Top 10 Nolan Batman moments.

I love the Christopher Nolan Batman films with all my soul – I truly believe each film is a classic. What Nolan did for the character is not easy – he made Batman, in the eyes of the mainstream audience, into a serious character. Previously, under different directorial regimes, I just couldn’t take character seriously.

But as well as all three films being wonderful, there are moments in the Nolan series that just make you remember why you love movies. Moments that force you to say “wow” and moments that conjure a chill at the back of your neck. 

These are my favourite 10 moments in the Nolan Batman series. 

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Ten: Ras al Ghul reveal

I feel that Batman Begins gets a bad rap among fans and critics – I think it is a very good film that expertly lays the ground work for The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. There are moments in the film that are as good as any in the series.

I remember the first time I watched Begins and seeing Bruce Wayne’s birthday scene and being blown away. The tension from the whole film pretty much builds to this moment. You realise that the real big bad of the film was a bloke you thought was a good guy and probably dead – Liam Neeson’s Ras al Ghul. From this moment on, I knew this was a very different Batman story than those that came before.

Nine: The Lau Extraction

This scene is the best bad ass “Batman” moment in series. I love it because it brings home a point that Heath Ledger’s Joker mentions earlier in The Dark Knight, “Batman has no jurisdiction.” It is the clearest demonstration of why Batman is more important than the Gotham City Police.

It is also just very cool.

Eight: Do you feel in charge?

As I have said before on this blog, I am shit scared of Bane and you only have to watch the below scene to understand why. In a moment, with a light touch of the shoulder, the whole dynamic of the conversation between Bane and John Daggett (played by the bloody brilliant Ben Mandelsohn) changes – and it is shocking.

Seven: Ninja Batman

Something that people overlook about Batman is that he is supposed to be a fiercely intelligent individual that thinks on his feet – a detective if you will. That is best illustrated in the Ninja initiation scene in Batman Begins.

First off, Ninja’s are just bloody cool anyway, so this scene was always going to stick with me. But I love the way that in this one scene you see Bruce using all of the knowledge Ras has passed on to him (or the knowledge we have seen him pass). This is where you pretty much see the transformation – this is the birth of Batman.

Six: The Bane walk

You take the boss hostage and threaten his life in front of his people who are ebbing closer and closer towards you. So you fight them with the help of a bloke that dresses as a bat, but more men keep coming. Chief among those approaching you is a big bastard with his hands on the collar of his jacket. 

Question: What do you do? My answer: Shit myself.

Five: Joker’s coward

The thing with me is that I keep forgetting how great Ledger’s performance was as the Joker. I try to downplay it because of the incredible hype it gets but when you watch The Dark Knight you realise what a remarkable performance it is. Truly jaw dropping.

One of my favourite moment is when he taunts a police officer into an altercation. It is the way that Ledger achieves being extremely threatening and funny at the same time. 

I chuckle every time Ledger mouths “six” in this scene - I don't know why. And when he drops his “do you know why I use a knife speech” you realise what Ledger was doing in this film was not normal.

Four: Joker reveal

There is probably nothing I can say about this moment that hasn’t already been written. It is my third favourite introduction to a film behind The Godfather ("I believe in America") and The Lion King ("Circle of life"). It is already iconic and rightly so.

Every time someone argues with me that Nolan isn’t a technically gifted director, I mention this scene because it is nigh near perfect beginning to a wonderful film.

Three: Hi

And yes for a third time in a row I choose a Joker moment – I left out so many. 

I’m really not that bothered about the rest of this scene (which is awesome in its own right), it is just the “hi” moment that delights me. Again, it shows you the level of detail Ledger put into his performance.

Firstly, it’s funny and secondly, for that to be the first word you say to a man who you ruined is just sadistic. 

Two: Darkness is Bane’s ally

Tom Hardy’s Bane is one of my favourite villains of all time and just surpasses the Joker. As I have said before, I find him trulyterrifying and is an evil that speaks to my generation.

The fight scene in the sewers between Bane and Batman encapsulates everything terrifying about the character – but it is his “darkness” speech that tips me over the edge every time. Terrifying.

One: Fire Engine 

It is just funny.

I remember laughing out loud in the cinema when I saw this visual gag. The thing is, I wasn’t the only one laughing.

Again, it sharply shows two important elements to the Joker, his humour and sadistic nature. But somehow, his humour is the thing that shines through the most – at least for me it is. I really don’t know what that says about me as a human being.

But this is the one moment I love the most in the whole series. It is small but it says a lot. 

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And that is my lot. 

                                           Chocolate Bats

Where is the Bane love?

Tom Hardy is 5 feet 9 inches tall. I am an inch shorter than this man. I say this because time and again I have been described as a man of below average height – which is true – yet, Tom Hardy is only an inch taller. I take this as an empowering piece of information.

Despite Hardy’s height impediment, he is one of the most physically imposing actors I have seen on the screen – I put him up there with Arnold Schwarzenegger. His performance in Bronson echoed that of a young Robert De Nero, as did his impressive turn in Warrior – but for me, it’s his turn as Bane that shows how special he is.

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I love The Dark Knight Rises – I think it is brilliant, ambitious and most of all brave. I also admit that the film is very much flawed, but not to the extent some believe it is. For instance, I do not think that there is much technical difference between The Dark Knight Rises and its much celebrated predecessor, The Dark Knight. The only difference to my mind is Heath Ledger.

Now when I think of The Joker, I don’t think of the comic book incarnations or Jack Nicholson for that matter, I think of Ledger – that tells you what a hell of a job he did in TDK. But Tom Hardy has done the same thing for the character Bane.

I can safely say, hand on heart, that if I was walking down the street late at night, I’d be more scared of the brute slowly walking towards me with his hands on the collars of his jacket than the bloke skipping and laughing next to him. Don’t get me wrong, I’d brown my pants if I encountered both of them – but Hardy’s Bane strikes me with more fear.

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I fear Bane more because it doesn’t take much to imagine a real life version of this character – and many of them at that. I don’t believe there many Joker’s in this world, this is despite the horrible events of the Aurora shooting.

Bane is a terrorist. He is smart, he is manipulative and his logic makes a warped kind of sense. While The Joker had no motive or ideology other than to create chaos – the presence of such things in Bane utterly terrifies me.

It is the rooting of this character in a post 9/11 reality and the addition of a physical menace that makes him special. Honest to god, he scares me.

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Let’s also not forget that all of Hardy’s performance was with a mask on. He had to portray a range of feelings with a mask on. I mean, stand in front of a mirror with a balaclava over your mouth – now act angry, tough, surprised, calm, worried, sad and happy. It isn’t as easy as it looks.

I accept that the voice is an acquired taste – I liked it, but I understand why it has been ridiculed. I don’t think the character would have been as menacing if he had an American or British accent. Maybe they were going for a non-Arabic foreign accent. Since 9/11, the foreign is a lot more threatening than the domestic.

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I truly believe that in time people will start to see The Dark Knight Rises the same way they see The Dark Knight – as a generational defining movie with outstanding performances. I accept that Hardy’s Bane will never be as beloved as Ledger’s Joker, and that is ok, but I feel his character and his work on that film deserves a lot more respect that it has gotten.

               The Dark Bear.    

The Dark W. Knight

I find it difficult to write about films I have a true burning love for, simply because I turn such pieces into an exercise of fitting clichés into sentences. So I end up writing about newish films that I have yet to form a concrete opinion on, or flawed films which I can give backhanded complements to, or films I absolutely hate so I can vent my frustrations.

But I actually wanted to try and write about a film I genuinely and whole heartedly love – Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. 

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I remember back when I was in secondary school, coming home for my lunch break – which was strange because I rarely did that. My Ma was kind enough to rustle something up and while I was talking to her through the kitchen window I noticed something on the telly. I ignored it at first because I figured it was a trailer for an action movie, but this image of a burning skyscraper was on there for sometime. Then I started to pay attention to the bright banner running along the bottom of the screen and just like that – a plane appeared on screen and crashed into the building.

“What the fuck?”

I was 12 years old.

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For me, The Dark Knight was one of the first truly great post-9/11 movies. It captures how I felt after that day in 2001 – and that was mainly scared.

Previous films and depictions of Batman show that it’s very easy for him to degenerate into a silly character. Nolan made the character a product of 9/11 – his Batman was deadly serious.

Everything about this film reminds me of how I felt after September 11 and how I saw other people react around me.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

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For me, at the centre of The Dark Knight is the idea of protecting innocent people by any means – even if the protector himself becomes corrupted by his task.

Yes, Heath Ledger’s Joker is an agent of chaos, but he had a simple role throughout the film and that was to corrupt the incorruptible – bring people down to his level.

This theme is at the centre of every thread of TDK. The corruption of the protector is at the heart of Harvey Dent’s plot and ultimately it drives Batman to develop the invasive sonar technology that helps to capture Joker.

Basically, this is a long winded way of me trying to say that to this day I believe TDK is a defence of President George W Bush.

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Another haunting image that I can’t ever forget is when Bush was in that school room, reading to the kids and an aide tells him what has just happened in New York. And he just sits there.

I’ve always asked myself why he didn’t abandon that photo-call, go straight into a war room and get to work. But the older I get, the more I question that initial reaction.

I’ve read quite a lot about President Bush and it is clear that he really wasn’t an intelligent man – a fact which I always find hard to reason with. How can someone with his academic record and his failed business ventures end up being President of the United States? Only in America, right? (To be fair to Bush, he was a successful Governor)

And it’s this man that America entrusted great powers to. America is a fascinating country, because, despite their hatred of monarchies and dictatorships, one man holds a huge chunk of power. The pressure George W Bush felt at that moment in the class room must have been greater than anything anyone who has achieved his position ever experienced.

This is why I feel a great deal of sympathy for him – everything after that photo-opportunity in the class room changed. Everything.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and I cringe when people blast Bush for being a war criminal (he may very well be) and the worst president – especially if they argue this in an American accent. Polls before the invasion of both the Afghan and Iraq wars show that a majority of American approved of it. And of course they did, because if they were like me, they were terrified.

You have to remember the way people spoke after 9/11. People were rightly angry, scared and vengeful. Damn it, it was ok to discriminate towards Muslims after 9/11 – Google “Muslim hate crime after 9/11”, it makes for terrifying reading.

Bush was the leader Americans and, to a certain respect, Britons wanted because in him we saw a protector.

Another image that resonates with me after 9/11 is Bush standing on Ground Zero giving his much celebrated at the time, “We hear you” speech. Bush was encouraged every step of the way in the actions he took, not just by his Darth-Vader-like Vice-President, Dick Chaney, but by the public. 

Never forget that George W Bush was re-elected.

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I love The Dark Knight because it makes me re-evaluate the past. The great films reflect the time in which they were made. I think Christopher Nolan's Batman does greatly resemble the presidency of George W Bush.

I personally believe that the world is a much more dangerous place because of George W Bush’s presidency, but I don’t think that’s because he’s evil or even a bad man. I just think he wasn’t clever enough or strong enough to deal with the situation he was dealt with.

But it is also disingenuous for us, the public, American or British, to wipe our hands of the mess Bush made – we are complicit. We allowed it to happen. Yes, a lot of people protested, but simply not enough. Again, he was re-elected.

Every time I hear a Bush basher (giggles) deconstruct his admittedly poor terms in office, especially when it comes to foreign policy, I think of the boat scene in TDK. We all believe that we have convictions and if given the power we’d do something about them. But, in reality, the majority of us would have done nothing and hope that somebody else does the hard work for us - like the characters in TDK.

                          @Chocoteddyfilms