2. The Dark Knight Trilogy (2004 - 2012)
Given the stature, popularity, and even watchability of this trilogy, this claim might strike you has hard to defend, but from the initial training montage in Batman Begins to the ticking time-bomb climax of The Dark Knight Rises, this franchise is completely ripe with cliches. Even within itself. The narrative structure of the trilogy as a whole mirrors the classic structure of a three act play: The Rise, The Fall, The Redemption. If this seems vaguely familiar, this is also the structure for the Star Wars Trilogy (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi). This three-act structure is well known by screenwriters as common practice in single movies and is most obvious in the narrative of The Dark Knight rises in which the first act concerns Bruce Wayne's reemergence as The Batman only to fall at the hands of Bane during the first act turning point, which lands him on his back for nearly the entirety of the second act. There are a few cliches that run a string throughout the films. One common thread is the bad guy who disposes of his own henchmen just to show how malicious he is. Including The Joker's exciting bank robbery in which the help drops like flies and Bane telling his henchmen to "follow" Gordon down the sewer. This trait even echoes each of the previous Batman films such as when Jack Nicholson's Joker kills Bob, his right-hand man, out of frustration, The Penguin shoots a henchman for asking if drowning babies is "a little much," Two-Face showers a helicopter pilot with bullets after discovering The Bat survived what should have been a fatal crash, or Mr. Freeze, who froze a henchman for interrupting his wedding video. Smaller specifics from the last franchise permeate Nolan's trilogy: Ledger screaming "Hit me!" seems almost of the stand-off between Nicholson and the Batplane. Even looking outside Gotham's city lines, we find cliches abound in Nolan's universe: Bad guys who mumble on far too long about their ideals, master plans, and overly elaborate death traps, Dream sequences induced by drugs or extreme physical conditions, friends who leave only to come back and save our hero, car chases, a plot-twist in which a good guy was really a villain all along. In fact, Ra's and his daughter pretty much have the same reveal. And even Scarecrow was peddling drugs for the mob. An examination of the love story between Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle speaks to the charismatic and lovable thief that wins the heart of the wealthy socialite. For other examples of this, see Aladdin. The inclusion of a love-story at all in a such a setting could alone be argued as trite. Further more, each third act of all three films involves a ticking time-bomb of sorts: In The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, the time-bomb is quite literal. But in Batman Begins, time equals the ever-decreasing distance between the train and the main water hub located directly underneath Wayne Towers. This climax sequence of Batman Begins brings to light another cliche that we'd previously found in Speed: The "Oh Crap" character, whose only real purpose is to provide cheap exposition that cues the audience in to the gravity of the situation. In Batman Begins, Nolan intercuts scenes with this character, who is monitoring the growing pressure in the sewers from inside Wayne Tower. While Batman is in his final showdown with Ra's Al Ghul, Nolan continues to cut back to this character to emphasize the effect of the microwave emitter on the water pressure, even though the plan had already been described in detail by Commissioner Gordon and again by Ra's. We encounter this cheap exposition again in an even more cliche dressing when Harvey Dent is transported in a S.W.A.T. truck. As Joker engages his assault, Nolan cuts back to the S.W.A.T. officer in the passenger seat who offers such classic "Oh Crap" cliches as, "I didn't sign up for this!" And, to add the cherry to the top, each film explores the notion that good guys and villains are really facets of the same person (see: Speed).