To start off this will be FILLED to the brim with spoilers for the Dark Knight and Batman Begins, so read with caution if you haven't seen them. My title may be a bit misleading, but I think it gets the point across. I don't understand why Nolan is making this movie, and his choice in villians is atrocious. So first off I will admit that I hate what Nolan is doing with Batman. It's not that he's making terrible movies, although I really disliked Batman Begins, it's that he's making a DC Hero more realistic and he's making up his own stories as he goes.  See DC was always a lot more sci-fi heavy and you had things like aliens, and other dimensions and time-travelers and all kinds of other shit. Trying to make that into something it isn't, a real thing, is just generally a really moronic idea. That said, he did a pretty good job with the Joker, I still prefer Mark Hamill's Joker, but that's beside the point. He did fucking terrible with Ra's al Ghul however. Here is quote from wikipedia regarding Ra's origin: "As told in Birth of the Demon, Ra's al Ghul is born over 600 years before his first appearance in Batman comics, to a tribe of nomads in a desert somewhere in Arabia, near a city whose inhabitants' ancestors have journeyed to the Arabian Peninsula from China." Take note of two things in this quote. 1. He's over 600 years old. 2. He's of arabian descent. In Batman Begins, Christian Bale goes to Bhutan, which is east of India not in the Middle East, and trains ninjitsu with Ra's Al Ghul, who is a white Liam Neeson and who ends up dieing. Apart from that, which I admit is a little nitpicky, the story arc of "contamination" in the batman comics was about "the clench" virus or the thing from Batman Begins. Take into account this paragraph from http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Batman:_Legacy: 

"It concerns the returning outbreak of a lethal disease in Gotham City, and Batman's attempts to combat it with his closest allies by discovering its origin in the Middle East. There, Batman faces two of his deadliest foes: Ra's al Ghul, who created the virus centuries ago, and Bane, the man who broke him. The Gotham Knights travel throughout the world as they race to stop The League of Assassins from releasing their pure strain of the virus across the globe, and Gotham itself becomes arena for a rematch between Bane and the Dark Knight." So when did that happen in Batman Begins. Also I might add to my previous statement, about how Ra's Al Ghul in comics is Nothing like Liam Neeson in Batman Begins, this quote: "Eventually, a way to eliminate the Clench virus is deduced from an ancient "Wheel of Plagues" artifact whose knowledge has aided Ra's in the creation of the disease. But the immortal madman again eludes his foes" Wait a minute I thought he died when they crashed the train, into the... Oh Wait he's immortal. The point I'm making here is that Nolan and Goyer are really bad at picking and adapting villians. To spell it out for you, Ra's Al Ghul is a very interesting villian, but a terrible Batman villian for the realistic batman movies, because he's immortal and he's been alive for hundreds of years, therefore 100% impossible to be a real thing. Also they didn't address his backstory AT ALL, and fucked up everything else about him, other than his reasoning for releasing "the clench".

Moving on, I personally thought The Dark Knight was a pretty good ending. It got rid of three of the biggest Batman villians, Two-face, The Joker and Scarecrow. I mean they did a better job at adapting the Joker, even though Harley Quinn wasn't there, and it still wasn't a very good job. They Really messed up Two-Face, who I might add has been a Batman Villian for oh just 69 years. Even Batman Forever did a better job with adapting Two-Face and Batman Forever sucked. Oh and hey They messed up Scarecrow real bad too, but I'm done talking about that. What I was getting at was The Dark Knight was the perfect closure, he got most of the big memorable bad guys, what else could Batman do in Gotham. oh apparently "Rise"...

Lastly, what the fuck are they going to do with this new movie. They identified the villians a couple days ago, that is probably what pissed me off and got me writing this blog, as Bane and the Catwoman. The first reason that is stupid is the fact that Bane and The Catwoman, have never, ever done anything together. Two Bane's most notorious stunt is breaking Arkham Asylum and releasing a lot of other criminals, three of which, The Joker, Two-face, and Scarecrow, are dead or imprisoned, and then he breaks Batman's back. This forces a new Batman to take over, who sort of abandons Robin. That whole side-plot can't happen, because Robin hasn't been introduced yet, and would be way to much for one movie. i mean there are several character Arc's involved which would take more than 2 hours to accomplish. Add Catwoman into the mix and oh jeez. Another big Bane stunt, is with Ra's al Ghul, the whole "the clench" thing, but that apparently already happened. So wait what other things did Bane do, umm he fought in the battle of Metropolis and he killed some drug lords. At this point you must be trying to follow my train of thought, and here is where i'm going. There isn't a possible Bane plot to make realistic,other then the first one, so they are going to probably change a bunch of shit around. Oh yeah and Tom Hardy is going to be Bane. Tom Hardy is skinny, 6 ft and looks kind of like an underwear model. Bane is an ugly 5,6 ft muscular criminal who takes a drug called Venom which makes him about 6,8 ft tall and gives him muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I mean Bane and Hardy are practically the same person, who am I kidding. Well onto catwoman, who is Anne Hathaway... What the Fuck. Well point here is bad casting is bad.

Well they could maybe make an interesting story, but it wouldn't be an adaptation or anything related to Batman, or even a reimagining of anything related to Batman. It would be some random ass story that Nolan and Goyer threw together with some pretty recognizable Batman villians. The Dark Knight was good, because of it's excellent acting, no offence Dark Knight fanboys, but the plot was pretty dumb. Partially due to the fact that they messed up Two-Face real hard and made him into a cardboard cutout versus the interesting villian he was in the comics. The Dark Knight Rises, is missing it's two great actors, Aaron Eckhart and Heath Ledger. They have been replaced by Anne Hathaway and Tom Hardy. Neither of which are really exceptional actors.

So I'll end this with a question. What is all the Hype for? From all the super-hero movies coming out in the next couple years, most of which look stupider than shit, do you really think that The Dark Knight rises, is going to be any different. Bane is a drug addict, Catwoman is a vigilante. Nothing super thought provoking about that. Personally I feel as though Nolan should stick to original movies, The Prestige, Memento and inception were all creative and awesome. Why does he have to stomp all over the Batman franchise, take it out of it's universe and make dribble out of interesting characters. toss a comment down there is you want to debate anything or whatever, and Thanks For Reading.

So I'm pretty sure everyone and their mother is playing Halo Reach by this point and unfortunately I don't understand why. I guess I'm going to kind of review Halo Reach  so if you are in love with the gamesand are completely blind to its obvious failures than feel free to stop reading. Starting with how I've never reviewed a video game before probably because it’s a little more complicated than a movie review. It's a lot more opinion, whereas with movies it's a lot more little technical stuff, like how it was filmed was the music good, was the script funny/scary/dramatic/fucking awesome. So anyway I'm going to judge Reach on its game play, its difficulty, its story and the stories correlation to the books titled Halo: The Fall of Reach and Halo: First Strike.

Starting with the game play, which is recycled Halo 3 with different controls. Well Halo Reach pulled a Resident Evil 5 were it fucked with the controls for no important reason; I guess changing controls after 4 games of very similar control schemes is how developers do it nowadays. The point I'm trying to make there is it was totally unnecessary, and they could have been doing other stuff with their time. Now aside from the controls, the game play is virtually exactly the same, as Halo 3, except now you get a cool more cinematic execution instead of just hitting them with your gun when they are turned around. This is a start in the right direction, but there is no cool melee combat system, which is really stupid. If you know anything about the Spartans they have super strength and they're shields, at least the older ones I'm not sure if the newer models adapted this, only activate when they are hit by high velocity rounds. In the past entries they have just had it be you hit them with your gun and it takes away their shields, and another smack will kill them. While this is disappointing I understand that it would be hard to install a close combat system back in the original Halo or even Halo 2, but it was kind of disappointing to see it not implemented in Halo 3 and even more disappointing to see nothing about it in Reach. Next is the first person shooter aspect to the game, because I get that my expectations were high expecting a FPS beat um' up that will probably never happen. The First person shooter aspect of this game sucks in all honesty. If you've played any of the newer Call of Duties, or Battlefield: Bad companies you'll see a very nicely done shooter where you can zoom in with every gun and you can actually sort of feel like a soldier. You can zoom in with every gun in Reach, but with some, like the assault rifle, it's like looking through some really shitty binoculars. Basically the game play is classic FPS style and I'm not saying DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D aren't fun I'm saying that the FPS genre has evolved and newer games should have a newer feel and not one like we don't know how to make a good shooter so we are just going to milk the shit out of this franchise and the original FPS style. To conclude the game play is just recycled Halo 3 game play with new-ish guns and no dual wield. The guns have been balanced a little bit better, but I kind of want something that isn't just another bad copy of the original Halo game play.

Next up is its difficulty, which I might add is ridiculously hard. Lots of people have been saying that this is the right kind of hard and that kind of thing, but no it is not. The enemies have a percent accuracy so when they shoot their guns at you from whatever distance this many bullets will hit you if you’re standing in point a and this many will hit you in point B. On Legendary it's something like 95%+ if you are standing in the open with no cover, from distances of up to like 100 in game yards away. Unfortunately we do not have this nice accuracy thing and we don't have a zoom option on the majority of the guns we pick up so this becomes fucking ridiculous because it is very hard to hit enemies when they are that far away. To add to the difficulty 4 rounds from a plasma rifles, which is an alien machine gun, brings your shields down and like 2 or 3 more kill you. It takes like an entries Assault Rifle clip or Plasma Rifle burst, until overheat, to take down an elites shield and there are parts where you are fighting up to 5 elites. Some may look at this like well you’re just bad at the game or you don't enjoy difficult games, but no I definitely enjoy difficult games. I just think it is ridiculous that they cripple your character and it veers away from the strategy aspect of the game and makes it more skill and ammo based.

It’s time for correlation and story which are terribly done and should be thought of as a landmark of fail. So here is what happened in Halo Reach: You are one of 6 Spartan III’s known as Noble Team, and you go to take care of insurrectionists on Reach and then you find out there is a Covenant Capital ship and then you fight the Covenant and kill their Capital ship and then like 6 or so more Capital Ships arrive in a Cinematic and all hell breaks loose, and you fight Brutes and your goal is to get Cortana to the Pillar Of Autumn. And a Spartan III named Jun flies Dr. Halsey away in a pelican. First of all I want to point out some obvious plot holes in this mess. First off Reach is the main military hub for the UNSC who is at war with the Covenant, so how did they let a Covenant ship into their atmosphere. I guarantee if an alien ship came to earth we would know about it before it even entered our atmosphere and the game takes place 542 years from now on the main military hub where all of their ships and defenses are. I just find it criminally unlikely that a ship would get through undetected I mean the only argument is that maybe they were in stealth mode, but even so they dropped troops onto the planet. That is the only huge plot hole without comparing the game to the books. First off when compared to Halo: The Fall of Reach, which was written in 2001 the same year as the original Halo game came out, there are two big story pieces that don’t correlate. First is the whole sneaking onto Reach, they tracked Captain Keyes’s destroyer ship the Iroquois to Reach and sent their entire fleet to attack Reach, there was no one ship tip-toeing its way through the entire UNSC army bullshit. Second big thing is where Cortana and Captain Keyes were. In the book they were going to do a sneak attack mission to obtain one of the Covenant religious leaders, or a Prophet and barter a truce with the covenant. Cortana was inside Master Chiefs Mjolnir armor and they are the only Spartans and A.I. that got to the Pillar of Autumn. In the game you command Noble Six a Spartan III that gets Cortana to the Pillar of Autumn and then you die. Well Noble Six is not Master Chief and Master Chief had Cortana, so therefore somebody fucked something up with the games story. I’m not going to explain the other shit that doesn’t make sense I just don’t seem to understand why they would make a story that clashes with the story from a book written 9 years ago. In all honesty Reach is a really stupid video game to make because in the book it is described as more of a holocaust then a battle. That said it may be of interest to say that a majority of the people working for Bungie currently didn’t work on the original Halo so it can be inferred that they didn’t supervise the creation of the first couple books. It seems that they thought well enough people didn’t read the book so we will turn a holocaust into a small battle, because that is what Halo Reach is. You never fight copious amounts of Covenant it’s always like maybe 6-10 guys per firefight, which is like the first Halo game. Yet in the first Halo game small divisions of Covenant were trying to find the humans from the Pillar of Autumn and imprison/kill them, it wasn’t the whole fleet. Well I could bitch about how they are just milking the genre and how the story is subpar and conflicts with the books that were written about the games, but I think that’s enough.

Now I’ll briefly cover the remaining lesser subjects, like graphics and music. The graphics were very well done; in fact I’d even go to say that they were great. As far as music goes it was a step up from Halo 3, but a step back from Halo 2. The music at some points was more irritating then it was cool, they just used repeating riffs, and not like minute long repeating riffs, but like say 10 notes on a guitar or bass repeating over and over again. I thought the cinematic music was pretty good, but Reach’s music is all pretty subpar, although better than Halo 3’s like stated before.

To conclude Halo Reach is a colossal disappointment story wise and game play wise, other than new guns the only thing added was executions. Overall the only thing that was upgraded from Halo 3 was the graphics, which are very nice, but they don’t atone for the shit that this game is. One last thing I got to say is I am being extremely harsh on this game, because it is extremely personal. I used to be a Halo nerd, like someone was a Star Trek or Star wars nerd, but Bungie seems to have just taken a shit on this series with Halo Reach, and its intense popularity is like a shit on Eric Nylund. Eric Nylund wrote the Halo books, Fall of Reach, First Strike, and Ghosts of Onyx and the game totally discredited most of his work. The games only saving grace is its multiplayer which is exceedingly similar to Halo 3, but then again it’s nowhere near as good of a shooter as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which makes it really sad to think that it is probably going to make more money than both of those games. I really want to thank anyone who actually read through this because to me this game was such a colossal disappointment and it is nice to have people actually listen to my opinion whether you agree or disagree.