There is a difference between being light on plot and not making sense. It's fine if there is not a lot of story in a film (large parts of the TV show Rectify come to mind). But something like a plot twist, or a supervillain executing a masterful plan, by definition involves a dense plot. Then making sense is important.
You've got to give The Dark Knight Rises some credit though, the plane scene has the most unintentionally hilarious dialogue in a blockbuster. Even on paper its pretty poor but Tom Hardy intoning "for you" as if its a direct response to being called a big guy elevates it to hilarity.
Yep. That's why I haven't seen any of these movies. I felt insulted long ago. Super heroes get smashed by a falling building in one scene and are barely scratched. Then, 10 minutes later a strong punch in the gut puts them down. I only watch the funny ones now (Deadpool, e.g.)
Yep. That's why I haven't seen any of these movies. I felt insulted long ago. Super heroes get smashed by a falling building in one scene and are barely scratched. Then, 10 minutes later a strong punch in the gut puts them down. I only watch the funny ones now (Deadpool, e.g.)
I was tracking with you until you came after Ocean's Twelve. Then I started nodding along a bit and begrudgingly agreeing with you. Then I cued up "L'appuntamento" and suddenly... I'm vibing.
It wouldn’t fix every one of the movie’s, problems but Dark Knight Rises would have been a lot better if Bane had just come from Gotham. Give his pseudo-revolution at least a little bit of actual legitimacy which he is exploiting for bad ends and show more of Gotham’s underclass, instead of just an outside agitator (from a soviet bloc country to boot lol) faking it for funsies. And it would save us the Kazakhstan excursion.
Dark Knight Rises really really wants to be Tale of Two Cities (Gordon even reads from it at the end) but Nolan can’t pull it off and it ends up somewhere between thematically incoherent and super reactionary instead.
I can't stand Rides because it ignores the themes of the prior two Nolan Batman movies. Dark Knight especially was very clear that Batman's vigilantism might be a bad thing, actually. Certainly it's a stopgap until the proper institutions can be repaired. Then Rises just jumps in and says, nah, vigilantes cool. Let's have a Batman forever.
I know it's Nolan doing a Prestige – you make the thing vanish (Dark Knight tearing down Batman's reputation) and then bring it back (Rises saying he's a good thing), but man you have to earn that. Rises just assumes it from frame one and it sucks.
One thing I’ll give the movie a little credit for is that I like the idea of the “noble lie” of Harvey Dent the martyr coming back to haunt them. The plot as a whole certainly has problems though.
Having turned out to be the person that I am, I'm rereading 16 or so years of X-Men comics. And what's interesting over this whole mutant soap opera is the change in what's allowed in terms of characterisation: at the beginning, three panels of the team playing baseball was all the character time they were given before a giant robot arrived. Consequently, scenes where a team leader grieves over a member who died carry no weight. Six, seven years later they can spend a whole issue playing baseball and angsting which means there are characters, there are relationships, so when dramatic events take place their reactions make sense and we as readers care.
Perhaps the opposite process has taken place in movies struggling to define themselves against the larger canvas of TV; there's no time for characterisation, only for action, so supposed friends or allies in Planet of the Apes aren't convincing when they claim to care and we don't care either.
(Ocean's Twelve has to go down as one of the worst films I ever saw at the cinema. And it's a long and dismal list.)
I don't know how there isn't any time for character development when every movie now seems to be at least 200 min in running time. They simultaneously have made movies longer with less in them to keep you fully engaged for the entire run time.
Yes, I mentioned this in the other post where Freddie linked to his NY Times article about comic book movies.
In it he talked about how these movies have stories with little emotional range, which I think is weird because most of these comic book movies are adapting absolutely iconic arcs, such as case in point= Knightfall in Dark Knight Rises. They're just doing it badly most of the time, because they don't have the time for setup that a comic or TV show would. Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past, for instance have a huge amount more impact as comics than they do onscreen.
I thought Days Of Futures Past was one of the few clear hits of the X-Men movies after X2. (Although they all suffered the problem that Mystique's actress turned out to be a superstar and so Mystique ended up becoming a necessary part of every storyline.)
Phoenix and Dark Phoenix is a really hard thing to do right with pacing. The comics had a long time of us knowing Phoenix and her even being outclassed a few times, but the movies have to rush it. Both times they told the story where movie one she saves the day as Phoenix and then movie two she has to be stopped as Phoenix. Neither try really worked (and they had completely conflicting core explanations of Phoenix, more than a time rewrite by DoFP could explain). The 90s cartoon might come closest, because they had a whole bunch of episodes between "Phoenix" and "Dark Phoenix." Filler episodes are underrated.
The problem is that, like Batman Vs Superman trying to fillet the climax out of Dark Knight Returns, the whole point of Knightfall was replacing Batman with an armoured, extreme 90s Batman who wasn’t as good then bringing back the original. Take that out and there’s no point to the story; it becomes Batman beaten, Batman gets better, Batman wins. Which isn’t a story so much as the usual sequence of events.
I have to admit I've not seen any of the movies you've critiqued here. But in general, I feel like whenever a movie makes little sense, it's a sign of a failure of the editing process.
Moviemaking is very, very different from say writing a novel. I've been working on a novel for three years now, and I'm finishing up a final round of developmental edits responding to feedback from critique partners. I'm being careful going for continuity. For example, I decided to have a dog die rather than survive as in the first draft, as it served no narrative purpose past a climactic scene other than to tag along, so I'm stripping out all the references to it.
My impression is that screenwriters generally write something fairly coherent and understandable to begin with. Then the studio begins to give "notes" which warp bits of it. If there's a big actor, they might disagree with certain lines, causing it to become further muddled. So right off the bat, it loses thematic coherence.
But it gets really bad once it's time to string all the filmed scenes together to make a movie, because the studio often calls for important linking scenes to be excised. As a result transitions may be jarring, promises may have no payoff, etc. Quite often they try to fix this in reshoots, but the reshot scenes are often the worst sort of expository infodumping - terrible filmmaking which just seeks to paper over the worst plot holes in the most superficial ways, so they can move on to the next big spectacle.
The thing is, filmmaking doesn't have to be this way. It's been noted, for example, that Pixar films (and to a lesser extent, CGI animated films in general) lack issues with nonsensical plots. This is because the rendering has historically been so expensive that the movie is storyboarded until it's 100% nailed down (at least, unless you're James Cameron). So I do think if Hollywood spent more time on pre-production, and less in post-production, we could indeed see more films that actually...made some sense.
Chris McQuarrie (writer for The Usual Suspects) said, of his opening scene of The Way of the Gun, that it was a metaphor for the movie-making process, of what happens after you complete the script and hand it over to those who make it into a movie.
Humans seem to have a compelling psychological need to have our made-up worlds show consistency. I used to teach statutory interpretation in law school and I used the (old, but so am I) example of Han Solo's statement in the original Star Wars that the Millennium Falcon "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs." That makes no sense on its face because a parsec is a unit of distance, not time. The obvious explanation is that George Lucas didn't know what a parsec was and wrote that line just because it sounded science-fictioney. But that metatextual explanation didn't satisfy decades of Star Wars fans, who even before the Internet came into widespread use developed all sorts of in-universe explanations for what was going on ("parsec" means something different in this universe, Han was trying to con what he took to be a couple of chumps from the moisture farms, etc.). It's more satisfying to believe that the text exists as an internally coherent whole, and we'll go to great lengths to interpret it that way.
And what I found interesting is that we do exactly the same thing in interpreting written laws. Statutes are full of contradictions and inconsistencies, partly because different parts of the code may have been written in different decades by different groups of people with different priorities. But courts rarely acknowledge that--there's a strong presumption that Congress is a single omniscient author that always acts with a consistent intent, even though we all know that isn't the case. Maybe there are pragmatic reasons for that presumption but I also think it reflects a psychological impulse that is best understood as aesthetic. It just feels better to us when a text presents itself as internally consistent.
I think that's a grossly underappreciated point. Courts often treat precedents like statutes, parsing language, looking for "intent" or "purpose," etc. As far as I'm aware no one has ever proposed a set of canons of judicial construction, but there really should be. For all the ambiguity and room for outcome-oriented construction that statutes and regulations have, judicial precedents have far more.
I think that's a gross oversimplification that ignores a great deal of variation between judges and even the same judge in different circumstances. It would be foolish to deny that legal authorities are sometimes indeterminate and judges may be influenced either consciously or unconsciously by their own preferences, identities, perspectives. But I think it's equally foolish to claim that there's nothing more to it than that.
" As far as I'm aware no one has ever proposed a set of canons of judicial construction, but there really should be."
That is exactly what 'tiers of scrutiny' and 'history, text and tradition' are. SCOTUS is constantly trying to find something like a canon or standard that can be applied evenly and maintain relevance and legitimacy over long periods of time.
I would say those are principles of constitutional construction more than canons for the construction of judicial opinions. Important for sure, but they don't purport to provide ex ante principles for the application of a judicial opinion to a new situation.
I think most people don't really care and are perfectly comfortable with the idea that George Lucas made a science mistake half a century ago. There are a few obsessive types who want to "read into" everything to make it intentional (who, incidentally, are the same people who talk about Star Wars constantly and know every nook and cranny of its universe). These people obsessed with Star Wars are not normal, and do not evince normal behaviors.
It's a convenient example of behavior that I think is pretty common. And to my point, it's formalized in legal interpretation as the "whole act rule" of statutory construction. I don't think it would be at all difficult to find other examples from popular culture. We prefer consistency and will put some effort into finding an interpretation that avoids internal contradiction where possible.
If you phrase it as "this behavior is common among people who really, really care about a thing," then I'd probably agree. I think there are a million "holes" in most TV series and movies. Most of them are simply, when they are noticed, overlooked because the movie or series is fun to watch and that is the very definition of suspension of disbelief.
Perhaps where you and I disagree (to the extent that we do) is that I believe the fact that most people are "okay" with many minor inconsistencies means that while we *want* our made-up worlds to be consistent, most people are willing to overlook it when they're not consistent, provided it's not egregious (and "egregious" is a line I'd expect is different for everyone, but most people will concentrate around a mean that's fairly permissive).
My comment is irrelevant compared to James’ comparison of plot and meta with statutory interpretation of law (and yours will be too, so go read his first just to feel better about wasting your time on blogs), but…*Lost* is practically the canonical example of this practice.
Interestingly, the mention of *I Am Legend* made me think of another weird movie with an empty Times Square: *Vanilla Sky*. It’s been decades since I’ve seen it, but my recollection is that by practically tacking on the explanation in the last 10 minutes or so it got around this problem a bit: You had a lot of fun here, show’s over and we’re ripping the band-aid off.
I'm getting the same feeling that plot is being stressed less and even on material that really requires it. I read the book "Presumed Innocent" and watched the movie back in the day when they were released and enjoyed them. I recently watched the reboot series. I was looking forward to this as a test case of whether a tightly packed movie can be beaten by the extra time given a series. If given a choice to make a movie or a series based on a book I think I'd take the series, because you naturally get more time to develop characters. One downside though, you also need to chop things up in a way where each episode can stand alone. Unfortunately, the series in this case was bad enough where it wasn't a fair fight, somehow they did a worse job with character building in the series. The plot actually made less sense in the series and was less developed than the movie. I can suspend disbelief at action movies but when the movie is based on human relationships and doesn't make sense I blank out.
Re: the DKR restaurant scene--Bruce didn't seem surprised to see Alfred, so I thought we were meant to understand that he missed Alfred enough to keep tabs on him and was consequently able to show up in the right restaurant at the right time. Possibly they even had a conversation, or maybe they just left it at eye contact to completely fulfill Alfred's little narrative of Bruce off living a healthy life without needing to be looked after. So that's one thing that we can maybe subtract from the list of stuff in DKR that makes no sense, leaving only 843 other things that truly are stupid and incomprehensible.
I saw the title of this and was prepared to argue against your premise, but I actually found myself agreeing with a lot of what you wrote.
I would qualify the claim that plots need to make sense, though. I think both of the primary examples you've used here are similar in that they are (1) late entries in very long-running IPs that (2) are seemingly embarrassed by the origins of their premises and (3) are trying a bit too hard to generate "serious" vibes through heavy-handed darkness and overly-convoluted plots. The problem, I think, is that the convoluted plots are being used as markers of the film's seriousness, which doesn't work when the films spend so much time on plot developments that the filmmakers want you to think are intelligent when they don't hold up to any scrutiny.
There are some kinds of movies where plot is much less important, of course. You mentioned Malick, and I think that could be broadened to include many types of art house fare. There are other types of movies, though, where how much the plot makes sense is less relevant. In a comedy like Airplane!, the fact that things very often don't make sense is part of the joke. In many horror movies, especially ones that dabble in the supernatural, aspects of the plot very often don't make logical sense, but that can be part of what makes them so scary.
To bring this back to a genre somewhat closer to the films you describe here--the plots of James Bond movies never made very much sense, but that never bothered me very much when the movies were primarily showcases of exotic locations, sexy women, ludicrous gadgets, and fun action set pieces. It's only in the Daniel Craig era when the plots became much more convoluted and more serious (and more importantly--convoluted as a supposed marker of seriousness) that the nonsensical plots got in the way of my enjoyment of them.
"Last Year at Marienbad," is a great example of a story where the plot either doesn't exist, or at least is heavily obscured, leading to the viewer's making their own interpretation. Perhaps, coming up with a new interpretation with each viewing. It's been many years since my last viewing. Maybe it's time for me to see if I have a new interpretation.
There is a difference between being light on plot and not making sense. It's fine if there is not a lot of story in a film (large parts of the TV show Rectify come to mind). But something like a plot twist, or a supervillain executing a masterful plan, by definition involves a dense plot. Then making sense is important.
You've got to give The Dark Knight Rises some credit though, the plane scene has the most unintentionally hilarious dialogue in a blockbuster. Even on paper its pretty poor but Tom Hardy intoning "for you" as if its a direct response to being called a big guy elevates it to hilarity.
That exchange it SO WEIRD
Yep. That's why I haven't seen any of these movies. I felt insulted long ago. Super heroes get smashed by a falling building in one scene and are barely scratched. Then, 10 minutes later a strong punch in the gut puts them down. I only watch the funny ones now (Deadpool, e.g.)
Yep. That's why I haven't seen any of these movies. I felt insulted long ago. Super heroes get smashed by a falling building in one scene and are barely scratched. Then, 10 minutes later a strong punch in the gut puts them down. I only watch the funny ones now (Deadpool, e.g.)
I was tracking with you until you came after Ocean's Twelve. Then I started nodding along a bit and begrudgingly agreeing with you. Then I cued up "L'appuntamento" and suddenly... I'm vibing.
It wouldn’t fix every one of the movie’s, problems but Dark Knight Rises would have been a lot better if Bane had just come from Gotham. Give his pseudo-revolution at least a little bit of actual legitimacy which he is exploiting for bad ends and show more of Gotham’s underclass, instead of just an outside agitator (from a soviet bloc country to boot lol) faking it for funsies. And it would save us the Kazakhstan excursion.
Dark Knight Rises really really wants to be Tale of Two Cities (Gordon even reads from it at the end) but Nolan can’t pull it off and it ends up somewhere between thematically incoherent and super reactionary instead.
I can't stand Rides because it ignores the themes of the prior two Nolan Batman movies. Dark Knight especially was very clear that Batman's vigilantism might be a bad thing, actually. Certainly it's a stopgap until the proper institutions can be repaired. Then Rises just jumps in and says, nah, vigilantes cool. Let's have a Batman forever.
I know it's Nolan doing a Prestige – you make the thing vanish (Dark Knight tearing down Batman's reputation) and then bring it back (Rises saying he's a good thing), but man you have to earn that. Rises just assumes it from frame one and it sucks.
One thing I’ll give the movie a little credit for is that I like the idea of the “noble lie” of Harvey Dent the martyr coming back to haunt them. The plot as a whole certainly has problems though.
Having turned out to be the person that I am, I'm rereading 16 or so years of X-Men comics. And what's interesting over this whole mutant soap opera is the change in what's allowed in terms of characterisation: at the beginning, three panels of the team playing baseball was all the character time they were given before a giant robot arrived. Consequently, scenes where a team leader grieves over a member who died carry no weight. Six, seven years later they can spend a whole issue playing baseball and angsting which means there are characters, there are relationships, so when dramatic events take place their reactions make sense and we as readers care.
Perhaps the opposite process has taken place in movies struggling to define themselves against the larger canvas of TV; there's no time for characterisation, only for action, so supposed friends or allies in Planet of the Apes aren't convincing when they claim to care and we don't care either.
(Ocean's Twelve has to go down as one of the worst films I ever saw at the cinema. And it's a long and dismal list.)
I don't know how there isn't any time for character development when every movie now seems to be at least 200 min in running time. They simultaneously have made movies longer with less in them to keep you fully engaged for the entire run time.
It's movies by the yard. Tickets cost so much now they're selling film in bulk to make audiences feel like they got their money's worth.
Yes, I mentioned this in the other post where Freddie linked to his NY Times article about comic book movies.
In it he talked about how these movies have stories with little emotional range, which I think is weird because most of these comic book movies are adapting absolutely iconic arcs, such as case in point= Knightfall in Dark Knight Rises. They're just doing it badly most of the time, because they don't have the time for setup that a comic or TV show would. Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past, for instance have a huge amount more impact as comics than they do onscreen.
I thought Days Of Futures Past was one of the few clear hits of the X-Men movies after X2. (Although they all suffered the problem that Mystique's actress turned out to be a superstar and so Mystique ended up becoming a necessary part of every storyline.)
Phoenix and Dark Phoenix is a really hard thing to do right with pacing. The comics had a long time of us knowing Phoenix and her even being outclassed a few times, but the movies have to rush it. Both times they told the story where movie one she saves the day as Phoenix and then movie two she has to be stopped as Phoenix. Neither try really worked (and they had completely conflicting core explanations of Phoenix, more than a time rewrite by DoFP could explain). The 90s cartoon might come closest, because they had a whole bunch of episodes between "Phoenix" and "Dark Phoenix." Filler episodes are underrated.
The problem is that, like Batman Vs Superman trying to fillet the climax out of Dark Knight Returns, the whole point of Knightfall was replacing Batman with an armoured, extreme 90s Batman who wasn’t as good then bringing back the original. Take that out and there’s no point to the story; it becomes Batman beaten, Batman gets better, Batman wins. Which isn’t a story so much as the usual sequence of events.
I have to admit I've not seen any of the movies you've critiqued here. But in general, I feel like whenever a movie makes little sense, it's a sign of a failure of the editing process.
Moviemaking is very, very different from say writing a novel. I've been working on a novel for three years now, and I'm finishing up a final round of developmental edits responding to feedback from critique partners. I'm being careful going for continuity. For example, I decided to have a dog die rather than survive as in the first draft, as it served no narrative purpose past a climactic scene other than to tag along, so I'm stripping out all the references to it.
My impression is that screenwriters generally write something fairly coherent and understandable to begin with. Then the studio begins to give "notes" which warp bits of it. If there's a big actor, they might disagree with certain lines, causing it to become further muddled. So right off the bat, it loses thematic coherence.
But it gets really bad once it's time to string all the filmed scenes together to make a movie, because the studio often calls for important linking scenes to be excised. As a result transitions may be jarring, promises may have no payoff, etc. Quite often they try to fix this in reshoots, but the reshot scenes are often the worst sort of expository infodumping - terrible filmmaking which just seeks to paper over the worst plot holes in the most superficial ways, so they can move on to the next big spectacle.
The thing is, filmmaking doesn't have to be this way. It's been noted, for example, that Pixar films (and to a lesser extent, CGI animated films in general) lack issues with nonsensical plots. This is because the rendering has historically been so expensive that the movie is storyboarded until it's 100% nailed down (at least, unless you're James Cameron). So I do think if Hollywood spent more time on pre-production, and less in post-production, we could indeed see more films that actually...made some sense.
Chris McQuarrie (writer for The Usual Suspects) said, of his opening scene of The Way of the Gun, that it was a metaphor for the movie-making process, of what happens after you complete the script and hand it over to those who make it into a movie.
"She's got a big mouth but she's not kidding. I'm gonna whip you silly and I'm gonna fuck you stupid".
Humans seem to have a compelling psychological need to have our made-up worlds show consistency. I used to teach statutory interpretation in law school and I used the (old, but so am I) example of Han Solo's statement in the original Star Wars that the Millennium Falcon "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs." That makes no sense on its face because a parsec is a unit of distance, not time. The obvious explanation is that George Lucas didn't know what a parsec was and wrote that line just because it sounded science-fictioney. But that metatextual explanation didn't satisfy decades of Star Wars fans, who even before the Internet came into widespread use developed all sorts of in-universe explanations for what was going on ("parsec" means something different in this universe, Han was trying to con what he took to be a couple of chumps from the moisture farms, etc.). It's more satisfying to believe that the text exists as an internally coherent whole, and we'll go to great lengths to interpret it that way.
And what I found interesting is that we do exactly the same thing in interpreting written laws. Statutes are full of contradictions and inconsistencies, partly because different parts of the code may have been written in different decades by different groups of people with different priorities. But courts rarely acknowledge that--there's a strong presumption that Congress is a single omniscient author that always acts with a consistent intent, even though we all know that isn't the case. Maybe there are pragmatic reasons for that presumption but I also think it reflects a psychological impulse that is best understood as aesthetic. It just feels better to us when a text presents itself as internally consistent.
One could say the same about judicial precedent.
It was abundantly obvious to me that first, judges decide the ruling and then construct a rationalization to reach that conclusion.
I think that's a grossly underappreciated point. Courts often treat precedents like statutes, parsing language, looking for "intent" or "purpose," etc. As far as I'm aware no one has ever proposed a set of canons of judicial construction, but there really should be. For all the ambiguity and room for outcome-oriented construction that statutes and regulations have, judicial precedents have far more.
Once you cut through the bullshit, judicial precedent, even more than statutes, are simply power plays. Nothing less or more.
I think that's a gross oversimplification that ignores a great deal of variation between judges and even the same judge in different circumstances. It would be foolish to deny that legal authorities are sometimes indeterminate and judges may be influenced either consciously or unconsciously by their own preferences, identities, perspectives. But I think it's equally foolish to claim that there's nothing more to it than that.
This is why judicial appointment is so intensely political.
" As far as I'm aware no one has ever proposed a set of canons of judicial construction, but there really should be."
That is exactly what 'tiers of scrutiny' and 'history, text and tradition' are. SCOTUS is constantly trying to find something like a canon or standard that can be applied evenly and maintain relevance and legitimacy over long periods of time.
I would say those are principles of constitutional construction more than canons for the construction of judicial opinions. Important for sure, but they don't purport to provide ex ante principles for the application of a judicial opinion to a new situation.
I think most people don't really care and are perfectly comfortable with the idea that George Lucas made a science mistake half a century ago. There are a few obsessive types who want to "read into" everything to make it intentional (who, incidentally, are the same people who talk about Star Wars constantly and know every nook and cranny of its universe). These people obsessed with Star Wars are not normal, and do not evince normal behaviors.
It's a convenient example of behavior that I think is pretty common. And to my point, it's formalized in legal interpretation as the "whole act rule" of statutory construction. I don't think it would be at all difficult to find other examples from popular culture. We prefer consistency and will put some effort into finding an interpretation that avoids internal contradiction where possible.
If you phrase it as "this behavior is common among people who really, really care about a thing," then I'd probably agree. I think there are a million "holes" in most TV series and movies. Most of them are simply, when they are noticed, overlooked because the movie or series is fun to watch and that is the very definition of suspension of disbelief.
Perhaps where you and I disagree (to the extent that we do) is that I believe the fact that most people are "okay" with many minor inconsistencies means that while we *want* our made-up worlds to be consistent, most people are willing to overlook it when they're not consistent, provided it's not egregious (and "egregious" is a line I'd expect is different for everyone, but most people will concentrate around a mean that's fairly permissive).
I admire Terrence Malick too, but God, I'd give anything for another Billy Wilder!
I laughed. Good article
My comment is irrelevant compared to James’ comparison of plot and meta with statutory interpretation of law (and yours will be too, so go read his first just to feel better about wasting your time on blogs), but…*Lost* is practically the canonical example of this practice.
Interestingly, the mention of *I Am Legend* made me think of another weird movie with an empty Times Square: *Vanilla Sky*. It’s been decades since I’ve seen it, but my recollection is that by practically tacking on the explanation in the last 10 minutes or so it got around this problem a bit: You had a lot of fun here, show’s over and we’re ripping the band-aid off.
I haven't thought about that movie in a million years!
"Vanilla Sky" is such a perfectly little weird snapshot of a brief end of the 90s/early 2000s/pre-9/11/GWOT moment in time.
Perhaps. I think of the remake of The Manchurian Candidate along those lines
Oops! Read that wrong. Pretty much all of ‘99 is like that. And even though it’s post 9/11 I’d put Lost In Translation up there as well
I'm getting the same feeling that plot is being stressed less and even on material that really requires it. I read the book "Presumed Innocent" and watched the movie back in the day when they were released and enjoyed them. I recently watched the reboot series. I was looking forward to this as a test case of whether a tightly packed movie can be beaten by the extra time given a series. If given a choice to make a movie or a series based on a book I think I'd take the series, because you naturally get more time to develop characters. One downside though, you also need to chop things up in a way where each episode can stand alone. Unfortunately, the series in this case was bad enough where it wasn't a fair fight, somehow they did a worse job with character building in the series. The plot actually made less sense in the series and was less developed than the movie. I can suspend disbelief at action movies but when the movie is based on human relationships and doesn't make sense I blank out.
Re: the DKR restaurant scene--Bruce didn't seem surprised to see Alfred, so I thought we were meant to understand that he missed Alfred enough to keep tabs on him and was consequently able to show up in the right restaurant at the right time. Possibly they even had a conversation, or maybe they just left it at eye contact to completely fulfill Alfred's little narrative of Bruce off living a healthy life without needing to be looked after. So that's one thing that we can maybe subtract from the list of stuff in DKR that makes no sense, leaving only 843 other things that truly are stupid and incomprehensible.
I saw the title of this and was prepared to argue against your premise, but I actually found myself agreeing with a lot of what you wrote.
I would qualify the claim that plots need to make sense, though. I think both of the primary examples you've used here are similar in that they are (1) late entries in very long-running IPs that (2) are seemingly embarrassed by the origins of their premises and (3) are trying a bit too hard to generate "serious" vibes through heavy-handed darkness and overly-convoluted plots. The problem, I think, is that the convoluted plots are being used as markers of the film's seriousness, which doesn't work when the films spend so much time on plot developments that the filmmakers want you to think are intelligent when they don't hold up to any scrutiny.
There are some kinds of movies where plot is much less important, of course. You mentioned Malick, and I think that could be broadened to include many types of art house fare. There are other types of movies, though, where how much the plot makes sense is less relevant. In a comedy like Airplane!, the fact that things very often don't make sense is part of the joke. In many horror movies, especially ones that dabble in the supernatural, aspects of the plot very often don't make logical sense, but that can be part of what makes them so scary.
To bring this back to a genre somewhat closer to the films you describe here--the plots of James Bond movies never made very much sense, but that never bothered me very much when the movies were primarily showcases of exotic locations, sexy women, ludicrous gadgets, and fun action set pieces. It's only in the Daniel Craig era when the plots became much more convoluted and more serious (and more importantly--convoluted as a supposed marker of seriousness) that the nonsensical plots got in the way of my enjoyment of them.
"Last Year at Marienbad," is a great example of a story where the plot either doesn't exist, or at least is heavily obscured, leading to the viewer's making their own interpretation. Perhaps, coming up with a new interpretation with each viewing. It's been many years since my last viewing. Maybe it's time for me to see if I have a new interpretation.
Story is King.
It is and always will be, ignore it at your own peril (which plenty seem to be doing nowadays).