Burning Questions: Do Plot Holes Always Matter?
Tuesday, July 24, 2012 at 7:00PM Michael C here to challenge the nitpickers. Minor Dark Knight Rises spoilers are alluded to, but then you've seen it already haven't you?
A two and a half hour movie and you can’t find time to explain how Bane eats?”
I admit that quip got a chuckle out of me. I would credit the originator of the quote but as is so often the case these days it seemed to appear simultaneously from countless sources.
This kind of stuff is to be expected since it appears we are now entering the nitpicking phase of the blockbuster hyperbole cycle. If I have my schedule correct we are currently leaving the trumpet sounding, joy fainting stage and this complain-a-thon will soon lead into a full-blown backlash. This will be followed, of course, by the backlash to the backlash, and so on and so on until the IMDB voters decide if it is officially the best movie ever made or if it is only good enough to bump Seven Samurai of out the Top 10.
(Of course, if you are reading The Film Experience you may be in search of the ever-elusive “Reasonable Weighing of Artistic Merits” phase. Godspeed and good luck to you. )
In the past 48 hours I’ve seen dozens of posts spring up claiming to nail various glaring plot holes in Dark Knight Rises. MORE...
The natural impulse is to respond to any and all gripes with a direct, firm, “Because it’s Batman. That’s why.” If you didn’t bail out with the logic of Joker’s prison break plot in the last flick, it’s too late to start lodging objections now.
On the other hand, is it not a huge cop out to spend three movies praising Nolan’s grounded, realistic approach to the material and then fall back on “It’s just a comic book movie” when things don’t add up? I think it is.
So why then am I unmoved when people point out Bruce Wayne appears to teleport from a Middle Eastern country to Gotham between scenes?
Do plot holes always matter?
First some clarification: Too often I’ve read critiques where someone refers to story points that are implausible, underdeveloped, or mysterious as plot holes. You may not buy that Joseph Gordon-Levitt knows what he knows but that doesn’t make it a hole. Call it a plot convenience, if you like. Call it undercooked. But it’s not a hole.
To me a legitimate plot hole is something like, “Who the hell heard Charles Foster Kane say “Rosebud” since he’s clearly alone in the film’s opening?” or “Why does everyone care about Casablanca’s letters of transit when the Nazis can simply threaten to shoot anybody who lets Victor Laszlo on a plane?”
"How to react to a Chris Nolan film" by Brent Bailey (click to enlarge)
Yet these points don’t bother me, and neither do any of the points I’ve seen raised so far about Dark Knight Rises. Suspension of disbelief isn’t a magic wand to wave over lazy writing but it is something a film can earn by giving you an idea to hold onto above plot details. The frankly ridiculous letters of transit plot in Casablanca never bothers me because the story isn’t about document protocol during World War II. It’s about Rick putting the greater good above his own desires. Likewise, who cares about the practical details of the pit prison scenes in Dark Knight Rises? If I want a realistic take on spinal cord injuries I’ll watch Murderball. If I want to watch Bruce Wayne face down fear (again) I’ll watch Dark Knight Rises.
Don’t get me wrong; Dark Knight Rises has some doozies. Bane’s master plan raises all kinds of questions, and Bruce Wayne’s physical condition flucutates drastically from scene to scene. One could make a compelling argument that Rises would be a better film if the plot were airtight, but then I’m not operating under the belief that the Dark Knight trilogy risks falling of some pedestal of perfection. I don't think it's an insult to say that Nolan’s realism was never more than a stylistic choice. A layer of believability over the usual ludicrous superhero plot. Still a distant relative of Superman turning back time by spinning the Earth.
Am I letting Nolan off the hook too easy?
Does his focus on grand ideas excuse him fudging some of the finer points?
Let me know in the comments.
You can follow Michael C. on Twitter at @SeriousFilm. My own Dark Knight Rises review is up at Serious Film.
Reader Comments (33)
I'm willing to fudge a bit. I think the emotional impact wasn't the same as the first two because they're stepping away from reality, but there are enough great scenes that I'm coming around. That comic is perfection, BTW. I will say TDK and Inception had me playing with the puzzle though, whereas this one I'm more marinating in the overabundant storylines.
As someone who's been a huge fan of Christopher Nolan's films I wish there was a more rounded and fair discussion on his merits (Yes I know this will never happen). I love Nolan but i'll be the first one to agree that his plotting tends be messy or unnecessarily convoluted, but at the same time i don't think I watch Nolan films for the plot; I watch them for the ideas and the sheer ambitions he's trying to convey, and for someone who makes the kind of blockbuster films he does I find that fascinating. Yeah The Dark Knight Rises is messy as hell, but how many directors could get away with making a tentpole superhero film that audacious? Perhaps I do let Nolan off the hook to easy, but I'm willing to admit that.
I think you have to suspend some disbelief when watching superhero/fantasy/sci fi films. So the apparent "plot holes" in TDKR don't bother me. What I did find distracting was the terrible Sean Connery impression Bane had going on. I couldn't take him seriously!
You nailed it when you said that Nolan's realism could be a stylistic choice. And it's a superhero movie! The filmmakers know they can't create a story with superheroes that is completely realistic. How could Nolan's realism be anything but a stylistic choice? I can understand someone attacking Inception for such flaws, but who actually expects everything that happens in a Batman movie to be possible in real life? For this reason, I have no trouble letting Nolan off the hook here.
“Why does everyone care about Casablanca’s letters of transit when the Nazis can simply threaten to shoot anybody who lets Victor Laszlo on a plane?”
I love Casablanca, but I have to admit that this has always annoyed the hell out of me. How is Laszlo even able to walk around Casablanca? They know who he is! I'm pretty sure some rinky-dink transit letters aren't going to stop the freakin' Nazis from dealing with a known fugitive with extreme prejudice.
But ultimately, doesn't matter. Casablanca is awesome.
I have always thought that complaints about plotholes roughly translate as "the elements surrounding the plotholes were not strong enough to distract me from the lapses in logic."
Hence, plotholes in Casablanca can be easily overlooked, as everything else is so compelling.
The thing that has irked me most of all about the TDKR nitpicking is that it's from so many people who basically married and had babies with The Dark Knight. Did they not realise the third act of that film was a complete mess? Maybe they did but found enough elsewhere to satisfy their "BEST.MOVIE.EVER.!" claims. TDKR is my favourite of the trilogy, admittedly, so I'm having an even harder time figuring it all out. How could people, as Michael says, be so finnicky about details of TDKR and yet so unapologetically forgiving of TDK?
I recently had a bit of a tizzy about people using the phrase "plot holes" in relation to Prometheus. No, a character doing something you personally find dumb or nonsensical is NOT a plot hole. A plot hole is the Stepford Wives remake alternating between the "wives" being robots of having a chip in their brain. A character taking a mask off is just a bit of a convenient plot POINT. Not a hole. Might as well say "why does anybody drive through Texas after the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre?" well, er, if they didn't there wouldn't be a movie.
I think I remember a lot of this from 24, actually. "When does he go to the bathroom?!?" Umm, during the commercial breaks because this is a TV series that has 60 minutes of "real time" in a 42-minute slot?
I'm generally more than happy to overlook plot holes particularly if plot holes save me a five minute expository monologue and make sure the swordfight or the musical number or the Bat-showdown come around faster.
But with Nolan I'm a little less forgiving. For one I counted roughly 42 expository monologues.
The plot holes in The Dark Night didn't bug me so much because Heath Ledger's malevolent charisma washed over all surroundings. But in Dark Night Rises, you don't have a single galvanising creation sort of permeating and unifying the tone of the entire movie.
Also the film very clearly wants to portray Batman not as a dude that wears spandex and fights bad guys but more as the Jung-inflected crux of a solemn investigation into the nature of fear as well as the root of all evil as well as mob mentality as well as the 99versus1% paradigm etc etc. So the plotholes become more glaring.
And I'm not even sure if they are plotholes so much as gaps in narrative. I got very confused very many times throughout the movie. I kept waiting for an implausible plot development to be explained or in some way rendered a tiny bit less implausible. But the explanation never came. Instead Nolan was launching his 27th consecutive subplot and crapping on about some warrior or emperor in a land whose name sounded borrowed from Tolkien. Because really, at that point what the story needed was even more expository mythology.
Also I do find Nolan offensive in that he demands that I take his solemn/constipated Jungisms seriously while also forcefeeding me multiple villains with talking-killer-syndrome.
(Speaking of intellectually inconsistent villains - memo to Bane: Dude. It's Batman. Putting him in a hole with a challenging but explicitly outlined escape route? Nobody with a sneering British accent could be that dumb.)
Rebecca: I 100% agree with you! Both about Casablanca and plot holes in general.
Glenn: Seriously, it's like at 1st I thought some of these TDK lovers who are so down on TDKR would reassess their unwavering perception that TDK is such a masterpiece, but nope. I really like both and don't see much of a quality difference (both are B+ for me, Begins is actually my fav of the trilogy, more focused, coherent, less bloated). The major complaints about TDKR are almost all present flaws in TDK. Maybe Ledger just made everyone forgive those flaws? I dunno.
Don't people always complain that Nolan's films have plot holes? I didn't see any glaring ones in Dark Knight Rises and I didn't particularly are for the film. Was it scattered? Yes. Completely illogical because of the plot? No. The plot holes I've seen mentioned in those post are mostly answered directly in the film.
It's not a matter of plot holes. It's a matter of choosing not to connect all the dots with dialogue and not paying attention to foreshadowing. The big twist in the end is set up before the character involved is seen onscreen. As in, they literally say when, where, and how the character showed up in one of the first exposition scenes. You can't just shut down during a Nolan film and blame him for your lack of comprehension. These lists popped up for Inception, too, and the vast majority of complaints were cases of lazy film viewers rather than poor writing.
I take issue with comparing the plot holes of The Dark Knight Rises to those found in Casablanca and Citizen Kane. In both cases, those films were establishing a unique world of characters and rules by which those characters are governed. When you are establishing a story, any choices you make regarding the fundamentals of that story, like the absolute power of a letter of transit or the audibility of a dying man's last words, are game because the rules of that universe are still being established. The Dark Knight Rises has had 2 prior films to establish its universe, and in neither of those films is the lead character able to defy atom bombs or the laws of time and space to conveniently appear at his destination. When Nolan makes choices like that he is breaking the laws of his own universe, laws that are as binding to the functionality of that world as gravity is to ours. If we believe Batman can do anything, then it defeats the purpose of his character and of the films at large, because we have been shown time and time again that what this character in this set of films must do has got to be explainable by logic and mechanics. He is a man, not a superhero.
For the record, I'm not a Dark Knight fan here. I'm actually not a Chris Nolan fan at all really. I tend to share Nathaniel's opinion that his films are overpraised, overlong, and over-serious. As far as this series goes, I like Batman Begins well enough until that stupid ending, but I think The Dark Knight is a giant mess from beginning to end, with the exception of course being Heath Ledger's performance. This film is marred with the same problems as its predecessor, but those problems with narrative, style, and scope are even more deeply entrenched in this film than in the last one.
I'll take a plothole over the miracle sonar device from TDK.
I think you're right that most of the so-called plot holes are more accurately plot conveniences - there are very few complete inconsistencies, though there are rather a lot of conveniences, some that really push the suspension of disbelief. And I do think that TDKR would be a better film without some of these - but not a lot better. Plot holes & conveniences are problems, but they're very minor problems. They become bigger problems if they take the audience out of the narrative, which happened to me with Joseph Gordon Levitt's knowledge. But in any case, they're minor flaws, and hardly the most important aspect of the film. They're not so different to moaning about their being occasional minor technical errors - sure, it would be better if the error wasn't there, but it hardly ruins the film.
Michael C., Liz N.: But Casablanca isn't under the Nazis' jurisdiction yet; that's why they still have to undergo diplomatic formalities with Captain Renault.
Colin--But Casblanca is under French control, and France had fallen to Germany by this point. Renault may not literally be a Nazi, but he's a Vichy official and therefore would work with the Nazis on apprehending anyone who had escaped from their custody. And even if Renault didn't want to deal with Laszlo, when Strasser shows up, there's really no reason that he wouldn't have Laszlo arrested or shot on sight.
I know they try to brush it off in the movie by saying, "Any violation of neutrality would reflect on Capt. Renault," but this doesn't make much sense. Vichy may have been neutral in the de jure sense, but they were subordinate to Germany in practice. The Nazis wouldn't have to work with Renault because Renault would have really been working for them.
Call them plot holes or whatever, but all of these things bugged me.
Why didn't Batman kill Bane when he had the chance? After Miranda Tate "revealed" her true identity? Batman is ready to be done for good with Bane still kicking?
JCL's character could figure out Batman's alter ego with little fanfare, and Gordon never could? He was all surprised when Batman told him about meeting him after his parents were killed?
How did Bane eat exactly? He had to have done something to have all those muscles.
How did all of those policemen stay in that tunnel for 3 months and come out in pristine clothes? They were getting food I think, and I guess since they were in a sewer they could go to the bathroom, but still, their clothes should have been dirty at least.
How did Batman not die in the explosion? How did Selena know where to find him? Did they have to telegraph that ending wth Alfred as much as they did?
I'm liking this film less and less the more time passes.
I think this movie is slightly above "Spider-Man 3" territory. Nolan really dropped the ball with this one. So many wasted opportunities.
Why didn't Batman kill Bane when he had the chance?
Batman doesn't kill people.
<I>JCL's character could figure out Batman's alter ego with little fanfare, and Gordon never could? He was all surprised when Batman told him about meeting him after his parents were killed?
Gordon said he wasn't interested in finding out who Batman is.
How did Batman not die in the explosion? How did Selena know where to find him?
He bailed out beforehand (which is cutting it close), and more likely Bruce found her.
Not only to plot holes rarely bother me, I usually don't even notice them unless the issue is truly glaring. Film is a primarily emotional/visceral experience. Even when I really sit with a film and study it the logistical details of its plotting generally seem like the least interesting aspect to focus on. Granted, a perfectly structured script can be a beautiful thing to behold, but, as the excellent Casblanca discussion points to, a certain messiness, ambiguity, or illogic in a film's plotting is not, I would argue, automatically a flaw or a negative
The movie is so long that it at times it feels as if you are spending time in that hellish "Midnight Express" prison ( too bad Joseph Gordon Levitt was momentarily captured by Bane) and speaking of plot holes- SPOILER ALERT - how does Bruce Wayne manage to get his way back to Gothan?
how does Bruce Wayne manage to get his way back to Gothan?
The prison was right next to a big city. He's Batman; it shouldn't be that hard for a brilliant ninja.
Excuse me, the proper term is "muscular genius"
Oh $$ Modern Family $$
Ugh. I'm so annoyed that I'm going to have to asterisk my opinion of "The Dark Knight Rises" as one of my favourites of the year with a note that "I didn't think The Dark Knight was all that, I just really loved this one"
@TB
It's easy to mistake the relative realism of the Nolan Batfilms with actual realism. All three films take place in a heightened comic-book world. They're only realistic compared to other comic book films, they're not strictly realistic in themselves. I don't think there's anything in Rises that violates the rules set out in the first two films.
Bane's a menace to the city like no other. He had the chance to eliminate an extremely dangerous criminal and didn't do it. Batman doesn't "kill"? Whatever.
Gordon might not have been "interested" in knowing who Batman was, but he was pretty oblivious all the same to some glaring clues at the truth. If Shane could figure it out, so should Gordon.
Okay, Batman jumped before the bomb detonated. That I can live with, though the explosion should have killed him regardless of him jumping or not. I can buy Bruce reaching out to Selena from the "grave" to meet him in Europe.
Didn't Selina Kyle blow Bane to Hell with the Batpod? He was already on the verge of dying after having his gas mask smashed by Bruce and I doubt he could withstand being blasted through a wall at that force.
People like Orion must be no fun at all to go to the movies with. None.
But insufferable Nolan stans who'll accept anything he offers up to them hand to mouth are a joy to be around. Bitch, please.
You're letting him off easy. I need logic and I make no excuses for the type of film it is. It removes me from the experience everytime and that is not what I want from my cinema. Sorry.
Yeah, I don't usually notice plot "holes" all that much, but when Bruce Wayne just showed up in the completely isolated Gotham it was a HUGE WTF?!?!?! moment for me. Not so much that it ruined the film for me (I thought it was marginally better than The Dark Knight, which I kind of hated), but it really took me out of it for a while. I could buy just about everything else, but that was REALLY stretching it.
Samuel -- that's a really great point. These movies AREN'T realistic. They're just cosmetically so.
I think they should've cut out the Paris scene at the end, I think the realistic end this trilogy would be to finalize that Batman died saving Gotham or have the audience have to interpet Foxe's allusion that Bruce mastered the autopilot as some glimmer of hope that Bruce/Batman didn't perish when the Bat vehicle was engulfed in the nucelear bomb explosion. I didn't need to be hit over the head with the "It's OK Bruce and Selena are now alive and together in Paris" and felt it was really corny. I wonder if the studio influenced Nolan to change the ending so as not to kill the cash
cowbat.Also, they assumed he was dead only after being gone for 7-8 years when he disappered in Batman Begins. I think without a body they wouldn't be able to divide up his estate and go through the will process since he had shown before that he goes off the grid years at a time.