Monday, September 17, 2012

Blockbuster Showdown

The Avengers vs. The Dark Knight Rises. Fire away, O fellow geeks!

(ETA link to my own opinion)

4 comments:

latoberg said...

Avengers. NO contest (emphasis mine).

The DKR was drawn out and painful to endure. It could have been the super gulp Dr. Pepper, though. I know that the comic line really played up the breaking of the Batman with Bane as the central character. But DKR made much more out of the character than was really ever present in the comic. He was a plot foil to bring new life to the character. Add to that the ludicrously contrived back story and the predictability, you had a story line as campy as any visual scenery from the Schumacher era.

And how can you call it a Batman movie when the title character has less screen time than any other character in the movie.

Avengers kept the story tight and moving. The character interactions were spot on. It was faithful to classic fans as well as paying appropriate credit to newer generations of the story. It succeeded where everyone thought it would fail: bringing three successful movie lines together without any one ego outshining the rest. It had a chemistry between the characters that seemed to be lacking in Batman.

What did each movie leave you with?

DKR - question - How did Batman escape? And will there be another set of movies without Bruce Wayne in the cowl?

Avengers - When are the next movies hitting the theater? And Thank you for making a Hulk film that didn't suck.

philip vm said...

i'm with todd: 'avengers,' hands down. i'll simplify it, though, and say that 'avengers' was fun and engaging. isn't that what superhero movies should be?

also, would it've killed nolan to make even half of bane's dialogue intelligible? (wait, i'll give dkr this: LOVED the wrap up to the bruce wayne story. nice payoff of themes from the first flick. oh, hell, i'll give dkr two things: loved catwoman, too. no silly attempts at making her feline, no 'she's a whack-job' character explanation.)

now i'll read your thoughts, rev.

Friar said...

Although I'm with you both, clearly in the Avengers camp, I also liked several things about TDKR even though the whole package didn't do it for me. She may have looked fragile, but Anne Hathaway was the baddest gal on the planet as Selina -- and I loved the Julie Newmar throwback look for her and the way she wasn't really "Catwoman" as much as she was a cat-burglar whose eyepieces looked like cat's ears when flipped up. With time, TDKR could have been as good as it was hyped up to have been, but it wasn't in the oven long enough.

latoberg said...

I would recommend a Director's Cut version of TDKR where large chunks of material were excised (Highlander 2-style???) to make the movie flow better.

And I agree - Hathaway was great in that role. The best part of the movie (except for the last two minutes).