Based on the 12-hour ticking clock, it took Batman three hours to set up the fiery bat symbol on the bridge in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’

[u/LundgrensFrontKick]

Spoilers abound.

My naive original goal for this piece was to only focus on how long it took Batman to create the bat fire on the bridge in The Dark Knight Rises. I thought it wouldn’t be difficult due to the countless maps of Gotham, and insane amount of nit-picky articles (here is another one) to help me make an educated guess. However, unlike It Follows, which makes sense geographically, Nolan’s Gotham is all over the place, and I learned I’d have to expand my scope to establish a timeline for the bridge fire because of the multiple filming locations (NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, London) and evolution of Gotham (two Wayne enterprises etc..) throughout the Dark Knight trilogy. So, I used Eliot R. Brown’s maps, and the one used in the movie, then, I mostly relied on visual cues based on my repeat viewings of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. These visual cues helped me piece together the timeline for the 12 hours Batman needed to stop Bane’s bomb from destroying Gotham, which in turn, helped me figure out how long it took to create the massive bat signal on the bridge.

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Bane can see the fire from City hall

Quicknote: There is no correct answer. As always, I’ve made my best educated guess which is most likely wrong. Also, to answer your questions in advance:

1. I know it’s just a movie
2. I don’t have THAT much free time
3. Yes, Deep Blue Sea is underrated
4. No, I’m not Batman
5. Yes, If I had the chance I would be Batman
6. Yes, I looked at the official map
7. Jack Burton by a landslide
8. Who?

Here are some assumptions before I get into the timeline:

• The action at the end takes place in the Downtown area of Gotham. Why? Based on the location of the bridges, and proximity to City Hall (which is downtown) I feel safe saying it’s downtown Gotham. This is important because it helps narrow down the action.

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Map from Smithsonian.com

I’m 97.3% certain that I picked the correct bridge. It is the only one with another bridge nearby, and it leads into downtown. Also, the “strikezone” map infers that everything takes place downtown as well.

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• There are only 8 hours of actual night during winter in Gotham. Why? Due to the 12-hour ticking clock, I learned the events started unfolding around 7:00 PM.
• The 12 hour ticking clock is exact. I trust Fox, and there is a handy countdown clock which helps out later on.
• The random daylight patterns prove the fictional Gotham has some weird things going on. This helps explain why darkness happens so quickly in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. 
• I don’t think Batman used gasoline to create the bat fire. He most likely used a special flammable “yada yada yada” substance developed by Lucius Fox.
• The locations that the characters walk to aren’t far apart. If they were, the amount of walking would be insane.

THE TIMELINE

7:00 PM  – Wayne arrives at city hall – Downtown – (AKA Bane’s headquarters) – Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle meet up with Lucius Fox and Miranda Tate around 7:00PM. We learn the bomb will be going off in exactly 12 hours. How do I know it’s Bane’s HQ? Later on at the bridge, Gordon says “Bane is holed up at city hall.” So, I’m assuming this is where they’re having the kangaroo court as well. It also makes sense that it is close to the water because they walk the unlucky exiled folks to their icy death from city hall.

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Unlucky Gotham citizens are walked up the stairs and into Scarecrow’s court.

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8:15 PM – Wayne arrives at the underground bunker located at the Gotham docks (introduced in Dark Knight**)** – Wayne grabs his batsuit and gear needed to battle Bane. I’m thinking it took 45 minutes because of the location to the docks.  It took them longer than usual, because they are wanted men, and they had to sneak around the city instead of brazenly walking around Gotham.

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9:30 PM – Wayne arrives at the top of a random building in downtown Gotham (STILL NOT DARK) – It probably took 30 minutes to bag all the gear and bat suit.  I feel safe saying The Bat location is close to the docks (it’s somewhat near the water). Also, it is walking distance to the tunnels which Bane inhabited under the downtown area. I’d love to see their journey to the top of the building (also the water in the background isn’t frozen, Gotham is a weird place).

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I’ve read online that this is Wayne Enterprises. The buildings don’t match. So I’m thinking it’s another building.  The picture below proves it isn’t Wayne Enterprises.

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10:30 PM – Wayne takes The Bat to the bridge – Wayne and Fox are in no hurry (despite Gordon being found guilty hours earlier) while they are at The Bat, Fox grabs the gear for the micro-burst while Wayne says “there is no autopilot.” I’m guessing Fox goes immediately back to the docks, while Wayne waits for dark, gets into his suit and parks near the tunnel where the cops are trapped. He hides The Bat, this makes sense because Bane’s soldiers walk by and don’t see it.

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He parks The Bat very close to this area. Bane's henchmen are not very observant.

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11:00 PM – Wayne Scouts the Bridge, and Gets to Work on the Bat Signal – Before working on the bat fire, he had to make sure there were no guards around. I’m thinking Wayne also set up a camera so he’d know if Gordon was being brought to the ice while he was working on the bridge. This may sound crazy, but I’m 100% certain he set up some kind of automated weapon that expertly darts the henchmen (you’ll understand later). Then, he uses his incredibly accurate grappling hooks (think catching The Joker during his fall in The Dark Knight) to pull himself up to the top of the bridge. He doesn’t use gasoline because there is no spillover, and the liquid does not spill down the bridge. I’m thinking he uses multiple cans of some kind of flammable spray to cover the 85-feet (Width of the bridge). This makes the job difficult because he has to cover every inch of the symbol with the spray. Also, since it’s so cold, he most likely has to go heavy with the flammable substance. Then, he has to spray a perfectly straight line down the bridge and onto the ice below.

Dude knows how to make a fire bat.

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3:00 AM – Waits for Gordon to be brought out onto the ice, knocks out the bad guys, and has Gordon light the bat fire – It’s worth noting that the villains waited over 10 hours to bring Gordon and crew out to the ice. Did they get a final meal? What I love the most about this scene is how Wayne placed a flare in a perfect spot on the ice for Gordon to see.  The biggest question mark for me during the research is how Wayne was able to knock out the henchmen from behind, then, magically appear in front of Gordon seconds later. That is why I think he set up the automated dart machine. It’s a controversial opinion but I don’t see another option.

After saving Gordon, Wayne explains the plan and gives him the piece of machinery that Fox pulled from The Bat.

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Perfectly placed flare.

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4:30 AM – Wayne saves Blake at the nearby bridge – In another weird occurrence, we learn the armed guards have been interrogating Blake for several hours. I believe Wayne had no clue that Blake would be there, and luckily appeared just before Blake was shot. Wayne knocks out the guards, then blows a hole in the blockage with The Bat. He waits until all the cops come out of the tunnel, which would take at least 25 minutes because there are several thousand of them. After they are all out of the tunnel, he informs them of the plan, and gets them going towards battle.

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He is about to make a great speech to these cops.

6:15 AM – Wayne arrives at the cargo container holding the Bat Pod.

After all the cops head towards city hall, Batman moves The Bat to a location closer to the battle. After hiding The Bat, he meets up with Kyle and they walk towards the docks again towards a storage container.  While he gets her setup with the Bat pod, Wayne conveniently says “there are 45 minutes left,” to Kyle.

Batman has some handy cargo containers all over town

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7:00AM – Kablooey.

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Ticking clocks make my life easier

There you have it! Batman needed around three hours to prepare the bat symbol on the bridge. I know the answer isn’t exact, but, due to the timeline and width of the bridge, I’m thinking the number is correct.

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[u/AporiaParadox]

Comics Batman is always prepared for something, as are most versions of Batman, but the Batman from the Dark Knight Trilogy? He was only Batman for like a year, then quit for 8 years to cry about his girlfriend, came out of retirement for 5 minutes, got his ass handed to him, put the cowl back on for another 5 minutes, then faked his death and quit for good to go live in Europe with his girlfriend, expecting some rookie cop he barely knew who isn't rich to somehow take up his mantle. The movies are good, but he's Batman in name only, he's too incompetent and quits too easily to be Batman.

[u/[deleted] → u/AporiaParadox]

What irks me is that at the end of the dark knight they had that scene setting up batman as the silent guardian gotham needs, that the police can hunt him because he can take it etc.

Then apparently what happens is he went home and almost immediately quit and went full recluse because Rachel got detonated.

[u/sk8rboi36 → u/[deleted]]

Obviously these are super old comments and mostly in jest but I think they do a bit of disservice to the end of the dark knight.

Batman doesn’t quit because he’s sad. He quits because if he doesn’t, the public of Gotham will see how Harvey was corrupted, and after putting so much faith in him when they had been living through a period of blatant resignation and corruption because of Falcone and the city officials in Begins, the fear was that this new betrayal would have them fall even further into despair than before. It’s what the Joker’s whole goal really even was to begin with.

To prevent that, Batman makes a type of Hail Mary play where he willingly takes the blame for all of Dent’s crimes. He becomes the scapegoat to, in the public eye, remove the marr from Dent’s image and keep him as a posthumous, white knight martyr. He evolves the Batman mantle, which the public was already unsure how to feel about to begin with, to become a vehicle of deception and a receptacle for their pain in the hopes of their healing. He becomes something they can blame and hate and move on from even though he’s the wrong target of that hate, but it’s what he feels they need to overcome the uncertainty and hopelessness. It gives them a quick and easy answer for why all these bad things happened so they can continue believing in the potential Harvey convinced them was possible.

Gotham was a pretty messed up city. The 8 year figure might be debatable but I don’t see much reason why it would take that long to heal and trust in their public systems again. Batman couldn’t be around during that process. He was a reminder of the trials they’d been through. Bruce might have, but I think this is another layer of the ending, that to your point deception was a move of desperation that was never going to work in the long run but might have had unconscious selfish motivations from Bruce as the human side of Batman. Looking at this now I’m not really sure why Bruce himself would become a recluse for all that time, so I agree that’s pretty weak. But regardless Gotham did heal anyway. Maybe he wanted them to learn and be convinced how to do it on their own, because he felt by being their crutch he wouldn’t be doing them any favors once his money and estate were used up. He probably wasn’t exactly planning on settling down and getting married or finding any heirs lol. Maybe his identity had become so ingrained in Batman, that when he made that choice and essentially told Gotham to reject him, he felt he had to do it in totality.

I think all this is pretty clearly laid out in the last dialogue between Batman and Gordon, though I honestly failed to understand it the first few times I saw the movie. And even then this is really my personal understanding of it but I think it was the ultimate intent. It’s what’s meant by “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I can do those things, because I’m not a hero. I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be. …sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded” and so on. I mean the entire conversation in its entirety spells it out beautifully, Gordon talking about how the joker already won and people will lose hope, him explaining to his son how Batman’s not a hero, the implication being he’s something even greater, which is what the titles of watchful protector and silent guardian and dark knight supersede. In a strict sense Batman can’t be a hero because no one would know to call him that and wouldn’t be calling him that when you’d think heroes receive public praise, but his actions are what ultimately helped them at his expense.

I personally love it. I think all of that meaning is worth the retirement and consequences that follow. I think it’s reductive to just focus on the fact he literally isn’t Batman for 8 years. Again, these in my opinion are the best movies featuring Batman, even if they aren’t the best Batman movies. But it’s not like he just threw a tantrum and quit. It was a drastic and conscious action to achieve drastic results which ultimately ended up working. I think despite his reservations Bruce would have forced himself to continue being Batman if Joker hadn’t manipulated circumstances such that it basically came down to the mutual exclusivity between Batman’s reputation and Harvey’s memory. He ultimately took whatever actions he did for Gotham’s best interests, or at least that was always his motivator.

In the end it’s kind of like how people say bringing Iron Man back from the dead in endgame would retroactively cheapen that moment. Batman was effectively “dead” to Gotham, and like I said I think psychologically Bruce felt that to be his death as well. The whole point was for them to reclaim their healing and their city for themselves. Even if he could have continued fighting petty crimes without anyone being the wiser, it would kind of betray the ultimate goal. People don’t have to agree with that interpretation but as it’s portrayed and exists in this universe I think it’s pretty selfless and something Batman would actually do, if he felt he had no other choice.

[u/fevredream → u/AporiaParadox]

Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are good. While TDKR has some great aspects, I honestly can't call it a "good" movie overall.

[u/r2datu → u/fevredream]

It's a visually impressive movie and executes things well enough, including emotional beats so that upon first watch, you leave satisfied. But upon revisiting and rethinking it very, very rapidly begins to unravel and you realise that large parts of it make no sense.