This past weekend could be described as the perfect collision of reasons to talk about Batman today, specifically from an era that already feels bygone despite being only eight years in the past. In all honesty, it’s a period that felt like the peak of superhero cinema at the time, or at least proving that these panels could be turned into poignant social commentary. After all, The Dark Knight (2008) is a film that feels invested in an America that has been ravaged with terrorism paranoia and the concern of corruption that causes groups like The N.S.A. and Homeland Security to be normalized. It feels rooted in the moment so much that it’s hard to recognize how much it revitalized the genre.
In 2020, everything associated with The Dark Knight Trilogy feels quaint by today’s standards. All you have to do is take a step into the highly successful D.C. Fandome experience that played out this past Saturday. With endless trailers and updates being announced, it was a moment that proved how much better 2021 is probably going to be, if just for The Suicide Squad (2021) and the rise of Polka Dot Man.
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| Peak cinema |
However, there was also The Batman (2021), the latest incarnation of Gotham’s caped crusader that features him murdering people in a hyper-realistic way. Many have called it cool and an interesting twist on the property. I’m still a skeptic, but I have faith that Robert Pattinson will produce a memorable performance, even if Ben Affleck randomly announced that he’s coming back to also play Batman sometime soon. Does the world have too many Batmen? Probably, but it doesn’t sound like anyone cares.
To go even further back, Friday featured the premiere of the final trailer for Tenet (2020): the film that refuses to give up theatrical distribution. It’s a concept that’s frankly ridiculous, though not nearly as much as what they played during that night’s NBA game. It was a trailer tuned to an original Travis Scott song called “The Plan.” Rarely has something seemed stranger than having a Christopher Nolan movie patched together with a trendy pop song. Not even The Prestige (2006) had the gall to have Nolan abuse co-star David Bowie for a quick track, so what makes Travis Scott any different?
Anyways, this all made me nostalgic for when I was the prime target for marketing, specifically for Batman movies. I’ve always been a sucker for Nolan, so I’d see Tenet blindly if I had to. Still, it reminded me of a moment that I didn’t realize at the time was the end of an era. Sure, it was the end of a trilogy, but I didn’t know that Nolan was about to hand over a baton to Zack Snyder with Man of Steel (2013), which would promise to go darker and more violent, lacking his dynamic altogether by the time they earned the name D.C. Extended Universe.
The thing to know about Nolan is that he’s a master marketer. It’s a detail that becomes lost as soon as the film opens. I can’t think of a single one of his films that didn't thrive on the idea of mystery, forcing the viewer to wonder just what he would do with two hours. Even Dunkirk (2017), based on real events, felt like this exciting curiosity that you could only see in theaters. He’s someone who forces you to show up. It could be that he remains one of the singular voices in blockbuster cinema, but it’s also because he understands at its core what makes movies fun. You want to talk about them, like… a lot. Every detail needs to be parsed over and wrongly assessed before it even comes out.
That is why The Dark Knight Rises (2012) was an amazing time to be alive if just for the uncertain potential it would provide. The Dark Knight had become a cultural phenomenon that you felt shift plate tectonics by the minute, making the world feel different as you walked out. It was in Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning posthumous performance, or how every line brought with it a thousand memes that continue to persevere to this day. Try to be stuck up and not have someone say “Why so serious?” There’s a whole generation that believes that this is the best that Batman has ever been and… I’m not going to disagree with them.
There are a lot of expectations when you make something like The Dark Knight. If you make a sequel, especially when your key actor dies, what do you do for an encore? In a move that hasn’t exactly gone away for Nolan’s body of work, he decided to go bigger and more expansive. Considering that he was praised for giving Batman a grounded realism, many were questioning why he chose, of all subjects, Bane as the bad guy. After all, most people knew Bane from Batman & Robin (1997), and to say that he was unintelligible would be an understatement.
But hey, if anyone could pull off a character facelift, it was Nolan. He created highly regarded versions of The Scarecrow and The Joker before, so there had to be something to picking Bane. The choice to cast Tom Hardy to make sense, if just because he had starred in Inception (2010) and was still known as this gonzo character actor thanks to Bronson (2008). If he bulked up, he could pull it off.
It’s impossible to capture the enthusiasm for this movie that existed in the rumor mills because, honestly, The Dark Knight Rises hasn’t garnered the legacy of its predecessor. If anything, it’s been lulled in a public who think it’s this campy and flawed piece of nonsense, finding an auteur breaking his code to make a film lacking the sense that he brought to the trilogy’s first two films. For most people today, nobody is going to spend time pondering over who Tom Lennon was going to play or, in one of the odder misleads, if Ellen Page was even in the film (long story short: no).
All that was known was that 2011 would be the public’s first exposure to The Dark Knight Rises. It was “the epic conclusion” that many of us were waiting for, experiencing a superhero trilogy unlike any other (and, frankly, any since). The rumor mill had been spinning for years, ramping up in the months leading up to December 2011 when suddenly, by the grace of God, the teaser was dropped. Whereas most would’ve been suitable to dedicate 30 seconds of some ambiguous hoogajoob, that’s not Nolan’s modus operandi.
He gave the world what many would envy as a trailer. The only filmmakers who come as close to rallying up so much frenzy over an ambiguous three minutes are David Fincher, J.J. Abrams, and Kevin Feige. Nolan had the market cornered for The Dark Knight Rises, which could’ve gone in hundreds of directions, especially after a harrowing finale previously. What was this going to be?
And then… it began. A trailer that Screen Crush has listed as one of the best trailers for movies that didn’t live up to their potential. Still, to take a dive into this world gave one the sensation that Nolan had done it. He found a way to go bigger and bolder, featuring an even more immersive view of Gotham, rich with a cryptic story that only kind of explained what was going on. By the end, there was enough fodder for people to deconstruct. People could react to the trailer on YouTube, and remind the world of a time when superhero franchises ended. If I’m being honest, that is what I miss most about the old model of filmmaking: the anticipation of a shorter and more concise franchise.
The opening sequence featured a child singing “The National Anthem” at a football game. It’s ominous, especially as we get a shot of Bane from behind, rising up to meet the crowd. It’s haunting because of a sound design that never lets up, suggesting that there’s massive destruction on the outskirts. What is Bane going to do in just this opening moment? In a move that feels perfectly designed for the trailer, a football player runs across the field as it implodes behind him, police running through a tube underneath him. As he turns around, he realizes how lucky he is. Also, in a nice touch, his name is Ward (a reference to Burt Ward).
Details carry from there, discovering Bruce Wayne worn out and hearing advice from Alfred that he is likely going to retire. The world is trying to carry on after the death of Harvey Dent, now perceived as a hero. What exactly is going to happen now that Batman is seen as a villain?
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| One of the best YouTube comments, ever? |
Next to a scene that ends the trailer of Commissioner Gordon huffing from a hospital bed, holding an oxygen mask in hand, this is as much plot as is given. Everything else qualifies as ambiguity, introducing us to the striking imagery that will populate the film. What is that room full of M.C. Escher-looking stairs? Where do they lead? What about that pit that the camera stares up at as if creating the sense of being trapped? What is going to happen to Batman?
It’s the brief glimpses of Anne Hathaway as Catwoman, of Hardy as Bane, that really makes the trailer pop. These moments give you anticipation of what will happen in the film. There’s also the sight of a flying Batcopter that is borderline ridiculous for a franchise praising its realism. Still, it was all so much bigger and crazier than we had ever seen before. Given that we were months away from hearing that it was a near three-hours (the longest for a mainstream superhero movie at the time), it proved to be the perfect antidote for those needing more.
More than anything, it was the iconography that popped. It created a sense of excitement where no character was without scrutiny. Still, it will be fun to remember hearing Gordon on that air ventilator and having the world be confused that they couldn’t understand at all what he was saying. The snippet of Bane’s voice was muddled enough that nobody was truly aware of what he was bringing to the character. Still, we wanted to know more as a crowd of prisoners bust through a wall, ready to take Gotham down.
Again, all of this now has existing context to pull from, and thus some of its appeal is gone. Later trailers would focus on the broken Batmask, and that was possibly the biggest frenzy of all, wondering if this was an adaptation of “Knightfall” that found Bane “breaking the bat.” I won’t go further, but it’s important to note how much power one trailer could have. It almost made you want to go to a theater just to see it on the big screen, to feel immersed by the Hans Zimmer score, itself full of a cryptic chant. Everything demanded that you saw it on a big screen.
I’m not saying that it’s my favorite trailer ever. Even in Nolan’s career, Inception (2010) had one of the best marketing campaigns. However, I think in a time where anticipation is necessary for any franchise to have traction, it’s amazing to think about how Nolan approached Batman and how it set a mold that shines through the darker, grittier, more realistic The Batman. Even Tenet – all these trailers later – still doesn’t make sense. That’s not saying it’s bad. It’s just that in 2012, in a time where The Amazing Spiderman (2012) notoriously released a half-hour of footage in marketing, the idea that less is more proved to be a powerful tool.
Sure, The Dark Knight Rises may not be triumphant to most audiences, but it set a bar for marketing that few trailers since have been able to embrace. While there’s ambiguity, very few have the ability to slowly reveal more and still keep the central ideas of the plot so unknown that it forced you to see the movie. If you didn’t, you were going to miss the performance that permanently shifted how Bane is seen going forward in pop culture (physically and verbally). Given that this 2012 movie made over a billion dollars at the box office, it’s likely that this trailer has more power than we know. For me, it’s a series of moments that we’ll never get again mostly because things refuse to end. If they did, maybe the world would feel the weight that these movies should have.
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