Note: the following article contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises and the Arkham series of games from Rocksteady.
“Pretty good movie, but Arkham City’s Batman is the better Batman.”
This took me by surprise. Did they mean the portrayals of the character alone, or the stories taken as a whole? Were they just trying to troll?. I didn’t care – I was already busy totting up Batpoints, having recently seen The Dark Knight Rises on the back of completing Arkham City.
Which is more competent? Well, I’d likely have to give that one to AC. Nolan’s Batman had a period of self-imposed seclusion, his apathy leading to the waning of his company and more importantly the misappropriation of his assets: “lazy rich men… become less rich!” is a lousy moral after all. His long-forgotten tech that he jealously guarded and refused to share with others gets distributed amongst Bane’s buddies and used to subjugate the people Batman claims to protect and care about. Way to ethically handle your monopoly, big guy.
It’s Wayne’s failure to take responsibility that makes this all possible. If he’d been alert and observant, none of this would’ve happened: the corporate (and physical) takeovers can and do occur because he allows the situation to degenerate.
By comparison, the Wayne of Arkham City is outspoken, politicised, and in the public eye — and it’s this activism that results in his incarceration in the very prison complex he’s protesting. Although, given that he rolls with it pretty well, maybe he planned on that happening all along. Either way, point Arkham.
Nolan-Batman’s arrogance is in assuming that he could come back to a life he had abandoned and still hold his own. It bites him in the ass with such force that it’s a wonder he didn’t have to have it amputated – if he could find it in the first place. Bane knows him intimately and exploits that knowledge to the fullest… and that really should have prompted him to think harder about how Bane managed that. On the other hand, the scene where Bane utterly unmakes Batman is one of the strongest in the film, so… point Arkham.
The movie very briefly,featured cops and soldiers dooming the lives of civilians because they were following their orders. Nolan’s intended message seems fairly clear: the Dent Act legislation is belief in a false ideal upholding an unjust law based off popular support and little else.
Surprisingly, though, Batman’s counter to Bane’s revolution consisted not of the people of Gotham, but its police force. A police force that – lest we forget – was laughably corrupt, resoundingly hated, and notoriously unjust even before Batman and Dent. Batman painted as the city’s fated champion, but that got lost under the attempt to show the police as an outstanding force for good. He ends up as the police’s champion.
Perhaps it was meant as a redemption arc, showing their progression across the trilogy, but I think it was a missed opportunity. The mostly unarmed masses march on the paramilitary who claim to fight for their benefit. Gun turrets turn on them and tensions mount… and then, just in time, batarangs disable the turrets. The people surge up the steps, following Batman as he faces Bane for a rematch. I thought at first the police were going to be the vanguard… but no such luck.
In a superhero story we expect a focus on the agency and achievements of said superhero: it’s not like I’m docking Arkham City any Batpoints for centering around the hyper-competence of a lone detective. But TDKR specifically brings themes of revolution to the fore, and then seems to forget that they exist, hoping no one will notice. We were offered the promise of a populace with agency and self-determination — it would have been nice to have the civic example — but instead the subplot just kinda lies there. Untouched.
Instead, Bane’s forces do away with the police, and the police eventually turn the tide again. The people of Gotham are mostly there to be oppressed and manhandled and then spectacularly saved by a return to the status quo. When Batman is flying around trying to shake off the tracking munitions fired from his own cars, I guess we’re supposed to assume the explosion-bedecked buildings were entirely evacuated. Not too massive a leap considering the usual standards of comicbook logic, after all: just don’t think about it.
Batman’s a costumed vigilante, one teaming up with Catwoman at that, so ‘submission to authority’ is kind of a mixed message It’s handled in such a way that it seems less meaningful nuance than structural inconsistency.
Batman is best (in my opinion) in situations where the rule of law isn’t one of his primary concerns. He eschews guns and doesn’t care about warrants or diplomatic immunity… he’s actually chaotic, motivated entirely by a personal concept of justice and ethics that sometimes is contrary to the laws of society. If Batman is just some guy declaring himself a super cop, taking on drug addicts and petty criminals, then he’s a main battle tank in the class war – and probably not on your side. If he’s beyond the law when he’s taking on rival supercorporations or unjust rulings, on the other hand, then he’s actually an engine of change and equality instead of yet another enforcer.
Batman defies the President if he thinks it’s right. When the President is Lex Luthor, admittedly, but that’s the kind of thing he does.
Modern Class Warfare
Keeping that opinion in mind, Arkham City takes the point a third time. Bane does have corporate backing in TDKR, but the titular Arkham City project is supported by the Mayor and by extension the government, right down to the ominous-sounding last resort that would have all the occupants slaughtered in the name of stability. Batman is essentially fighting a state-run prison industrial complex (and a bunch of supervillains, of course). The culmination of Strange’s “blow up a bunch of people with rockets” plan was hardly subtle but it was certainly more effective than whatever the heck Bane was trying to achieve.
In Rises Bane’s much-touted mastermind status — billed as Batman’s physical and mental match — is undermined by the revelation that he’s nearly childlike in his doe-eyed devotion to Talia and her completely daft apocalyptic scheme. When the splinter League of Shadows set their plan in motion, the pseudo-revolution is just a tangential and very prolonged distraction to a bomb which they could well have detonated far earlier, if not immediately. It’s there to fill narrative time . If everything else was just to humiliate and inspire false hope in the populace, then, uh, way to go, champs! You inspired so much false hope for so long that it turned into the real thing. Typical supervillains; if they fail, it’s only because of arrogance, of the need to toy with or gloat over their victims. Not incompetence! Honest!
To be fair, Ra’s reveal as the true power behind the Arkham City initiative was similarly detached and similarly ill-advised. I don’t feel Strange was undermined there so much as Ra’s was; we, the player, beat Ra’s already… and then he is bested again in a cutscene. Ra’s stabs Strange and stabs himself (in an attempt to stab Batman, of course). Batman survives Strange’s bomb, survives the fall after the blast, and then mentally shrugs and goes to take on the Joker again. Hmm. That got messy.
Both the Bane/Talia and Strange/Ra’s reveals were dramatic, but neither were particularly necessary. The League of Shadows subplot in Arkham City was solid enough on its own merits and, if anything, the grand reveal that Ra’s was behind Strange detracted from Ra’s power and competency — moments after establishing that he’s Badass Prime Mastermind, he puts himself in a position where he can be blown up by a wronged underling.
TThe Joker remains the primary villain of Arkham City, even though you never actually fight him (at least, not the actual Joker), even though he’s being exploited by Ra’s/Strange like the rest of the gang leaders. Arkham City doesn’t shy away from interconnecting plots, and for the most part it pulls it off. (Although Arkham-Bane’s side mission was bland, and I’ve never liked the incredibly veiny and bloated look they gave him.)
Which brings me to the aesthetics of the Arkham games. While I liked the environments and the character models were undeniably distinctive, I wasn’t that fond of how everyone actually looked in the Arkham series of games. Granted, Nolan-Batman gets around in a gigantic flying lawnmower and his all-black getup with the less-visible bat emblem has its flaws, but the most jarring thing about Arkham was the treatment of women. Between the costumes (in the comicbook tradition of skimpy faux-fetish-wear) and the misogynistic dialogue of the thugs, it’s hard not to hand the point to Nolan.
The Catwoman in Rises is a thief who decides the faux-revolution isn’t her bag, and she’s on hand to sympathise with the rich and, uh, abandon her roommate when the situation calls for it? Arkham’s Catwoman refuses to zip up her suit and seems to purr almost every word regardless of the recipient, and especially if it’s player. They both do their thing in high heels, both get more ass shots than their Batmans, and, while Nolan-Catwoman faces adversity and a sprinkling of bitch this and bitch that, she doesn’t encounter anything near the volume and vitriol in the threats which Arkham’s Catwoman encounters. Not-amazing-but-still-better-than-video-games point to Nolan. Half-point. Quarter.
Returning to the initial statement, I’m surprised to find that I agree despite my initial resistance. I expected to “prove” the Nolan trilogy higher-quality, but instead I convinced myself that Arkham City was more thematically consistent and more in-keeping with what I consider to be the best of Batman’s stories.
While Rises is inconsistent and feels like any message is accidental rather than communicated — I don’t necessarily believe it’s deliberately pro-authoritarian, merely that it’s uncomfortably easy to interpret it that way — it lacks the overtly sexual visuals so excruciatingly common in games. If Rises was a game, it would not be as enjoyable as City . But it would be something I could play in the living room, secure in the knowledge that no one was going to raise eyebrows at a pantless Poison Ivy.
…although they might think the Talia sex scene was completely out of the blue. And they’d have a point.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!
