I Must Fess, Superman Did Not Save Batman in 'TDKR'

For the longest time, I was posturing that in the... OK... I'm getting ahead of myself.  First, to understand where I was coming from, I was bouncing off what I thought was a visual Easter egg in the promo art for The Dark Knight Rises.  (Look under the tip of the left wing...  and tell me that does NOT look like the chest logo for Superman!?)

oh crap... this could still be considered a spoiler.  All joking aside, if you still haven't seen the movie, I'm giving a wee bit away here.

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At ending of The Dark Knight Rises, I thought that Superman could have swooped in and snagged Batman out of the Bat and saved him from the nuclear explosion at the end of the movie...

I had been presuming that for a long time for a few reasons.  One is the Superman Logo/Symbol in one of the marketing posters for The Dark Knight Rises (TDKR).  See above.

Another reason was that WB is looking to start their Justice League movie franchise.  Somehow.  It seemed it would have been a great way to start connecting character franchises.

Third, the common production thread was Christopher Nolan, having produced Man of Steel and created/directed TDKR.

It seemed to me that connecting the two would have been easy.  And the ending of TDKR was the perfect moment to inject the inkling of this premise.

Alas, in Man of Steel, it never happened.

Instead, Christopher Nolan gave us another one of those, "It's what you want it to be" kind of endings with TDKR.

That worked great with Inception.  But Nolan might be treading on thin ice with another movie being explained without explanation.

But be it as it may, the movie did have an obscurely unexplained ending.

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In the end of the movie, Batman must hook up a nuclear bomb to his hovercraft-jet and drag it out to the open ocean, away from Gotham City, before it explodes.

We watch the Bat fly out over a bridge and out to sea.

We get two close ups that confounded me a little bit.  One was of the bomb.  Super close up, not rocking around, but rather, seemingly sitting pretty stationary, as if it's in a box or something.

The other close up was of Batman, in a cockpit, flying.  But the close up was so close, all you could see was his face.  It wasn't panned out enough to see the machine he's sitting in.

Then boom.

(BTW: Nolan sets up the future of the franchise perfectly for Warner Bros., if they were to ever even consider it.)

Next, we see Bruce Wayne's funeral.  We see Lucius later discover that the supposedly broken autopilot was in fact fixed. And we watch Alfred spotting Bruce and Selina Kyle in that Florence Cafe, just like he explained his dream would be.

We see John "Robin" Blake discover the bat-cave, via a note left for him by Bruce, and that's that.

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I'm suspicious of the close ups of the cockpit and the bomb in the closing scenes, though I can't figure how he could have gotten out of that doomed Bat when that closeup took place with only five seconds to go.  Did he have the second Bat, with the fixed autopilot come find him?  Did he have a submersible waiting for him to dive down to?  Did Scotty beam him up in time?  (Dang, that would be one hell of a crossover!)

The more I dwell on it, since there was no supes in the region, I'm starting to bank on his ejecting early enough, swooping down through the sky with his floating cape trick, landing on a hovering Bat whose autopilot was fixed, and when we saw that closeup, he was booking it out of the neighborhood.

I'm really starting to hate on Nolan for making me dwell on this.  And I'm doomed, because I'm compulsive enough to dwell on it until I think I sorted it out.

Ug.

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