Brian writes an interesting piece on the newest Batman movie. For the most part I agree with him; but one statement he makes is, to put it mildly, complete batshit:

The watchword of the current series is plausibility. Everything has to make sense. None of the equipment is over-the-top for the sole sake of being over-the-top.

Okay. So… Bruce is not himself a tech guy. That is almost the entire point of Lucius Fox.

Would you please explain to me the “plausibility” of Bruce wiring up EVERY CELL PHONE IN THE WORLD into a bat-sonar device? Without Lucius having any clue??? Did he take a correspondence course in “Comic Book Tech”? (It’s on the list right next to “VCR Repair”.) Did he wire it up during a lull in his copious spare time? All those monitors alone must have taken hours to hook up — and to what purpose but to look cool for the camera?

(As a sidebar, that particular bit of tech was certainly a tip of the hat to, if not a setup for introducing, the character “Oracle” from the comics.)

Having a gimmicked phone in Hong Kong worked, because he made it specifically for the job. Somehow magically making millions of regular off-the-shelf units do the same thing was complete nonsense.

(Oh, and while we’re on the subject of implausible schemes, can somebody please tell me how Joker managed to load hundreds of drums of gasoline onto the two ferries without anybody noticing? For that matter — if they were evacuating the city via ferry, how did it not occur to anybody to maybe put people down in the massive, supposed-to-be-empty hold?)

The worst part of it to me was that it was totally unnecessary to the plot. If the plot simply didn’t work without it, they should have called for rewrite. As it is, it smells as though some studio exec watched a pre-release version and said “this movie just doesn’t have enough bullshit.”

The movie was excellent, but Nolan really tripped over his cape with that bit….

[Update: Brian Responds]

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