Bruce trains with the league of Shadows and totally subscribes to their philosophies. He's eager to swear alliegence to them and be branded with their mark. Then suddenly, when faced with executing a criminal (which was the entire motivation of his ending up in Tibet or wherever), he's suddenly above such acts.
The impression I got was that he trained with them in order to know how to fight crime, but didn't realise how crazed they were. We never got shown him being sat down and having the policy explained to.
So much so that he's willing to destroy the entire temple and kill everyone he had just pledged life-long alliegence to.
If someone said that they were gonna destroy my hometown, and I thought they could do it, i'd probably try to stop them myself. He was protecting his city.
I don't totally get why the league of Shadows would even care about Gotham anyway. In the comics, Ra's wants to purge the world in an ecological disaster and then rule over the survivors. In this movie he just kinda wants to focus on Gotham for no good reason. Why focus on that once city? Did I miss his ties to Gotham?
A common failing of fans watching a new incarnation of their franchise: They don't pay attention to the changes and then act surprised when things don't mesh as they expect. The league of shadows is very similar to the euthanatos from Mage - they cull that which harms society, be it criminals, or be it a city that is a magnet for evil. Gotham is full of crime, so, destroy gotham and you take out a lot of that crime.
Katie Holmes is a total beating in this film. She is not convincing as an assistant D.A, and her only role in the film is to lecture Bruce and provide someone for him to rescue.
She was good enough. And she had a fair number of scenes (more than gordon). She had no chemistry with bruce at all, but she handled the rest pretty well.
The movie also fell into the trap of a couple of Super-hero movie cliches that really detract from the film. The first being that everyone is connected and had met each other previously. Gordon was the street cop that comforted young Bruce. Ducard can't just be some guy in Tibet...he had ties to Gotham(right?). The random kid that sees Batman on the side of his building is the kid that Rachel runs into in the Narrows. Why? is that really important to tie everyone together like that?
Ducard is linked to gotham? I didn't notice. And the rest is kind of wierd, but also helps to give both a) a sense of continuity and history (by having recurring characters) and b) to generate some sympathy (by having a kid that already appeared, the viewers are more likely to care about him getting toxined).
And once again..the Hero reveals his identity to the girl for NO GOOD REASON.
She was his childhood friend. Very few people can keep secrets from EVERYONE.
The Bat-action was weird. Doing Batattacks in the same vein as the alien movies is cool. You only see pieces of him as he's taking people out. But the fight scenes are awful. It's a total mess. You have no idea what's going on or who's winning until it's over and the camera stops moving.
Totally true. I hated the fight scenes, just horribly confusing and irritating. When will film makers learn that what I want to see is a scene shot from the side on, whole bodies visible, so that I can see what everyone is doing. That's far more interesting than closeups of bruces left shoulder or whatever.
The microwave scrambler can reach through concrete and metal pipes to instantly vaporize water. Well humans are mostly water. Why weren't people exploding near that machine?
Midiclorians.