The Scotsman Abroad | Rise of the Franchise

I don't know what it is about these things, but every time the fine folks at SF Signal ask me to take part in a Mind Meld, I end up banging on about Batman.

I guess I've got a decent excuse this afternoon. Here's the question James Aquilone posed to the panel:

DC reportedly has at least seven movies in development. Marvel has movies planned out to 2028. Star Wars kicks off a new trilogy next year and has at least two spinoffs already in development. Then there are the upcoming TV shows—Gotham, The Flash, Agent Carter, Daredevil... 

Is this too much of a good thing? Or a dream come true? Do you ever get sick of the constant movie news updates? What are your thoughts about the recent influx of shows and movies from these big franchises?

I took this open-ended question as an opportunity to talk about original ideas as opposed to established IP... albeit by way of franchise fatigue, finance, the overabundance of quality entertainment available to us today, and the forthcoming police procedural featuring baby Bruce:

Ideas are easy. If all it took to make a movie or greenlight a TV series was an awesome concept, we’d all be multimedia moguls, made of money—money we could pour into more original intellectual property, perhaps. But banking on original characters and shiny new narratives is, in the industry today, a dodgy bet at best. Better by far, financially, to latch on to an established franchise, which comes with interest built in; with a fanbase gagging to evangelise a few of their favourite things.

As I mentioned in the last Mind Mind I was asked to be a part of, I’m a longstanding Batman fan, so I’ll be watching Gotham in the autumn—for long enough, at least, to see if it’s for me. Would I if it lacked those connections? It’s not likely, no.

I love new experiences, in theory. In practice, alas, I’m more prepared to spend my minutes and my and my monies if I can try before I buy. So if there’s a problem, and I think there is, then I’m a part of it. I imagine most of us are. But we haven’t done anything wrong, really... or else, that’s what I tell myself.

Read the rest of my ramble right here, along with answers from a selection of other irregulars, including Douglas Cohen, Abby Goldsmith, Deanna Knippling, Derek Johnson, Lisa McCurrach, Melanie R. Meadors and Paul Cornell.

The Scotsman Abroad | The Great Geeky Debates

Maybe you'll have spotted it, maybe not... but guess what? I was in this morning's Mind Meld!

In case you weren't aware, the Mind Meld is a regular feature on the Hugo award-winning SF Signal which asks a bunch of genre fiction's best and brightest to put their heads together to answer a certain question. 

Truth be told I don't know what the Irregulars were doing, inviting yours truly to participate, but I wasn't going to miss it. Didn't hurt that the question was such a fun one. Let me hand it over to James Aquilone:

What was the first or most memorable geeky pop-culture debate you ever had? Or what’s that one thing you can’t stop ranting about? What was the outcome? Are you still on speaking terms with your opponent? Why are you so passionate about this?

In response, I wrote about "the years a friend and I spent butting heads over a couple of comic books. He was a Marvel man; me, a DC devotee. He read The X-Men; I was an unabashed Batman fan. Matter of fact, I still am, and I’d bet my last penny he’s still got the hots for Emma Frost."

Be warned, though, that my piece, at least, takes a turn for the serious... because this friend is firmly former, unfortunately, and our different interests—up to and including the arguments we had about whether Batman and his entourage would be a match for Marvel’s supermutants—had a part to play in that:

As kids we were great mates, he and me. As adults, our friendship fell apart. So whether it’s Star Trek versus Star Wars or the merits of manga as opposed to anime, take heed, dear reader: at the end of the day these debates can be about the people as much as the particular properties.

Click on through, as you do, to read the rest of the Mind Meld in question, which also features Mur Lafferty, Maurice Broaddus, David Lomax and a whole load of other awesome authors. 

(I'm aware that I'm the only contributor without a short story or novel to my name, but I have no shame.)

Coming Attractions | Arkham's Disappointing Origins

Rocksteady's Arkham games were great, weren't they?

Moody, gorgeous, elaborate and impactful. Innovative, even; you see Arkham Asylum's combat mechanics everywhere these days, and I ain't complaining. Rocksteady did justice to the Batman franchise where endless other developers had tried and failed, then doubled down on their commitment to the character with a superb sequel.

What with these guys making Batman games, Chris Nolan making Batman movies, and Scott Snyder writing the comics, the last few years have chronicled rather a renaissance for the caped crusader. By and large, I've loved it.

Alas, all good things must come to an end. The Dark Knight Rises capped off the cinematic trilogy; sequentially speaking, Scott Snyder must be closer to the end of his tenure than the beginning; and now, it looks like Rocksteady have also moved on. For the time being, at least.

Which isn't to say there won't be more Batman games. Far from it, in fact.

This October, it was recently revealed, will see the release of Batman: Arkham Origins for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. What we're looking at here is a prequel to Rocksteady's series, being made by an untested developer: Warner Bros. Montreal. 

And it gets worse. Apparently Eric Holmes—lead designer of Prototype and Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, amongst other rubbish—is the game's creative director.

I have minimal willpower when it comes to this character, so I'll probably play Arkham Origins anyway. But I don't expect it will be a patch on the games Rocksteady made.

Luckily, some good news broke alongside the reveal of this prequel. Allow me to quote from the originating Game Informer article:

Releasing on 3DS and Vita the same day as the home console version, Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate is a completely separate experience that takes place after the events of Arkham Origins. Armature Studio is developing the 2.5-D Metroid-style exploration action game. Industry followers will recognize Armature Studio as the company founded by several of the leads from the Metroid Prime trilogy.

Doesn't that sound like a match made in heaven?

And guess who just bought himself a 3DS XL?

Me! :)

Film Review | The Dark Knight Rises, dir. Chris Nolan

The question of expectations, especially as regards a tentpole flick like this, is a necessary evil in any account of The Dark Knight Rises, but for once in my life, I went into a thing without my blinkers. I was neither primed for a pale imitation of the pitch-perfect previous film, nor desperate to declare The Dark Knight Rises the greatest film since Citizen Kane. I'll admit to high hopes... but there's no harm in those.

Above all, I was aware that the last chapter of Christopher Nolan's re-imagining of all things Batman would have to change things up hugely to escape the long shadow of its immediate predecessor, and the tragic absence of its stunning star.

I don't know that it does, ultimately. In fact The Dark Knight Rises is such a deliberately different film from the summer smash it succeeds that it invites the very comparison one suspects the filmmakers were attempting to sidestep. In a sense, it begs the question. And alas, it can only answer in the negative.

That is certainly not to say this final chapter is a failure. On the contrary, it trumps Batman Begins, the above-par but sub-sterling origin story which kicked off this trilogy, and which The Dark Knight Rises hearkens back to both narratively and thematically. Beyond the initial set-up, however, so little of this series' centerpiece survives that Nolan's lavish new movie feels almost... compromised.

 

Eight years on from the events of The Dark Knight, crime in Gotham City is at an all-time low because of an act championed by the late DA. Accordingly, the caped crusader - having taking the fall for the death of the very fellow: the duplicitous Harvey Dent - is in retirement. Yet when a new threat arises, Bruce Wayne dons the mantle once more to meet the challenge posed by what amounts to a muscle-man in a gas mask — only to be found unequal to Bane's brute force. Beaten, if not wholly broken as in the pseudo-source material of the surprisingly straightforward screenplay by the brothers Nolan, The Dark Knight must now rise again... again.

Of course it's not a question of "if" but "when" - and perhaps "how" - and in this protracted act The Dark Knight Rises is at its weakest. We who have seen films before know perfectly well that Batman is going to come back, and the time Nolan takes to patch up his protagonist is inexcusable. Superficially this seems a mere over-indulgence, but beneath the sheen the sequence is more insidious still, for what does it offer except a convenient means to a predestined end? How many times must we watch the same Bruce Wayne defeat the same demons in the same film, one wonders.

This repetition does The Dark Knight Rises a disservice, made doubly more damaging because of its incredible length, and the various ways in which - even then - this second sequel fails to flesh out the vast majority of its supporting characters. Lucius Fox, Alfred Pennyworth and Commissioner Gordon are all sidelined or saddled with thankless arcs, meanwhile a few of the major new players also fall flat: Marion Cotillard's Miranda is as wasted as the franchise's past attempts at a love interest, and as Blake, an idealistic young police officer who just so happens to have worked out Batman's deepest secret, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is nearly meaningless.

Almost without exception, however, the star-studded cast makes a herculean effort. In the title role, Christian Bale is a substantially better Bruce Wayne than he's been in the past, and Tom Hardy's Bane is a more credible antagonist than his silly voice suggests, however short-changed he is by the last act. Finally, Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle strikes a smart balance between a damaged femme fatale and the Catwoman of the comic books, complete with cartoonish antics.

Credit where it's earned, incidentally: hers is a character you can imagine easily oversexed, objectified with precious little effort, and yet - despite a few long shots of her bum on the back of the Batbike - she is by a large margin the best-developed woman the Nolans have written into existence. Which may not be saying a great deal, given the caliber of the last candidates.... but every little helps!

I've raised a fair few of my issues with it over the course of this review, but you mustn't misunderstand me: at the end of the day, I had a pretty fine time with The Dark Knight Rises at the IMAX. The unbearable sense of tension that made its predecessor so remarkable may have taken a time out, yet the action is every bit as astonishing, and if Hans Zimmer's score is more of the same, it's more of the same stunning score — plus, it adds at least one memorable new dimension.

It must stand as a testament to how very much the filmmakers do right in this crucial conclusion that even with so much wrong, still The Dark Knight Rises rises above the vast majority of comic book movies. It's more of a sequel to Batman Begins than The Dark Knight, and it fares far better in the former comparison than the latter... but then, what wouldn't?

But I Digress | The I in IMAX

I used to go to the movies all the time — at least once a month, if not every couple of weeks, to see what I could see.

This year, I've been to the cinema all of... two times. I saw Cabin in the Woods, and I saw Prometheus. I enjoyed both experiences immensely... though I think I would have been fine waiting to rent a copy of the former film.

And why is that, I wonder? What did the movies mean to me that they don't any more?

I suppose it's something to do with the inherent spectacle of cinema. The experience of being taken in by a film. But then, I didn't always have a sweet series six Samsung to watch movies on at home, nor the surround sound setup that I take for granted today. Either that's what's changed, or I have.

Though I suspect the whole truth is that it's a bit of both.

Because I certainly don't like opening nights. These days, there's nothing quite as likely to spoil a trip to the pictures for me than the sweaty, noisy, nacho-slathered mass of fellow film-goers that one can hardly avoid on opening nights. The inappropriate sniggering. The conversations you can't help but overhear during quiet moments.

The farts!

So on those increasingly rare occasions when I feel like I need to see something at the cinema - because I'll have to wait four more months if I opt not to - I'll wait at least a week. Often longer. And in that time, any number of things can happen to put me off: I can read one too many negative reviews, or be spoiled by some sadistic soul, or outside of all that, obligations have a habit of coming up right when I wish they wouldn't.

Which is why I still haven't seen The Avengers. Or The Hunger Games. Despite having planned to take both films in at the pictures.

I won't - and I haven't - let that happen with The Dark Knight Rises. Batman Begins might have been a bit mince - fun in a silly sort of way - but The Dark Knight was and is one of my very favourite films ever, and I have faith in Chris Nolan to conclude this trilogy more meaningfully than in the movie it began with.

Long story short, I've been avoiding potential spoilers all week. I haven't, as yet, read a single review. And I think it's safe to say that by now, the farters have come and gone.

Or at least, that's the dream.

But the dream, for me, has taken on a different form than it has in the past, because given how significant spectacle is in terms of my interest in cinema, and the fact that there isn't another film I can imagine myself being this excited to see due for a period of years, for the first time in my life, I've booked tickets to the IMAX. To see The Dark Knight Rises.

And do you know, I don't even know what IMAX is!

My best guess? It's big cinema. And I'm expecting big things from this film. So it sort of follows.

But I really have no idea what to expect otherwise, and there are truly few things as thrilling to a jaded old man like myself as that. To wit: woo!

I'll report back on my inaugural IMAX experience in the comments a little later, or else in my review of The Dark Knight Rises. In advance of that, though, what about you guys? I want to know.

Do you, for instance, go to the cinema as often as you used to do? If not, why not? What's changed?

Meanwhile, who's seen something at the IMAX? Did it add anything to the essential experience, in your opinion, or ruin the movie for you?

We'll talk again shortly!

Coming Back to Comic Books | WTF, Batman RIP?

I came back to comic books - was it three, or four months ago? - for a number of reasons. Because I finally took the plunge and bought a tablet with a beautiful, backlit LCD screen that makes art on paper look bleached by comparison. Because with the much-ballyhooed about New 52 from DC in the middle distance, it seemed like as good a time as any. Because I'd never really meant to leave them behind in the first place, truth be told...

That said, there were things about the medium that I had been happy as Larry to be free of: foremost amongst them the publisher-wide tie-ins which only seem to have intensified in the time I took out... the desperate grasping attempts to get folks who want to read about Batman to buy Robin and Nightwing and Birds of Prey and The Outsiders to see a complete story told for instance. Disgusting practices, to my mind, which only serve to foreground the deficiencies - the disharmoniousness - of serial narrative in the comic book.

As such, Batman: R.I.P. has been a real test of my tolerance.

But I couldn't very well not read it, masterminded as it was by one of the most distinctive talents in the industry today: Grant Morrison, of The Invisibles and All-Star Superman renown, whose Arkham Asylum stands today as one of the definitive texts in the Batman canon. Never mind that I do dig me my The Dark Knight.

So. I started reading R.I.P. pretty much the moment I came back to comic books. It's taken me this long to get through it. Says a lot, doesn't it?

What happened was... I started reading the core storyline of R.I.P. - six issues of the monthly - and realised, not even a single in, that I hadn't the foggiest as to what was going on. So I went before Wikipedia, and Wikipedia said unto me, You fool! You must also read Batman and Son, The Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul, and The Black Glove... only then will you understand! Maybe!

Well, of course. Grant Morrison does nothing by half measures, after all, and I'd been an eejit to think I could appreciate Batman: R.I.P. without some grasp of The Dark Knight's new status quo, not to mention the groundwork Mr Morrison had been laying all the while. So I went back. And back and back.

I won't bore you with the details of that belaboured introduction to the characters and the conflicts at the acid-high heart of R.I.P., except to say, as of that story, The Caped Crusader has a kid - the brat Damien Wayne, born of Bruce's dalliances with Talia Al'Ghul, the demon's daughter - and a new arch enemy in the shape of The Black Glove, a secret organisation of super-rich individuals intent on bringing down The Dark Knight. These three stories were tolerable enough, but not at all remarkable in the sense I'd been expecting... all melodrama and false jeopardy. Business as usual, basically.

Still I figured they'd resolve into something more, if not as things themselves then as parts of the whole; when their place in the grand design Grant Morrison went on and on about while writing R.I.P. was revealed. I know now that this was rather charitable of me.

When I finally caught up to the events of R.I.P., I found, not entirely to my surprise, that I still hadn't the slightest what was happening... but this time, I pushed through. This time I understood that it wasn't meant to make a lick of sense, because R.I.P. isn't, in fact, about the death of Batman - although in a manner of speaking Batman dies both before and after the events related in this arc, for whatever that's worth.

Rather, R.I.P. is about Batman losing it. It's about the inherent madness of what Batman does finally getting the better of Bruce Wayne. And no-one does madness better than the madman Morrison.

As a narrative, R.I.P. is an absurd, fractured, fearsome thing. Don't go into it expecting a quick fix: a breaking of the Bat a la Bane's five minutes of fame circa Knightfall. This is an elaborate deconstruction of heroism's very premise, by way of one man in and out of tights; an hallucinatory interrogation of the cost of living as Bruce Wayne has endeavoured to live, which is to say in two: split down the middle his entire adult life, and coming apart now (with a little help from his friends) at the seams.

Sadly, or happily, depending on your perspective - Grant Morrison certainly has his detractors - R.I.P. is neither the beginning nor the end of Batman's torturous undoing. Never mind what all comes before it - a mixed bag of overwrought nonsense juxtaposed with moments of marvelous clarity make these establishing arcs something of a zero sum equation - what happens after is as much as part of R.I.P. as the core storyline: from Last Rites to Final Crisis to The Battle for the Cowl and beyond.

Now on the one hand I'm impressed that DC had the sheer gall to follow through on the events of R.I.P. so resolutely; only now that they've hit reset via the New 52 is the fallout properly behind us... and I'm not completely convinced that there isn't more of Morrison's mad Batman to come. However, on the other: I've been longing for this story to come to a close for months. God knows how it must have felt for those poor souls buying the monthlies as and when they came out.

The Dark Knight is dead.

Long live The Dark Knight?

Well, I guess. Plenty good has come of R.I.P., assuredly, and plenty bad. So I guess we're basically back where we started... beginning again, but with Bruce Wayne's midlife crisis behind us, at last. I wouldn't say Grant Morrison's run on Batman was a long road to nowhere, exactly, but nor did I find the journey contained or restrained enough to reap much meaning from.

On the bright side, I had some fun, and at least now it's done. But whatever the pull of the core story - and there is a power to it (now you see it, now you don't) - I don't think I'd recommend R.I.P. to any but the most devoted Batman fans, or Grant Morrison admirers.

And new readers be warned: this vast event may be the exact opposite of an ideal jumping-on point. You can't go wrong with Frank Miller's wonderful Year One, or the aforementioned Arkham Asylum. With Batman: R.I.P, you can.

Trailer Trash | Rise, Ye Dark Knight!

I am curiously unmoved by this teaser trailer for what must be my most fervently anticipated film from the foreseeable future:

Perhaps it's because it's mostly made up, as Garth Franklin reports over at Dark Horizons, of repurposed footage from Batman Begins, which to be perfectly honest I didn't adore. Certainly not half as much as I did The Dark Knight -- and this despite my unbridled love for all things Caped Crusader. (Though that seems something of a misnomer when applied to Christopher Nolan's brooding vision of the character, doesn't it?) 

 

As is, the most Bat-tastic thing about that trailer to me is the glimpse of a more suitable image of the shattered Gotham skyline to borrow for my desktop background than was featured in the poster I blogged about last week. Oh for a full, downloadable HD trailer, and decent free screen-capture software!

 

Your thoughts, then, ladies and gents? Will this tide you over till something more substantial comes along? Or are you as underwhelmed as I find myself? 

 

P.S. Here's hoping you can all see this video. I'm telling you, embedding from facebook: it ain't easy!

***

Source: Dark Horizons

Batwatch | Casting Catwoman

Off the starboard bow, the first legitimate casting news for the next and last Batman movie on Christopher Nolan's slate has broken, and like Bruce Wayne - the bloody lunatic - I'm in two minds. What we know thus far, in concrete terms, amounts to these three things.

Presumably to capitalise on the box office inherent in having The Dark Knight in your title, Batman 3 will henceforth be known as The Dark Knight Rises, and not, as I'd have liked - being a sucker for symmetry and all - Batman Ends.

As of the latest reports, Anne Hathaway is set to play Selina Kyle. For those of you who haven't read a decade's worth of dodgy Batman comic books to tide you over through the dark days between Tim Burton's take on the Caped Crusader and Christopher Nolan's time bearing the mantle, Selina Kyle's alter ego is Catwoman. Rrrrr. And now Katie Holmes/Maggie Gylenhaal's character - whose name I think it says a great deal I can't for the life of me remember - is out of the picture, courtesy of Harvey Dent (thank you very much), it's likely Selina Kyle will also act as a new love interest for our gruff-voiced vigilante.

The other little titbit to have come out this past week is that Tom Hardy, who the world raved about stealing scenes in Nolan's somewhat underwhelming last effort Inception, will be playing Bane. Bane being the brute who broke Batman's back in the Knightfall event, leading to months - nay, years - of a foppish half-wit running around pretending to be Batman while Bruce Wayne recovered from his injuries.

Knightfall seemed to me the obvious place to take the film continuity, having been blown away by The Dark Knight in theatres a couple of years ago, and having - as aforementioned - a mind intent of describing circles in everything, but I'm much less certain it's the right thing for this story, and frankly I'm a touch taken aback to see Nolan going down such an unsurprising path.

Of course there's no guarantee that is what Nolan's doing. Two bits of early casting news are hardly the ingredients entire for such a conclusion. The one director to rule them all probably has something much more worthwhile up his sleeve, and I can do patience. I can.

(Can too!)

However. Tom Hardy and Anne Hathaway? I didn't even notice Tom Hardy in Inception, and sure, he's a bit buff, but short a metric tonne of prosthetic muscles, he hardly seems the type to be playing a villain the sheer steroid-ridden strength of whom is enough to overcome all Batman's wiles. And Anne Hathaway, the Ice Queen from last year's Alice in Wonderland? That Anne Hathaway?

Not exactly an actress known for her edge, if you know what I mean. Easy on the eye, I duly agree - though I'd love to see a properly bedraggled, crazy-cat-lady take on Catwoman now that you mention it - but she's no Michelle Pfeiffer, is she?

I wasn't so exhilarated by Inception last Summer as many were, but I have a lot of faith in Christopher Nolan: however much trouble he might have embellishing warmth, connection and emotion on his ideas, his ideas alone have always been worth the price of entry. Recall the folding city of Inception; the backwards-forwards narrative of Memento; the tricks and traps of The Prestige; and the horrifying bent on Scarecrow and the Joker he's given us in his incredible Batman movies.

So I trust the man to make a hell of a film. I just don't know that this - this thing I can't help but imagine now - is it.

Then again, what do I know? For the Batwatch has only just begun...

Chibicats are Go!

The other day, as is their way, io9 republished a press release with no comment whatsoever on its content. But what a press release it was. For you, TSS readers, the highlights:

"Warner Bros. Animation has begun production on ThunderCats, an all-new animated series for Cartoon Network, based upon the iconic 1980s action classic... The 21st century reimagining of the series marks a creative collaboration between WBA and Studio4°C, one of the most vibrant animation studios in Japan, with credits including The Animatrix, Gotham Knights and Halo Legends. WBA is working closely with Studio4°C, utilizing the latter's expertise to give the ThunderCats characters a new cutting-edge look while remaining true to the compelling storylines and mythology of the original series."

Which has to be the best cartoon news since they brought Futurama back from the dead, don't you think?

Or is it just me? I wonder. ThunderCats was my cartoon of choice, when I was but a little lurker on the speculative threshold. My dad made a video tape of twenty episodes on grainy longplay for me, which I watched and watched until there were more scan lines on the screen drawn lines. He cut some black and red cardboard into that iconic cat-face, the show's logo, which I proudly displayed on my bedroom door.

The rest of the cartoons - your He-Mans and Ghostbusters and what not - I'd watch 'em, but they were nothing to me next to the bumbling adventures of Lion-O and Snarf and the rest of the crew. I loved me my ThunderCats.

This re-envisioning, then, leaves me with mixed feelings. There's the little kid inside me, stamping his feet and squealing with excitement, and the rational, critical adult I wear on the outside, thinking... what? ThunderCats, of course, isn't the first treasure trove of 80s nostalgia to be brought kicking and screaming into the modern day, but let's not speak of the others, for fear we jinx this one.

In fact, let's look to the positives. The anime production house lined up to assist in the creation of the new world order of ThunderCats is certainly a promising one. Yes, they've done some passable work in service of Western intellectual property in the past - namely Batman: Gotham Nights, Transformers Animated, The Animatrix and Halo: Legends - but Studio4°C have knocked out a few gems of their own, too: the 1995 film Memories and the mind-bending Tekkon Kinkreet in 2006, not to mention Tweeny Witches (better than it sounds, I swear) or the superlative Detroit Metal City OVA.

Studio4°C is a fine studio, in short, and if it brings its A-game, we can be certain of at least one thing: the new ThunderCats sure will look great. The notion that it will remain "true to the compelling storylines and mythology of the original" makes me giggle a bit, though. I mean, come on. I bought those ThunderCats DVDs collections a few years ago, and you know what? I even tried to watch a few episodes. But no.

I'm not at all sure what to make of this announcement, even now, but consider my interest piqued. To be sure, I'll be keeping my eyes open for the new series, whenever it airs.

Anyone else have happy memories of Lion-O and co. to share?