![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneThese thoughts were sparked by watching The Batman, which I enjoyed - a great deal for the first half, and then, well, I'm willing to stick with it to see the next one anyway. However:
The plot of The Batman took a left turn at about the halfway point. Up to that point, the movie was pretty much... populist. Anti-elitist. Specifically it was a story about uncovering corruption, a corruption that riddled the police department, justice system, and local government. This isn't unrealistic! It happens all the time! The Riddler was killing people theatrically as part of his uncovering of this conspiracy, but he was also making people admit to things and revealing the dirty deal to the public. None of the things he had said - ideologically, that is, mostly about the corrupt elites running everything - were wrong up to the midpoint.
But then the movie swerves. They catch the Riddler and Batman has a highly psychological showdown with him, and the Riddler could not more clearly be Batman's foil or dark mirror, so much so that you think the Riddler knows it too because the conversation is briefly like Batman having a breakdown and yelling at himself.
And then it turns out that the Riddler planned to be caught all along and his WHOLE plan was not actually to unmask and remove all the corrupt people from the police, justice system and local government; it was to do that, and then "cleanse" the city by
His plan is supposed to cause the flooding to force the everyone into the arena during the results of the mayoral election, which he implies will include all the important people, sort of, and there would be a good amount of cops and local authority figures who would certainly be there; but it's not like the whole prosecutor's office, city government, local court bench, and police department would all be there in person. It's not even an inauguration, it's just the results coming in! Where are the other party? What about... all the rest of the cops?
But EVEN IF it made sense for the flooding to inevitably mean everyone in the city would be herded into the stadium (rather than many of them sheltering in other places such as ON THE ROOFS OF ALL THE BUILDINGS like people actually do in flooding), where they would stand under ground level to shelter from RISING WATER, that would still just result in a huge crowd of people in the water, and random terrorists recruited from YouTube are not a weapon that's easy to aim. Not only are you getting the wrong people, there's... not that good a chance of getting the right ones at all?
(He doesn't imply that his plan is to target the corrupt people here I think; he seems to mean killing pretty much everyone is the way to go? I actually am not sure, so... I guess he was vague, or else I was suffering a lack of oxygen to the brain or something at that moment.)
The first half of the movie has Batman struggling with and eventually being confronted with the links between him and the Riddler, who is his foil, and the Riddler uncovering this huge conspiracy comprising everyone with any power in the city government, the city legal system and law enforcement, all working for the mob; and the sinister force of this conspiracy is revealed as the dark force that Batman has been struggling to fight (by trying to make the city safer and better), and is also revealed to ultimately be the force that hurt both him and Riddler - that orphaned them, that shaped their childhoods, and that turned them into the vengeance-obsessed fanatics they are. It's also not just THEM, but the whole city who are its victims - all the normal, non-elite people in the city, anyway.
A logical, emotionally satisfying second half to this plot would have to involve Batman fighting consciously against this network of criminal corruption and presumably catching more of the crooks. Possibly that was too hard for them to imagine, since in reality networks of corruption like this take decades and decades to root out (and they can never be sure they got them all); perhaps they couldn't pick an emotionally satisfying intermediate goal.
But whatever the case, they needed the action to continue rising and a big conflict for the heroes to win, and rather than anything related thematically or logically to the story told in the first half of the movie, the Riddler suddenly isn't a forensic accountant who discovered the biggest embezzlement imaginable and fell down the rabbithole of digging to the bottom of the mystery and punishing the guiltiest of the corrupt crime ring that he sees as responsible for all his suffering. No, he's just flipped like a switch into what sounds more like an apocalyptic cult member, grooming random incels as terrorists in a highly unrealistic plan (even though all his previous plans were meticulous and effective) to kill most of the city and "start over", as if he was dealing with Sodom and Gomorrah (Evangelical version) and not institutional corruption.
Batman villains are typically motivated by real injustices that victimized them, so that checks out. Trying to, say, blow up or collapse a building to get all the bigwigs present at an event wouldn't be at all out of character for a Batman villain in general - in fact, it's the first half of the movie that makes Paul Dano's Riddler less like a typical Batman villain. He's so well-organized and focused, in spite of his theatricality. It's the seeming shift in his focus combined with a suddenly ineffective plot (vs. his earlier near-omniscience in being constantly so far ahead of Batman and Gordon) that seems so strange here. I feel like a plot like this in the animated Batman would probably have had somebody simply trying to destroy whatever building the ceremony was happening in.
What if this was somehow their idea of doing that expected Batman plot and trying to make it more realistic?
...If that was the case, the main problem is just that the only people who would shelter from a flood in an arena/stadium/whatsit are people who are caught somewhere where that is the best way to get higher than a couple of stories above the ground - so presumably, really close to it. If the party was in the arena, or in the middle of the street outside it, okay. Otherwise, they're just gonna go up on the nearest roof they can get to. A parking garage would've worked fine! If this fictional stadium is actually so located that there are no other buildings people can get like... to roof level, or the 3rd storey or whatever... anywhere nearby, then... shouldn't they say that? They couldn't have actually been planning to put the entire city of Gotham in there! Look, an arena's big but it's not THAT big. They use them for hurricanes but like... not as the only one in the whole city!
But beyond that, I, at least, was really distracted by the lines that made it sound like the Riddler forgot the primary target of his ire was the corrupt officials. Batman villains never forget their primary targets. It wouldn't really have mattered, because trying to use incels from YouTube is such a bad idea that they'd be guaranteed to just turn it to a generic mass shooting regardless! (Am I crazy? Was the failure of this speech in my head? Did everyone else hear him definitely still focused specifically on all the corrupt dudes he was after?)
The plot of The Batman took a left turn at about the halfway point. Up to that point, the movie was pretty much... populist. Anti-elitist. Specifically it was a story about uncovering corruption, a corruption that riddled the police department, justice system, and local government. This isn't unrealistic! It happens all the time! The Riddler was killing people theatrically as part of his uncovering of this conspiracy, but he was also making people admit to things and revealing the dirty deal to the public. None of the things he had said - ideologically, that is, mostly about the corrupt elites running everything - were wrong up to the midpoint.
But then the movie swerves. They catch the Riddler and Batman has a highly psychological showdown with him, and the Riddler could not more clearly be Batman's foil or dark mirror, so much so that you think the Riddler knows it too because the conversation is briefly like Batman having a breakdown and yelling at himself.
And then it turns out that the Riddler planned to be caught all along and his WHOLE plan was not actually to unmask and remove all the corrupt people from the police, justice system and local government; it was to do that, and then "cleanse" the city by
- herding everyone in it (?) into one place (?) by breaching "the floodwalls" (so Gotham is below sea level, like Amsterdam or New Orleans?) so they would all have to shelter in Madison Square Garden (and TBH I'm almost more upset because not only would that not be the disaster relief procedure for this case - they were following what you do for hurricanes, NOT what you do for floods! - but even if they HAD told people to go to an arena to escape the flood, the basic human urge to go up HIGH to escape flooding is such that way more people would actually have simply gone up on the roofs of buildings and escaped the whole maneuver),
- and enciting a mob of his followers, through YouTube, to put on military gear and break into the arena so they can have a mass shooting there?
His plan is supposed to cause the flooding to force the everyone into the arena during the results of the mayoral election, which he implies will include all the important people, sort of, and there would be a good amount of cops and local authority figures who would certainly be there; but it's not like the whole prosecutor's office, city government, local court bench, and police department would all be there in person. It's not even an inauguration, it's just the results coming in! Where are the other party? What about... all the rest of the cops?
But EVEN IF it made sense for the flooding to inevitably mean everyone in the city would be herded into the stadium (rather than many of them sheltering in other places such as ON THE ROOFS OF ALL THE BUILDINGS like people actually do in flooding), where they would stand under ground level to shelter from RISING WATER, that would still just result in a huge crowd of people in the water, and random terrorists recruited from YouTube are not a weapon that's easy to aim. Not only are you getting the wrong people, there's... not that good a chance of getting the right ones at all?
(He doesn't imply that his plan is to target the corrupt people here I think; he seems to mean killing pretty much everyone is the way to go? I actually am not sure, so... I guess he was vague, or else I was suffering a lack of oxygen to the brain or something at that moment.)
The first half of the movie has Batman struggling with and eventually being confronted with the links between him and the Riddler, who is his foil, and the Riddler uncovering this huge conspiracy comprising everyone with any power in the city government, the city legal system and law enforcement, all working for the mob; and the sinister force of this conspiracy is revealed as the dark force that Batman has been struggling to fight (by trying to make the city safer and better), and is also revealed to ultimately be the force that hurt both him and Riddler - that orphaned them, that shaped their childhoods, and that turned them into the vengeance-obsessed fanatics they are. It's also not just THEM, but the whole city who are its victims - all the normal, non-elite people in the city, anyway.
A logical, emotionally satisfying second half to this plot would have to involve Batman fighting consciously against this network of criminal corruption and presumably catching more of the crooks. Possibly that was too hard for them to imagine, since in reality networks of corruption like this take decades and decades to root out (and they can never be sure they got them all); perhaps they couldn't pick an emotionally satisfying intermediate goal.
But whatever the case, they needed the action to continue rising and a big conflict for the heroes to win, and rather than anything related thematically or logically to the story told in the first half of the movie, the Riddler suddenly isn't a forensic accountant who discovered the biggest embezzlement imaginable and fell down the rabbithole of digging to the bottom of the mystery and punishing the guiltiest of the corrupt crime ring that he sees as responsible for all his suffering. No, he's just flipped like a switch into what sounds more like an apocalyptic cult member, grooming random incels as terrorists in a highly unrealistic plan (even though all his previous plans were meticulous and effective) to kill most of the city and "start over", as if he was dealing with Sodom and Gomorrah (Evangelical version) and not institutional corruption.
Batman villains are typically motivated by real injustices that victimized them, so that checks out. Trying to, say, blow up or collapse a building to get all the bigwigs present at an event wouldn't be at all out of character for a Batman villain in general - in fact, it's the first half of the movie that makes Paul Dano's Riddler less like a typical Batman villain. He's so well-organized and focused, in spite of his theatricality. It's the seeming shift in his focus combined with a suddenly ineffective plot (vs. his earlier near-omniscience in being constantly so far ahead of Batman and Gordon) that seems so strange here. I feel like a plot like this in the animated Batman would probably have had somebody simply trying to destroy whatever building the ceremony was happening in.
What if this was somehow their idea of doing that expected Batman plot and trying to make it more realistic?
...If that was the case, the main problem is just that the only people who would shelter from a flood in an arena/stadium/whatsit are people who are caught somewhere where that is the best way to get higher than a couple of stories above the ground - so presumably, really close to it. If the party was in the arena, or in the middle of the street outside it, okay. Otherwise, they're just gonna go up on the nearest roof they can get to. A parking garage would've worked fine! If this fictional stadium is actually so located that there are no other buildings people can get like... to roof level, or the 3rd storey or whatever... anywhere nearby, then... shouldn't they say that? They couldn't have actually been planning to put the entire city of Gotham in there! Look, an arena's big but it's not THAT big. They use them for hurricanes but like... not as the only one in the whole city!
But beyond that, I, at least, was really distracted by the lines that made it sound like the Riddler forgot the primary target of his ire was the corrupt officials. Batman villains never forget their primary targets. It wouldn't really have mattered, because trying to use incels from YouTube is such a bad idea that they'd be guaranteed to just turn it to a generic mass shooting regardless! (Am I crazy? Was the failure of this speech in my head? Did everyone else hear him definitely still focused specifically on all the corrupt dudes he was after?)
