolan's favorite Batman story, to be the crucial one. Along, of course, we have other elements from the first Joker story published in Batman #1 written in 1940 by Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson and also from the first Two-Face story from 1941. We have also nice elements from the classic Alan Moore interpretation "The Killing Joke" and even clearly noted elements from a Brian Azarello recent comic book simply titled "Joker".

In movies and series, we have the Two-Face story told in the animated series from 1992

and strong elements from the movie "Heat" directed by Michael Mann and starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro that Nolan took most of the inspiration, specially considering the urban tone and the Batman and Joker interrogation scene.

It was also told by Heath Ledger in one of his interviews that some inspiration that he had for the role of Joker also came from Malcom McDowell from the Stanley Kubrick movie "A Clockwork Orange",

and some even say that "The Crow" was also a source of inspiration, something that we can take for granted, considering the Joker's make up in the movie.

With a box office that huge and all the recognition Nolan earned from the excellent critics and opinions by public and media, it's more than obvious that it would generated a next Batman flick. With or without Christopher Nolan directing. Fortunatelly, they chose the first option.

THE END OF THE DARK

Finally, all came to an end in the third and last Batman movie directed by Christopher Nolan. The production of the movie, once again started after Nolan filmed another one of his personal projects, the highly acclaimed flick "Inception".

Even having the whole story in their minds, the Nolan brothers decided only to return with a good script. The death of Heath Ledger and consequently the absence of The Joker worried everyone, but fortunately, everything went well. Once again they worked the script of the movie under a fake title, calling it "Magnus Rex". Everybody was hyped as hell for this final installment of the Dark Knight saga. Everyone wanted to see what Nolan would do to live up to the expectations earned by the last movies and to give the fitting ending to the whole story told in those three films.

And as the Joker would say: he didn't disappoint!!

The Dark Knight Rises is an epic and exciting conclusion to the story Nolan has begun in Batman Begins. 8 years later, Gotham was still dealing with what happened in the last movie and it was in a state of peace time, provided by the lie formed between Gordon and Batman in the end of The Dark Knight. Harvey Dent was the hero, Batman the murderer, the outcast... as predicted by Alfred!

So Bruce becomes a recluse and retires Batman, but when Catwoman started an old feeling on Bruce and Bane came to town he feels a storm rising and decides to go back in action as Batman again.

The story is gripping, it never makes you blink. The movie follows a feel of anarchy and fear, it's tense, suspenseful, but also exciting.

The acting is brilliant! Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle is sexy, exciting, thrilling and very strong. Tom Hardy as Bane is terrifying! Other supporting actors are just as strong, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt as cop John Blake.

And Nolan kept his promise untill the end: no Robin and no Batgirl or Batwoman in the whole trilogy! Just Batman, and his main allies, Alfred, Lucius Fox, Gordon and the police force. Though, there's a Robin reference in the movie, as there was a Henri Ducard reference in Batman Begins. And it's awesome, I won't tell you how it comes out because it would ruin the surprise for you, but trust me, it'll feel great when you see it.

The story rolls back to elements depicted in the last movies, tying everything together leaving no loose ends.

It ends the whole story perfectly, leaving, as always, an open door to new possibilities but never cheating the audience with the feeling it's incomplete. The story can perfectly be left here, like the closing of a circle.

More than that! After all the darkness, the movie gives the audience in its end a sense of closure and internal peace, leaving people with the wonderful and courageous story of Bruce Wayne and Batman, as the epic and true legend it is. An inspiration to everyone, just like Bruce wanted to be. You leave this film, wanting to become Batman, wanting to be an inspiration to other people. And that's what a true hero movie is made of, that is the feeling it has to evoke! It brings a smile in your face and a cheerful feeling of victory.

It's exciting and very emotive. It's thrilling and very meaninful in it's message. It's strong but it has a sense of lightheart at the end.

Personally it left me very happy but at the same time with a bittersweet taste, knowing that a great era in the story of comic book movies had come to an end. But as we was always told, every great story has to end sometime.

So lets talk about the influences and connections of the movie. As for comics, one of the strongest influences was the Knightfall saga written by Doug Moench and Chuck Dixon. You can clearly see it after an hour and 15 minutes in, when Batman and Bane faces each other. You can see the arc where Alfred leaves the Wayne Manor in that same story. You can sense the atmosphere of anarchy and conquest, the smell of powder and dynamite, the tension and the horror of citizens from Gotham when they are lead to chose to die in their city or to be exiled from it, taken from stories like The Cult and the No Man's Land saga. And you can also notice again the desire of Bruce Wayne to retire and his will to return after many years like the Dark Knight, as it's depicted in the classic story The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller.

I even found incredible like Christopher Nolan was entitled to read and inspire himself from various moments and stories from the Batman cannon in the comics, since more marketable, strictly "made to sell magazines" sagas like Knightfall and No Man's Land to more artistic and higher note tales like The Cult and The Dark Knight Returns. He took a small scale villain like Bane, which was created in a rush, with the only purpose to break Batman in half, to cause commotion and then disappear in thin air on the next sagas and stories, and turned him into someone really frightening and scary, a memorable adversary.

There's lots of other sources as well. Catwoman's suit, for example is a reference to Julie Newmar from the 1960's Catwoman in the comical Adam West series, and you can see the resemblance.

And there's even books as inspirations, yes, classic stories, Nolan also spoke that most of the plot of the movie was inspired by the Charles Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities, beautifully depicted in a 1935 movie, and when you get the book to read, you notice it right off the bat. PS, pardon me for this infamous pun! Anyway, this beautiful inspiration becomes even more evident in a "certain part" of The Dark Knight Rises, when there's a letter written by "someone" with a passage from the book, and it's just beautiful! It brought tears to my eyes and ended everything epically!

Now speaking about the movie connections, we can point, to start, the 1926 german silent movie Metropolis, by Fritz Lang, inspired by the german book Metropolis, written by Thea Von Harbou, Fritz Lang's wife. In this movie, the society is divided into rich man and workers, poor people, who decides to start a revolution against the rich people who doesn't give a crap for them. And they also have a leader, called the "mediator" between head and hands. It's a great and epic movie with strong characters, great development and surely a milestone from the history of cinema. And together with the Batman No Man's Land and Knightfall saga and the Charles Dickens book it clearly formed the central idea for the plot of the movie. Brilliant!

Also, Anne Hathaway inspired herself on the Delilah character from the 1949 movie, Samson and Delilah, witch is ironic, because Bob Kane got inspiration from the Delilah legend to mold his own Catwoman. Kane built his creation under Delilah's skin and now, Anne Hathaway is drinking from the same source!

And now for my final considerations about this fantastic trilogy.

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FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

Personally, I consider this, one of the best and most successful trilogies of all time. The plots are very well developed, the story doesn't leave any character behind, everything that happens in the movies, has a reason, a purpose, and an incredible ability to develop things to new levels.

These three movies are the closest to the comics that any other live-action Batman movie ever got to be. But they still manages to give us their own and original point of view about the source material.

The characters are great, the story is very well tied in and the decision to never treat these films like a "franchise" that gives always clues to a next chapter makes the whole difference.

Instead of thinking about these films in a movie structure, I like to think about them as an opera being enacted to us. Yes, an opera in three distinct acts.

The name? "The Dark Knight Legend"

Act I (Prelude) - Batman Begins Act II (Intermezzo) - The Dark Knight Act III (Furioso) - The Dark Knight Rises

In fact, when the plot of the very first movie decided to replace The Mark of Zorro in the origin story with an Opera in the evening, it just gave us all the clues about what was the approach of these movies.

And it really delivers. From the beginning of the trilogy until it's very end, we witness the journey of a true man, who wants to make the difference, who wants to prove to everybody that everyone can be a hero. And together, we can change whatever we want.

The end of the trilogy is special in a very positive sense. It leaves us with a very high note and makes us want to be part of the life of those characters.

I don't want to spoil the end of the story for those who will still watch it, but the sequences of the ending are very rewarding. So rewarding and giving us that uplifting and majestic sensation that the only thing we can say in a speechless state is...

... BRAVO!! WELL DONE!!

Let's hear it for one of the greatest directors of modern days, Christopher Nolan! We will miss you!