The great geek hive mind can get so fucking exhausting - I still remember how 'everybody knows' that The Gunfighters was the worst Doctor Who story, until people actually got to see it and found out it was a fun slice of sixties sci/fi western; and it's actually remarkable how many articles still being published that still unilaterally profess that absolutely everybody hated the final season of Game of Thrones.
And one of the most irritating examples of the past decade has been about a goddamn voice. Just the other day, while reading about something completely unrelated, I came across the brazen assertion that nobody could understand what Tom Hardy's Bane was saying in the Dark Knight Returns.
It's an easy mark, but it's objectively not true, it's easy as hell to tell what he's saying, and there is never a moment when you are not sure what the big guy's intentions are (although it should be noted that he is lying his arse off for the vast majority of his screen time). I don't have the best hearing in the world, but I could make it out easily enough.
Besides, it's bloody great! That outrageously unknowable accent, the weird inflection on the wrong words, it's a fucking terrific use of voice to create menace and uncertainty, while also being quite funny. The hive mind might say it's a mistake, but I say it's perfect.
Everyone should know that.
Bane really is an exceptional baddie in TDKR.
ReplyDeleteComic book movies can sometimes have an inadvertently malign influence on their source material when the comics are made to contort themselves to more closely resemble their more popular progeny (if memory serves Spidey was made to have organic webbing in the comics around the time of the Raimi films).
I think it's quietly amusing that the Nolan trilogy's most enduring contribution to the Batman mythos is 'the Bane voice' - something that doesn't register in the comics medium. Except of course in the mind of the reader!