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By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

TDKR Spoiler Space

Assume that all comments on this entry are SPOILERS…

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49 Responses to “TDKR Spoiler Space”

  1. Amblynman says:

    I think my biggest surprise was the scope of the film. I did not see a version of No Man’s Land coming. It’s what pushes this series above anything else in this genre – Nolan is interested in usin these characters to tell a story. Every other director just makes a “comic book movie.”

    Also, of course Batman doesn’t die at the end. Anyone who bough. Into that is dumb.

  2. anghus says:

    copied from another thread:

    Nolan always tries to give the audiences so much. He crams so many characters and layers into the movie. And he’s given us as intelligent take on a comic book character. I’m willing to forgive the excesses. With that, some questions.

    Wasn’t this the most convoluted nuclear bomb plot ever? I almost preferred the Dr. Evil method of stealing one from a foreign country. This one seemed awfully contrived.

    Miranda Tate gets on the board of Wayne Enterprises, steals Bruce Wayne’s fingerprints, has Bane stage a huge, public armed robbery of the stock market, forcing Wayne to put her in charge gaining her trust by showing her the reactor which is then used to create a bomb…..

    And then the next day at Wayne Enterprises Lucius Fox says “we could maybe prove it was fraud.”

    Wouldnt that huge, public robbery at the stock market the day before clued everyone in the known world that it was fake?

    Most of the problems i had revolved around the weird series of events tied around getting the bomb. It felt like there would be eight billion better ways to find a nuclear weapon that didn’t require an obscenely convoluted plot to put one in their hands.

    Couldn’t the opening scene have been Bane stealing a nuke in mid air? Would you have lost anything removing the complexity of the bomb acquisition? In fact, i’d argue you could have spent more of that time on character development, specifically Hathaway who felt like she could have used some more scenes.

    I liked the film. But man, the scope of the plot to grab a nuclear bomb felt long winded.

    My other major complaint was Matthew Modine. You could have cut him out of the movie entirely and would have lost nothing. And at 2 hours and 45 minutes, wouldnt losing Modine have been a gift to the audience?

    “where could he really take the character from here without it becoming played out?”

    Id love a Gordon-Levitt Batman film, though i know the reality of that happening is 800 billion to 1. The ending was so nice and tidy. But id be thrilled with an epilogue style film in the same universe with a new challenge in a post No Man’s Land Gotham.

    That’s just the fanboy in me wanting more trip to this world.

  3. Amblynman says:

    @Anghus

    I don’t think all of Tate’s machinations were soley about the bomb. She wanted to ruin Wayne financially and personally too, thus all the stock shenanigans. I agree on Modine. I was a little nervous initially he was going to play Paul Gleason’s Die Hard cop to Batman’s John McClane.

  4. anghus says:

    Yes, i could see the angle that she wanted to ruin him. But wasn’t he already ruined. He starts the movie a broken shell of a man, his company on the road to ruin. Was it that she wanted to hurt Batman and not Bruce Wayne?

    I suppose all that work was done so that he could witness Gotham rotting from the pit. But it still felt like a lot of work to get a nuke.

  5. Amblynman says:

    I can forgive stuff like that as long as its done in a way that’s logical and makes sense. I felt this did. I think, also, stealing a nuke would bring lots of attention and heat on Bane’s group vs buying a company that owns a device that could potentially be turned into one.

    My take was that she wanted to ruin Wayne in every way possible. Even fucking him was a way to fuck with him when she finally betrayed him.

  6. anghus says:

    Its nitpicky stuff, i agree. I very much liked the film.

    But that stuff lingered with me after the movie. I get what you’re saying, she wanted Wayne to suffer in every way imanginable, however….

    What if he hadn’t escaped the pit?

    She says at the end to Bane “dont kill him, i want him to feel the heat”,

    But what if Bane had kicked his ass again in the streets?

    The only reason the betrayal happened in the first places is because he escaped the pit and Bane couldnt kick his ass the second time.

  7. movieman says:

    Could the final scene of Alfred spotting Bruce in the cafe have simply been an old man’s sentimental reverie–his way of dealing with inconsolable loss?
    After all, the scene is foreshadowed by a speech early in the film that posits that exact scenario.
    (And how DID Batman/Bruce manage to survive?)

    Or maybe I’m just having “Inception” flashbacks.

  8. Joe Leydon says:

    Movieman: Remember the references to “auto-pilot” planted earlier in the film?

  9. Amblynman says:

    @Anghus

    If Bane had won in the streets my guess is he brings Wayne to Tate, she reveals evil plot, he gets to be nuked along with Gotham. If he never escapes the pit, he watches Gotham get nuked. Win/win.

    @Movieman

    Nah. No dreams here. Nolan’s not fucking with us. End of a popular franchise ends on a happy note.

  10. Amblynman says:

    @Joe

    You mean the AUTOPILOT THAT THE PLANE DOESN’T HAVE? THAT AUTOPILOT THAT THEY MENTIONED 15 TIMES? SURELY YOU DON’T MEAN THE BATPLANE WHICH DOESN’T HAVE AUTOPILOT BY THE WAY.

  11. Joe Leydon says:

    And that earlier speech is itself a plant. I’m not joking when I say I’m going to recommend this film to scriptwriting students. Not because it’s perfect — but because it does plant so many things that bloom into pay-offs later on.

  12. Joe Leydon says:

    Amblynman: LOL. See: You fell for it!

  13. Amblynman says:

    I guess it’s “story” was finished in TDK, and probably wouldn’t have enhanced proceedings but…I did miss the Tumbler. I was hoping a new, revamped version would make an appearance but I suppose the plane was the badass-Bat-Vehicle for this film. Too bad. Of all the reboot flourishes Nolan added to the character, the new age Batmobile was my favorite gadget.

    I do have a question though: What the FUCK was the gun Batman used in the underground parking lot when he chased the LoS on motorcycles supposed to do, exactly? He pulls out that gigantic thing with lightbulbs on the end of it, and it looked like it just shot sparklers at people. Did I miss something?

  14. Amblynman says:

    On a side note, this is why I virtually don’t bother reading a word Knowles writes anymore:

    “but the multiple fights between BANE & Batman are the exact opposite of cinematic. They’re tracking shot fights. You never feel the blows. ”

    What movie was he watching? Bane’s takedown of Batman is excruciatingly brutal. In fact, Nolan really went for bare knuckle, I”m-gonna-fuck-you-up type direction with their confrontations over the usual stylized ballet-karete fight we normally get treated to.

  15. movieman says:

    I guess maybe I was just trying to overcomplicate things–or looking for something that wasn’t there.

    Happy endings always make me cry.
    It’s probably just my pessimistic nature that looks for some kind of tragedy around every corner. (Or at every movie.)

  16. Don R. Lewis says:

    I thought Nolan upped the ante in terms of his action scene direction in this one and I felt DARK KNIGHT was pretty sloppy on that count. I also can see where you’re coming from, anghus, but the nuke stuff didn’t really bug me too much. My ony real complaint was not enough Annie Hats. Her character was intriguing and they didn’t give enough backstory about her.

    I also agree about Modine and I also wonder if Juno Temple had more scenes and they got cut? She served no purpose.

    Best piece of awful exposition in the film has to go to the “clean slate” though. Bane’s got that guy on the ground and everyone in the room knows what the “clean slate” is but he says something like YOU MEAN THE CLEAM SLATE PROGRAM? THE ONE’S THAT CAN COMPLETELY ERASE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT ANYONE WITH JUST A SIMPLE KEYSTROKE??

    I LOL-ed

  17. Amblynman says:

    “I thought Nolan upped the ante in terms of his action scene direction in this one and I felt DARK KNIGHT was pretty sloppy on that count.

    Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I always thought Nolan’s direction of action was his Achilles heel. The action sequences in BB are…not good. TDK has the Joker’s assault on the motorcade, but otherwise once again most of the action stuff was kind of clunky. TDKR was pretty spectacular. He really did a great job with the hand-to-hand moments.

  18. Eric says:

    Amblynman: The light gun would short out electronics (and maybe machines?) when it was used. The lights surrounding Batman went out as he drove, and in front of him when he fired it ahead.

    I thought the movie was great but also probably the weakest of the three. Most of the material in the movie that would give it thematic heft felt strangely undercooked to me. Bane announced to the city that the people would rise up against the upper class… but we barely saw any everyday citizens after that.

    Like Anghus, I thought the nuke plot was a little too complicated. It could have been streamlined in order to flesh out the second half. But I’m not surprised, because I had a similar complaint about Dark Knight– the diversion to China was cool but the same narrative and thematic needs could have been served in Gotham in half the time.

  19. anghus says:

    Yeah. the Clean Slate thing was funny. I joked to my wife afterward that the movie had like multiple macguffins. The bomb/reactor, the clean slate… there were lots of unexplained motivators.

    The gun was an EMP pulse rifle. It fired a blast of electromagnetic energy that disabled electronics. He employed a bunch of those through various delivery options throughout the film.

    As for the action, it was interesting because he overcut so much of the action in the first film that these long, one take tracking shots feel almost naked in comparison.

    My number one bitch in Batman Begins (other than Katie Holmes) was the indecipherable action. On paper, Batman fighting four ninjas should be the most awesome thing ever, but its terribly cut together.

  20. Amblynman says:

    @Eric

    We barely saw any citizens rising up because Bane was lying. The whole thing was about giving everyone false hope.

    Thanks to all explaining the gun. I guess I did miss something.

  21. Smith says:

    As with TDK, the set up felt overly convoluted (remember the field trip to China and the ballerinas) but man oh man, once TDKR got rolling (right around when Bane finally made his intentions clear) it was a sight to behold. For me, definitely as good, maybe better than its predecessors.

    Re: the first act, though – did anyone else think it felt oddly compressed and rushed – like Nolan had excised everything but essential plot advancing dialogue? Anyway, my point is: I wonder if Nolan had to do a lot of cutting to whittle that first act down to a reasonable size.

  22. Smith says:

    Oh, and I would also love to see a Batman movie with Gordon-Levitt in the Batsuit – mostly just because, as someone mentioned above, I’m not ready to be done with this universe.

  23. anghus says:

    the whole device to get selena and batman together felt contrived. Dagget was so useless you might as well have called his company Exposition Industries.

  24. Don R. Lewis says:

    Jim Emerson did a pretty amazing video essay on the editing of that Joker car chase sequence in DARK KNIGHT:
    http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/IN_THE_CUT_The_Dark_Knight_by_Christopher_Nolan#.UAysCO08gUU

  25. berg says:

    TDKR is sequel worthy … in Prometheus it was like you could explain what happens next in twenty-minutes, in TDKR you want a sequel to encompass everything that happens in the last half reel

  26. jesse says:

    Don, I admire Emerson’s tenacity and eye for detail but he makes a lot of truly bizarre suppositions in that essay about what certain camera positions and movements ALWAYS mean in movies that itself feels more convoluted than some of the Nolan plot twists.

    Though these three movies work elegantly as a trilogy, part of me feels a little cheated that everyone thinks in terms of trilogies for no real reason; the slightly overstuffed but generally thrilling/epic nature of DKR convinced me you could’ve done four or five Nolan/Batman movies with generally pretty high quality. Looking back over the series, it’s the time between Begins and Dark Knight I would’ve liked to see more of. All told, in this movie’s timeline, Wayne is Batman for about two years total, maybe three depending on how you can stretch out some sequences of the first movie and how you count sections of the last. Very realistic — as DKR points out, it would take an enormous physical toll — but kind of weird that we sorta miss the middle of Batman’s career. A casualty of trilogy thinking. But now that I’ve seen Nolan re-do Catwoman in a way that I loved even though I also loved Burton’s version, I’m even more open to the idea of him doing a version of the Penguin — again, LOVED Burton’s version (moreso than a lot of the comics versions) but Nolan could probably do a pretty cool Penguin as mob boss type of story. Won’t happen now.

    Oh well. Guess it’s better to leave ’em wanting more, but still: damn. Kinda sad these movies are over.

    Also, if anyone wants to check out a near-parody of a forest-for-the-trees comics fan, the Harry Knowles review will do nicely.

  27. Krillian says:

    I know what you mean. Would have loved to see Nolan tackle Penguin… or Riddler… or Clayface… or Mr. Freeze…

    Really hoping that they either give JGL his own movie, or the next guy treats it like Bond where the story just keeps going. Actors might be different, but it’s the same universe. No new origin story needed.

  28. Vicki Hobb says:

    I think any version of the Riddler would pale after Heath Ledger’s Joker IMHO.

  29. Amblynman says:

    @Vicki

    I liked that this film was set 8 years after the last one. It raised the stakes for Wayne because he was older, more injured.

    Im probably in the minority but I did not enjoy Catwoman. Hathaway, who is pretty and has a great body, still can’t do sexy. She comes across as playing sexy vs being sexy – you can see the seams in the performance. Her wearing that mask with the Dom outfit is the closest Nolan has dipped his toe into a campy SUPERHERO moment. I found it almost jarring when she and Batman were doing something together in full costume, almost like “oh right – superhero movie.”. Also, I don’t understand the reasoning for her wearing a mask. The whole point of her quest in the film was to get the clean slate because apparently everyone knows her identity.

  30. jesse says:

    Amblynman, I generally agree about Hathaway — I’ve often found that she comes off like a very studious, serious A student without a lot of real spontaneity or creativity. Her performances are usually technically correct but don’t have that extra feeling. But I really liked her in this — to some degree, she is playing at being sexy, but this movie’s Catwoman very much does use that kind of play-acting to get by. She’s basically a con artist, albeit a pretty smart and tough one. So some of that, presumably, has a bit of practiced posing going on (and can also explain the mask, I suppose; probably pointless, but also probably not meant to literally conceal her ID since it doesn’t really cover much). I was surprised by how much I liked her and felt like a Bat/Cat shipper by the end. I loved seeing them fight side by side, however fleetingly.

  31. Amblynman says:

    I can see your con woman argument. Perhaps she’s the most undercooked element of the film in that case because there isn’t a lot given as to why Batman suddenly wins her true self over.

  32. jesse says:

    I definitely could’ve gone for more Catwoman but in general with the Nolan Batman movies, I feel like I could’ve gone for more of just about anything in them. It’s not that I didn’t feel the length of DKR — it doesn’t rocket along with the same tick-tick-tick pace of the second movie — but I loved how epic and BIG it felt without sacrificing character notes. I probably could’ve watched a four-hour version of this movie. Though I understand that 2:45 was probably about the limit from a practical standpoint.

    (Meanwhile, every YA-targeted franchise in the land will now pointlessly split the final part into two movies to “get it all in”… the fact that Breaking Dawn in “full” will be longer than any Nolan Batman movie is such calculated self-indulgence that I can hardly stand it).

  33. Steve Lamacq says:

    Why all the debate about autopilot? The engineers clearly state that Bruce Wayne fixed the autopilot!

    After what Wayne/Batman had been through surely it was to his and everyones benefit to be presumed dead.

  34. Razzie Ray says:

    For some reason I just didn’t feel as satisfied as I did with the last one.

    I’m one of those people that liked Batman Begins, but its got a lot of problems in terms of convoluted logic too. Not to mention Katie Holmes.

    It’s safe to assume that combination of Heath Ledger’s performance and the brilliant way the shaped this version of the joker escalated The Dark Knight that wasn’t around this time.

    And look – we’ve seen this ending lots of times before.

  35. Amblynman says:

    I Understand why Batman had to be perceived as being killed, but why Bruce Wayne?

  36. Amblynman says:

    I found this movie much more exciting than TDK. TDK kind of fizzles out in the last act. I thought Dent/Two-Face was handled pretty badly, and the final confrontation between Batman and Joker lacked any excitement. TDKR on the other hand just kept building momentum. The last half hour is pretty fantastic.

  37. mrbonturcode says:

    How do Bruce Wayne get back into Gotham when the only way in was policed to shit…?

    I mean, I can buy he could make his way back to the USA with no money after escaping the prison as he showed his resourcefulness in Batman Begins…

    But to get back to a city that no-one can leave or enter? Huh?

  38. palmtree says:

    Seriously, once the seige on Gotham started the movie fell apart for me.

    Question, why did they use Manhattan so clearly as Gotham in those wide shots? Why did they take me out of the movie by showing a real landscape?

  39. Don R. Lewis says:

    mrbonturcode-
    I tend to agree with you but I thought it was a callback to BATMAN BEGINS where Bruce gives the homeless guy his coat and all his cash and wallet and leaves to “find himself.” We never saw how he got to Tibet (or where ever it was).

  40. Triple Option says:

    Yeah, I was kinda expecting Hathaway to show me something as Catwoman that I wasn’t seeing when Nolan cast her. To some extent, she didn’t have to be anything special. Just, you know, not F- things up. But I was expecting to see something totally re-imagined. Like maybe psycho chick catwoman.

    This one had the fewest surprises and was set up more like a standard action hero movie. I could see La Vie en Rose’ turn coming from a mile away. I would have actually liked to see more of her but that’s just in general I love to watch her on screen. I thought Bane was good and creepy. I thought Bale was excellent. This installment had more emotion. I get people saying Nolan can’t direct action. It didn’t bother me so much in Begins but when it starts out with this huge air sequence, all you get is the thing breaking apart like a model (not that it looked bad) but it was so…eh.

    Oh, and I went to a 3:40 AM IMAX showing. Can you believe there were still people checking their freckin’ phones?! Really?! Are you f’ing kiddin’ me?? Do you wake up at 4:30 every morning, check your phone and go back to sleep? If the 3rd world ever does rise up and holds tribunals, the evidence against some people is going to be almost painful to watch.

  41. anghus says:

    Nolan loves to leave small hints and clues, and he very rarely ever goes back and says ‘this is what this meant’.

    i had a friend say he knew something was up when he ‘saw the scar on Miranda Tate’s back’. But i dont remember them revealing where that scar came from.

    I did have a wonderful laugh at the end when theyre all standing at Bruce’s grave. And Alfred is crying. the other three just walk away. I was thinking “jesus, someone put a hand on the guy’s shoulder or give him a hug”. It was a great ‘what a bunch of dicks’ moment.

    My wife did have a great observation after seeing it. She said: “Is Commissioner Gordon the worst police detective ever.” She said this after Batman is flying away with the bomb and Gordon goes “Bruce Wayne”. She thought it was idiotic that he never put two and two together, especially considering Batman’s absence and subsequent return coincided with Wayne’s. I think its a fair point.

  42. Joe Leydon says:

    As I posted elsewhere: Saw Dark Knight Rises again tonight — this time in IMAX — and I can’t help thinking Anne Hathaway was giving us a little wink-wink, nudge-nudge Liza Minnelli/Sally Bowles in her performance. And I liked it.

  43. leahnz says:

    i enjoyed TDKR, which i found gripping and engaging for the most part, but just a couple thoughts:

    thanks to previous discussion here speculating about selina kyle and miranda tate and who their alter-egos would be in TDKR, i knew miranda was likely talia right off the bat (no pun intended), so no suspense there. (thanks for the advance spoiler whoever called that one, one of the comic book nerds – but good prognosticating none the less).

    how bruce gets back and into manhattan – oops i mean gotham – from that hole in the middle of a honking arabian/moroccan/whateveritwas desert with only the clothes on his back is a huge mystery.

    in terms of political subtext, basic allegory and who represents whom in terms of the ‘haves & have nots’ in this, nolan’s batworld, i found this movie fairly disturbing. i don’t know anything about the nolan bros politics, but i wouldn’t be shocked to hear nolan is a good little tory.

    why does bane have an ott replica sean connery scottish accent? just laughable, esp considering the back-story of him and wee talia in the arabian (moroccan?) prison. if there’s some explanation i missed, i’d love to hear it.

    yes, that gordon doesn’t realise wayne is the bat until the final buzzer makes him look like a bit of a dolt.

    (aesthetically speaking, batman’s overly-bulbous mask drove me nuts, i wanted to pop it like a grape – i guess the days of a sleek mask-over-cowl combo are over, at least in nolan’s incarnation – but thank goodness batman’s ‘i’m-dying-of-fucking-emphysema’ gravel voice was toned way down, christian bale’s perf in this installment was far more satisfying and less annoying to me than in TDK)

  44. Foamy Squirrel says:

    “why does bane have an ott replica sean connery scottish accent?”

    Sean Connery? Simon Gruber, Die Hard 3 for me.

    I’m less concerned with the “how did that happen?” stuff, because Nolan & Co. make no attempt to explain it. Fusion reactors explode when they run out of power because. Buying put options makes you bankrupt because. Wayne gets past the security patrols surrounding Gotham because.

    They don’t matter to the plot – Nolan could have spent 5-10 minutes on each explaining how it happened, but in the end all that needs to be known is that it’s possible that it could have happened that way and we’d rather be watching the Good Stuff ™.

  45. Steve Lamacq says:

    Amblynman – because they are the same person and quite a few people know this. If Batman disappears, so does Bruce Wayne!

    mrbonturcode – Similarly, Wayne gets back into Gotham because he IS Batman. The most resourceful, intelligent and stealthy of heroes. Just because he’s Bruce Wayne doesn’t mean he stops thinking like Batman. Face it, he’s just climbed out of a prison that is nigh on impossible to escape from – this is because he is Batman. Hence he has the skills to get back into Gotham. I’m puzzled why people question this – and lot of people are. The general query is ‘How can Bruce get back in when no one else can?’…because he’s Batman for christ sake!!

  46. Steve Lamacq says:

    …and just to add, no one is looking for Batman/Wayne to even be around. When Bane left him broken backed, he left him there to die so it’s not like the guards are watching out for him.

  47. jesse says:

    Yeah, I would guess it’s a lot harder to get out of locked-down Gotham than it is to get in. It’s a little bit of a cheat that they don’t show him doing ANY of that (I can say OK, skip over the cross-continental journey because we’ve basically seen in Batman Begins that he can do that sort of thing, but I was curious about how he got back into Gotham), or even hint at it, but really, Bane’s lockdown was based much more on fear than practical measures. He didn’t actually have guards at every possible entrance and exit. He simply told people in Gotham, if you leave, someone will blow us all up. And the number of people trying to get in would be way lower (plus, those special forces guys who got killed got in somehow, right?).

  48. Don R. Lewis says:

    I’ve heard many complain that Bruce Wayne is rich therefore Nolan is saying we need a rich person (or corporation like Wayne Enterprises) to keep us safe. Yet in this last film, he’s broke (financially and physically) yet still wants to save the city he loves. He also threw everything away to “find himself” in BATMAN BEGINS and come back to save Gotham.

    Being rich has never been something that made Bruce tick; it was his sense of justice, feeling like he had to continue where his father left off (even though ostensibly, Gotham killed him) and his unfettered rage. In fact money matters so little to Bruce he finally throws it away in public to keep up a facade of a playboy.

    I also really felt a strong pro-Bush agenda in DARK KNIGHT with the phone tapping. That it was ok to do it in order to keep us safe. But in TDKR I really felt Bane was playing up the Guantanamo issue in that Crane as the judge was assuming guilt automatically and the hearings he was overseeing were a sentencing. There’s a bastardization of the writ of habeas corpus much like we (the US) continues to do in Guantanamo. The pro-phone tap idea doesn’t gel with the way a lack of rights are shown in TDKR.

    Obviously Nolan is showing how screwed up and un-American this is and that it’s unfair and indecent to treat anyone who goes against the grain as criminal. Assuming guilt without a fair trial goes against the very fabric of a safe and sane government and it rings true in real life because we’re doing it still, post 9/11. Even Obama won’t close Gitmo and he represents “Hope” which is a major theme in TDKR. (JGL getting kids on the bus when “hope” is lost, Batman a signal for hope).

    It just makes me think that:
    A) Nolan is a flip-flopper of Romney proportions
    B) These films aren’t actually as overtly political as they seem/Nolan doesn’t know WTF he’s talking about
    C) Nolan is figuring out how he feels along with the audience

    I’m hoping it’s “C” and I’m sticking with that idea. Since I’m doing that, I’ll also align THE DARK KNIGHT RISES with THE SEARCHERS in that we know John Ford was extremely conservative but he allowed for humanistic cracks in Ethan Edwards (Wayne) which in turn allowed for a discussion rather than a dyed in the wool, knee jerk, political reaction to a situation. I think filmmakers with ideas that are open for discussion rather than some staunch political side are intriguing. yet it seems like many who are down on the film are using this true lack of perspective as a way to nitpick the film rather than to allow Nolan to say, “hey, I don’t know. Let’s look at this.” That’s a big positive in my book rather than a negative.

  49. Kev says:

    I watched all 3 films a load of times because you miss some stuff in the first couple of viewings and a big well done is due to Chris Nolan and the whole of the cast and crew. The only thing I don’t grasp is the blood transfusion Bane forces the Russian doctor in the opening sequence of TDKR, who was that guy in the body bag? That is al…

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