The Dark Knight

    Hello and welcome to part three of The Batman Season here at Now with Numbers. This week: The Dark Knight; a much less awful Batman movie than the one I watched yesterday. I’d go so far as to say I really liked it. Regrettably I may have loved it had it not been for the one that came before, which just left a bad taste in my mouth.

      I preferred this because it finally lightened the hell up. It wasn’t wallowing in grief we – the audience – weren’t given enough reason to care about. It didn’t have a Tibetan cult of ninjas teaching him the ways of having eyes-in-the-back-of-your-head and perfect choreography*.

     The much needed levity of course came from Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker. All the way through Arkham Asylum I was more interested in Joker than Batman (even if his taunts became infuriatingly repetitive at the harder bits) because I got little else out of Batman other than his parents were dead and that was sad. Which as I said in the Begins review was nothing I didn’t know before, even as someone uninterested.

      I really mean it when I say this movie didn’t need Begins. Batman at this stage is a cultural artefact that most everyone knows at least a little about. Like Jaws, or Harry Potter or Jack Bauer. People know what you’re referencing when you say “you’re gonna need a bigger boat”. Not to mention I’m a huge fan of starting in the middle – or in medias res, for the more sophisticated. I enjoy picking up a storey and working out what has happened before, occasionally not finding out is more fun. Would it really have made any difference if Bruce chose to clean up the city for the sake of others over doing it because he’d already been burned by the state of affairs. Well actually yes, but my point is you could draw your own conclusions.

      This started off great. With a bank robbery that goes spectacularly well because the robbers kill each other after their usefulness has ended. It’s callous yet elegant and when one of the masked men is revealed as Joker it feels like a real revelation even though you can see it coming a mile off, if you’re paying real good attention. The way it should be.

     Ok so escaping into a row of school busses and nobody notices the rubble falling off your roof is a little bit hard to swallow – all it would take is for the bus behind to take the number plate (I think school busses also have unique numbers on their side and stuff too but I’m not sure) and it could be traced with relative ease – but I was impressed enough to suspend my disbelief.

      I could talk forever about the scenes involving the two ships – how the passengers refusal to play his game surprised me and how tense the whole thing was – but instead I’ll just gush briefly in parenthesis.

     The new (as far as I’m concerned) character of Harvey Dent brought a lot to the movie. He exposed Bruce Wayne as part of the problem in the scene where he accepts a large donation for his campaign – didn’t Gotham get into its mess by being bought and corrupted? Having its politicians and judges on the hooks of richer people? In the pivotal scene where batman is forced to choose between Girl and Dent I was genuinely surprised when he rescued Dent – I figured that, like in most movies, the Girl would make a nice reward for our hero when the job is done. I mean, sure, this could be construed as Batman meagrely protecting an investment but Harvey did have the chance to really change things. The utilitarian view made me like Batman slightly more. (I’ll concede my last review made me seem kind of petulant that murder is always wrong. It’s not, I didn’t care for the criminals any in ‘Begins’ I just hated Bruce/man’s pretentiousness.)

     Sure I felt it was a little bit too sudden when Dent suddenly became a homicidal psychotic but, as Joker said, sometimes all it takes is a little push to descend into madness. And the coin flipping thing was cool, an interesting look into choice and fate, the way I read it.

     I also find it a little incredible how batman can turn every mobile phone into a sonar device and yet nobody can work out who he is, the world of Batman seems to be slightly more technologically advanced than ours – how come nobody can figure out who he is? Surely his daemon summoning voice isn’t enough to cover his identity, all it would take is a picture – from, say, a mobile phone – for someone to map the facial structure and then extrapolate possibilities from various data bases and rich lists. Anonymous would have it nailed by afternoon.   

     I really enjoyed this movie, even if its villains were far more entertaining – even likable – than its irritating hero. I’d watch it again and am even looking forward to the third movie, which is apparently out this year.

*I didn’t mean that to sound like a back-handed compliment. The choreography was meagrely adequate.

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Blog War

     The friend that forced me into the batman universe – on the promise I’d adore it – started his own blog, chiefly it seems, to argue with me. He attacked my opinions with opinions of his own forcing me into the situation where I have to defend my innocent non-fanboy opinions.

     He first quotes the paragraph where I accuse the film of being slow, and where I assume the Joker killed Bruce/man’s parents, as I had heard way back in primary school. He starts his argument by agreeing with me, the film is too slow and then pointing out that the story I’d heard is only applicable in one of the more ancient versions of Batman. So I’m perhaps mistaken on this version’s take on the back story. I apologise. Unreservedly.

     Except I’d like to point out that if Begins isn’t going down that road, it makes it even less relevant. If the beginning of the trilogy isn’t seeding any pay off for the third it makes the trilogy less satisfying.

      So his next point goes exactly like this:

"I’d have been totally behind Bats if I’d known he was enjoying himself. Instead he’s oh so terribly compassionate in that irritating holier-than-thou way that pisses me off to no end."

I think that's the point of a "Super-Hero" it's someone who morally is better than your average mortal. Now I know that you've never been a great fan of the super universe. So it doesn't come as a surprise to me that you feel that way. In any normal film, i'd probably feel the exact same.

    Morality isn’t difficult. It’s about what causes and elevates pain and suffering. With the shading of the greater good. And besides Batman isn’t super. He’s a rich boy with time and money on his side. Sure he’s at the top of his physical fitness and martial arts trained but most armies are made up of thousands of people who can hold their own.

     Spiderman for example can do things nobody else can do and chooses to use that power to help people rather than for personal gain or revenge, simply because it’s the right thing to do. Bat man has ambiguous motivations, either revenge or to win the Girl – she dies but in Begins she presents herself as a reward.  

     

At the point where he blows up the League of Shadows, which I might add, he doesn't do with intent. Unlike the manslaughter.

       Somewhere along the conversation another friend of ours mentioned Batman’s intellect. I’ve no doubt that Bruce is relatively smart and I can’t imagine what he was trying to do if it wasn’t blow the place up. He knows where the explosives are kept. If his goal was simply to flick the burning poker away, that would never have created the diversion he needed. Even if we assume he never intended to kill anyone he knew it was overwhelmingly likely.  

       And I don’t care that he killed the guy in the train at the end. He meant to, he’d planned it, getting Gordon to destroy the bridge and then ripping the train apart himself. It was necessary of course, to stop the vaporising machine. But if he’d wanted to he could have saved that guy. “allowing him the chance to escape” isn’t what happens here.

      As for the hotel scene. I stand by what I say here. His exchange with Rachel could have been done in any number of ways – like if he’d shown some thought he could have gone to his best friend instead of allowing her to think he didn’t care about her after a seven year absence and his declared death. You know? Like a compassionate individual would have done.

     And, Just to finish, your suggestion that I watch this again is quite toxic to me.

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     This is me drawing a line under the debate. I’m sick of Batman.

     Look, that’s a line. Under the Debate. Respect the Line.

     Colon Pee.

Batman Arkham Asylum

     I realise I’m a little late to the game here given that its sequel is out and proud and doing well but I just completed Batman Arkham Asylum for the Xbox 360. A friend lent it to me*, enthusiastically batting away my indifference to the Batman universe – insisting “it’s a good game, even if it wasn’t Batman, it’d still be good”; which suggested to me they were too lazy to create something new and instead surfed on the back of something already popular. I’m right about that but, admittedly, it is a quality game.

      The basic premise is that Joker takes over a prison/come asylum in order to create an army of super mutants and take over Gotham City or the world or similar. Spoiler alert. The storey is told well, it’s revealed and foreshadowed and isn’t just expanded in a contrived way like when some games hit six hours they – because that resonates with the zeitgeist – pull some terrorism out of their ass and continue for another pointless four. I really enjoyed it over all and it’s a great example of storey telling in video games.

     On the other hand. The characters, for the most part were a little anaemic. There were a lot of villains in it that were – I assume at least – returning characters like Scarecrow and Killer Croc and Zsasz to which I was introduced and given a sense of but I felt like that was it. There was nothing else to them. Even with the psychiatric recordings littered around the place. I suspect this is just a problem with the source material: comic books. These characters have to survive years and years of re-use so they have to be vague lest they implode like their cousins in soap land. Yes it’s true good characters can be summed up in a sentence (Zzasz: self hating serial killer with a god complex. Killer Croc is a metaphor for the animal in us all and Poison Ivy is a nasty evil naked Greenpeace liberal fag) but with great characters you want to say more. I didn’t.

      But it’s a game. Examples of great characters are a little sparse *cough – Kazooie cough cough*.

     The game play is split into three main parts, rooms of baddies that you have to punch into unconsciousness – the moral alternative to murder – room of baddies to you have to suffocate into unconsciousness one by one causing panic and fear in your future victims – the moral alternative to murder – and very infrequent side scrolling-ish pieces that end up with you shining a light on Scarecrow – the much less effective alternative to murder.

      The crowds of baddies are what make up the majority of the bits of the game, and it’s done well enough. Most of the time it just comes down to hitting X a lot, but as you progress through the game you have to think about what you’re doing a little more some enemies shock you if you attack them head on and some have knives and guns making them higher priority targets. There are some moves you can do after building up a high enough combo but I found that it rarely responded quickly enough and I lost powerful finishing moves. Even the simple counter move didn’t always work – especially later on when there were lots of baddies. You either had to pre-empt the counter prompt or if you’d successfully countered you’d get attacked by someone else which just simply wasn’t fair.

      The predator bit’s were my favourite, you were given a room full of armed guards (in this game bullets kill you dead) and you had to take them out one by one and silently, reminiscent of how you’re ‘meant’ to do things in Assassins Creed. They require a lot of thought and if you fuck up it’s always your fault, not the game’s. They evolve throughout the game, as you get gadgets you can distract guards or blow out walls to take them out. It’s very satisfying to complete one without being caught and to watch the guards get more and more freaked.

       The Side scrolling-ish bits were a nice change of pace. But they never really evolved and I thought they were foreshadowing something bigger as they were linked to Scarecrow but they never followed through.

        Boss battles! I’ve missed playing games that have such things. However these were either at the end of the game or let downs. Killer Croc especially was disappointing, he’d been referenced all the way through and when you got to the sewers all you had to do was slap him back into the water thirty-two times while you were trying to do something else. I get that it was trying to build tension and stuff but it went on so long it became terribly predictable.

      Flaahgra from the Metroid prime games made an appearance towards the end. “How’s it going?” I asked surprised to see her, it’s been a long time. “How’s the family? Are you still eating Vigilantes for a liviaaaaghhh!” Poison Ivy was a fun boss if a little simple. In fact all the bosses in this game are simpler than some of the combat arenas and predator rooms which you will have to retry. But they give the game good pace and stop it being too repetitive.

      I played through on hard mode and once I’d nailed the basics I coasted through a lot of it until about three quarters the way through when I just hit a wall. I was trapped in a tiny room with one huge enemy and like twenty thugs armed with metal pipes for four hours hearing jokers three taunts half a billion times and no doubt in my sleep for the next fortnight. It was difficult to the point of tears. It was the game’s fault. The area so small it was impossible to fight both the mini-boss and jokers devoted minions at the same time. It didn’t seem to want me diving to the right, there was always something to get caught on and diving to the left got you slapped by goons. When I realised that this was actually a puzzle-fight (you have to use the Titan to thin out the crowd of smaller guys) it was better but still frustratingly difficult – enemies were taking more hits than they had in the last room and the game never lets you counter two people at once even when two people are coming at you at once.

        The difficulty spike in the minions seemed really unfair given that the conditions were very different plus you had to neutralise a Titan at the same time. When I finally completed it, it wasn’t as satisfying as some of the other trickier bits – it felt more like I’d gotten lucky.

        Over all though I did enjoy the game. It’s exiting when you get a new gadget to play with it and it opens up areas you were previously locked out of – particularly if you’re hunting down all the Riddler trophies. There are great details too like the chattering teeth that guide your way and your costume deteriorating through a pretty rough night. Things like that can really strengthen a game.

         Like I said I’m late to play it but if you haven’t already, it’s worth picking up – even if you no like Batman.  

      

*The same friend that bullied me into buying the recent Batman films. I assume it’s necessary for them to be Batman lest something as original as a toxic idea escape from the film industry.