Peter Parker used facial recognition like the US company
Palantir to spy on all of New York. The newest movie treats This as quirky vs the Nolan Batman movies where Batman does something similar and his allies threatened to quit.
It wasn't even good then. Dark Knight treated universal surveillance as an inherently good idea so long as one sufficiently Strong Smart Man was the arbiter of it. That's just not how shit plays out.
No? It was treated as too great a power for anyone to have, but a necessary sin with the specific current circumstances. It's why Lucius threatened to walk away if Bruce kept it, which is why Bruce destroyed it immediately after using it. If Lucius had changed his mind after seeing Bruce use it, then it'd have treated it the way you said it did, but it was destroyed for a reason.
Lucius didn't just threaten to walk away. He did walk away. But he was pleased to see that Bruce had programmed the technology to self destruct using Lucius's name as the password.
But it didn’t matter that Bruce destroyed it afterwards.
The point is that Bruce created it in the first place.
It’s not The One Ring, The Holy Grail or The Last Unicorn. It’s a computer.
Destroying it is a meaningless gesture. Bruce could build another one at any time.
That’s why Fox walked away.
If push comes to shove Bruce will do almost anything. Sure, it took the Joker to make Bruce to build it. But what about the next villain, or the next guy afterwards.
Each time Bruce justifies building the device, it will become easier to justify.
Just like real life, Tyranny tends to come into existence inch by inch rather than showing up fully assembled
Tbf, it was what made Bruce suceed in that fight, he saved millions because joker could not blow up everything.
Then there's the lie of Harvey Dent.
Bruce goes to extreme lenghts in TDK, and whilst his morality is debated amidst the characters, there's a greyness in his actions, Lucius literally says out-loud to the audience "This is wrong.". But at the end of the day "he is the hero Gotham needs"
Superhero intervention and individual exceptionalism is a debate that has existed since the 80s, practically since Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns came into inception. "Batman is a facist" is since forever.
The good thing is that it is a movie, and that people can critique it or agree with it freely. I think it's important to understand how media is created and how the fictional setting and events that occur speak aloud about what the creators believe.
The circumstances and the actions (and respective consequences) are created deliverately by the author.
Exactly. It was "too great an evil" for anyone to wield but the billionaire who could afford to build it; and who could also decide who was "honorable" enough, or who had "only the best intentions at heart" to be allowed to wield it.
It was too great an evil even for the billionaire, which is why it got destroyed. You'd have a point if they kept it, but they didn't precisely because it's not something anyone should have.
And you'd have a point if it hadn't explicitly been written into the movie as the only way Batman could save the day-- and it did in fact turn out to be the only way Batman could save the day. The narrative conveniently left Batman clean, but the argument made by the plot itself was that the technology itself was necessary and there were situations where it could be justified.
What doesn't have merit is the propagandist bullshit everyone seems to have taken up hook, line, and sinker, where it's justifiable because our heros can be trusted to only use it when absolutely necessary and to willingly relinquish it and destroy its structures afterwards.
I liked the movie as much as the next guy but it was shot through with uncut Patriot Act propaganda, and I'm not just gonna clap like a seal and pretend it wasn't. The world didn't look like this before 9/11. The real "good guys" never push the button to blow up the machine, they normalize its use and inevitable misuse.
What's the thing he says about living long enough to see yourself become a villain? This would be the prime example of him living to become the villain. The actions he does are villainous. They are villainous actions. Using the surveillance tech - however helpful it might be, however few a times he uses it - it's still villainous. So is he for doing so.
Not to mention, you're still boot-licking your way into the "billionaires know better than me" corner at a worrying rate.
It's an allegory for the Patriot Act after 9/11. Thr responsible thing to do was to use it for the mitigating circumstances, an emergency, then once the emergency had passed, to deconstruct it.
You can take the position that that's still inherently immoral, but then you'd have to agree that under no circumstances, ever, would the state (or any authority) be able to weild additional powers in a time of emergency. Huge natural disaster? No national guard coming to restore order.
I think Lucious destroyed it, not Bruce. Some people interpret adding Lucious name as a self-destruct code, but the previous scenes show that Bruce thought he could handle the power. IIRC it is implied like he was using it before the Joker showed up.
It's never implied he was using it before that incident with the Joker (it's actually based on tech Bruce uses for the first time to map out the office building in China) and there's no reason Lucius entering his name on a device Bruce made without his involvement would self destruct it unless Bruce programmed that in.
That's assuming it's Lucius entering his name that destroyed the machine and not just Lucius destroying the machine as he wanted to do the second he laid eyes on it.
Batman literally says "when we are done type your name" and doing so destroys the machine. Also it uses technology introduced not long ago (Sonar) which Lucius showed Batman probably less than a week before. So yeah Batman made the whole thing as a desperate measure to get Joker.
But that happened because pretend people can act in any way you want if you're writing a pretend fun story. No one who builds that system destroys it after one necessary use. Anyone willing to destroy it would never have built it. "Power corrupts" holds true, but I've always found it less true than "only the corrupt seek power."
You've pivoted from "The Dark Knight treats it as a universally good thing" to "it's a work of fiction, so it doesn't matter if it acknowledges it as a bad thing because that's not how it'd go in the real world".
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u/Melodic_Till_3778 17h ago
Peter Parker used facial recognition like the US company Palantir to spy on all of New York. The newest movie treats This as quirky vs the Nolan Batman movies where Batman does something similar and his allies threatened to quit.