It's also entirely possible that Bruce Wayne did not survive, and what we see at the end is Alfred's wish, not reality. It could be him imagining that Bruce had finally put the past behind him and moved on with life. I keep wondering about that, honestly, because the movie foreshadows Bruce's death several times, most notably when Selina tells him that he's already given everything to Gotham and he replies "No, not everything. Not yet."JediTricks wrote:The end of The Dark Knight Rises is crap in a hat, they set up mountains of foundation saying Bruce Wayne cannot survive the explosion at any distance he could reasonably get to, they show him in the cockpit on the scene just before it blows up - the only half-plausible argument out there is that he's in a remote control cockpit, having separated from the ship earlier, but the visuals prove that can't be the case with a shot of the city moving background through the cockpit window AFTER the last chance to eject over land in the exploded building, and worse, moving lights over the cockpit and Bruce from the front a moment before the bomb goes up, the autopilot argument the film makes later is failed by this false dramatic "no way out" foundation they laid through visual statements.
So, there's a little ambiguity in that character ending as well.
I think so. Because I generally agree that killing a character off and then bringing them back miraculously is a cheat and renders the drama of their death null, and that it's an overused dramatic device in comics, but I also think there are exceptions to that rule.Anyway, you make an interesting argument overall, I read the whole thing but only quoted the stuff I really could add thoughts to. I think you and I are in a "shades of gray" scenario here (using that metaphor a lot lately) where we agree on a lot of this stuff, just at different levels we're willing to tolerate certain things.
