Film Theory: How Batman DESTROYED Gotham (Dark Knight Rises)

if Batman is the hero Gotham deserves hell I just feel sorry for Gotham hello Internet welcome to film theory where today's episode is gonna get real not like Hellmann's mayo real I mean comic book movies getting real real seriously even though it seems like it really shouldn't matter whether comic book superhero movies are realistic it's been all the rage for literally the last decade and it's made a huge difference the way we see movies made about men and spandex tights comic-book movies used to be the center of everything cheesy campy and overblown but now every time you turn around there's another alcoholic Jessica Jones or debate about the ethics of Superman as a god-like being don't get me wrong I enjoy it just that this stuff is intense and at the center of it all is Batman or should I say Batman that's right gritty realism has been right next to the batarangs and grappling hook on Batman's tool belt ever since Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy took superhero movies from this this and that's a good thing I love The Dark Knight trilogy well most of it anyway because simply put for being the film's that defined what realism means in comic book movies the ending has a huge mistake a mistake that puts Batman's hero status into serious question from here on out hitch up your spoiler pants because today we're talking about the ending of the Dark Knight Rises at the end of the movie Batman stands victorious Spain has been defeated and Talia al Ghul has died her um dramatic death only one major threat remains but it's a doozy a nuclear bomb set to flatten Gotham as the timer ticks down Batman rushes to fly the bomb out over the water to a safe distance where it explodes city saved Batman is a hero except that's actually not what would happen if the movie was truly adhering to realism as strictly as Christopher Nolan intended Batman would actually have failed in his attempt to say the city let's look at the fast to show you what I mean I have to tell you some more about nuclear bombs I've actually had the chance to visit one of the world's real nuclear weapons sites in Hiroshima do research for this kind of episode and these weapons are incredibly serious neutron bombs like the one shown in Batman work by shooting incredibly high-energy neutron particles to specifically cause radiation damage to know how strong a bomb is you look at its yield which tells you how much regular TNT it would take to achieve the same blast as the bomb the neutron bomb from Batman is a four kiloton weapon meaning it would take 4,000 tons of tnt to get the same blast that's 8 million pounds of TNT to give you a comparison the hore Oshima bomb was between 12.5 and 15 kilotons so this one is actually quite a bit smaller about a third of the size fun fact or maybe not so fun fact believe it or not there have been much much bigger bombs made and tested over the years up into the mega ton range a hundred times the size of what was detonated over Hiroshima so to the movie's credit it actually does a good job of using a much smaller bomb relative to how big these things can get that being said though they're still far from me letting them off the hook the other thing about neutron bombs that makes them special is that they give off about 10 times the neutron radiation of a fission bomb of the same size that means that instead of most of the bombs energy just being a regular blast a lot more of it is specifically radiation energy which is longer-lasting and harder to contain so even though the bat bomb is smaller than say the bomb dropped on Hiroshima inside the blast radius uncontrollable radiation would make it much more deadly so how big exactly is that blast radius well the movie actually tells us that it's six miles or about twelve kilometers we know how far we need to get the bomb away from every other person to avoid major casualties the end of the movie is trying to do this when we see Batman tow the bomb out to sea with his bat copter thing but there are a lot of problems here the first and most important is time let's break it down when Batman attaches a harness to the bomb we see that it has one minute and 57 seconds left before detonation then he wastes a bunch of time macking on selina kyle and having a heartfelt goodbye with Commissioner Gordon factoring in this hanger hanky pranky into the countdown he has just 75 seconds to get that bomb as far away from Gotham as he possibly can so let's assess how he does let's assume that Batman's bat copter is as fast as the fastest helicopter in the world this would make it the eurocopter x3 which can achieve an absolute max flight speed of 293 miles per hour it takes the helicopter a minimum of 20 seconds to achieve that max speed accepts even though the eurocopter x3 is a really fast helicopter Batman won't be flying at top speed until he clears through the buildings in the city you can even see how he's slowly lifting the bomb up and dragging it along the ground even having to blow up and fly through buildings how long does it take him to get out of the city factoring in only the time we see him flying on the screen it takes him 38 seconds to get out of Gotham who'll be generous in our calculations here and safe for that time he can fly at 50% of his top speed I mean it's pretty clear that he isn't going anywhere close to a hundred and forty six miles per hour half of our to 93 top speed since you can see him struggling to lift the bomb it's hitting things etc but hey we'll give the guy a fighting chance this leaves him with 37 seconds at top speed beginning right here based on all these factors and with the odds heavily stacked in his favor the bat copter would be able to fly only 3.1 miles away from the city before detonating over the water looking back at what the movie tells us about the blast radius six miles it's clear that Batman Batman it's clear that Batman can't make it out far enough to even save Gotham from the basic blast Batman is a very different type of Supergirl let me reiterate our assumptions here are really generous when planes and helicopters are loaded down they accelerate and fly a lot slower remember that the bat copter would be carrying a huge payload atomic bombs typically weigh between 5 and 20 thousand pounds including their casing and even though this bomb is small we can expect it to easily clock in at around 3,000 pounds weight that we weren't factoring into the calculations at all that kind of weight isn't too heavy for the eurocopter x3 based on its tech specs but it's over a third of its total capacity meaning that it would definitely slow down the flight based on weight and wind resistance but okay let's take it to the extreme just for funsies let's see if there was ever any chance of this scenario being even a little bit accurate because I like Batman and math is fun let's assume that not only is the bomb weightless the Batman hitches it to his fastest in the world bat copter already somehow going at top speed and it doesn't take any additional time to change the height of the helicopter in the air if we basically ignore the laws of physics to make all this happen you come out with a different distance salmon would be able to travel drumroll please 6.1 miles offshore some days you just can't get rid of a bomb technically just edging out the main blast radius of the bomb so I guess technically there was a way to fake it to make it look like it works even in this scenario not exactly because the Batman bomb is a dirty bomb and that means you need to factor in radiation to understand what happens in Gotham when the bomb doesn't make it out of town we'll go back to our original calculations where Batman makes it a little more than three miles off the coast to figure out what kind of damage the bomb causes from there you have to be clear about where Gotham is technically it's a fictional location but there are plenty of clues in the Batman universe that give a good indication of what real-life city it's based on Gotham City is a nickname for New York City first used back in 1807 Batman's writer bill finger also originally meant for Batman's location to be New York which is why he chose the name Gotham and the city used as a stand-in for Gotham in the Dark Knight Rises is New York City and if that's not enough evidence for you oh sorry jeez face the facts it's true but okay fine you can tell that this is specifically Manhattan when you see Bane destroying all the bridges into town I could go on but really there is no debate here why does this matter well knowing that Gotham is roughly New York tells us a lot especially about where Batman is going with the bomb if Batman is starting in Manhattan we know that there's only one direction you can go over Manhattan into the water Sal with that we now know Batman's trajectory and all that's left is for us to pinpoint the area 3.1 miles off the coast and figure out what would happen if you detonated a four kiloton nuclear bomb there fortunately modeling a nuclear bomb is incredibly difficult remember there are a lot more factors in a dirty bomb than a regular explosion there's the fireball which is what creates the mushroom cloud that we associate with all the old footage of nuclear bombs then there's the physical blast radius which is the actual shockwave that blasts through buildings and breaks glass and finally there's the nuclear fallout which can travel massive distances and cause damage for years decades to come luckily I don't have to model out this explosion on my own because the Internet can do it for me believe it or not there's a site called nuke project that raises awareness for how destructive nuclear weapons are that actually lets you model the damage a nuke would cause anywhere in the world yeah this is one of those nightmare fuel websites don't to play with this one before going to bed or in the airport like we were when we were working on this episode I've got to be on some watch list somewhere at this point anyway you can't put in every factor but we can put in a few including where the bomb goes off and how much it weighs we know that the blast radius will already be 6 miles and the model tells us that close to the center of the blast we're looking at a 50 to 90 percent mortality rate so what happens at 3.1 miles offshore buildings in Jersey City Brooklyn and Staten Island would instantly collapse everyone from the bottom of Staten Island to northern Manhattan would have third-degree radiation burns even though the fireball would be mostly contained in the water our model does show that almost six thousand people are going to die immediately with another two hundred and forty five thousand people being injured from collapsed buildings and radiation it's important to remember to the bum doesn't have to go off in the water for that to happen the most famous devastating nuclear explosions like the one in Hiroshima didn't happen with the bomb on the ground it happened when the bomb exploded 600 meters above ground level just like in our scenario with Batman the bomb exploded in midair which was actually more destructive than it might have been on the ground according to this simulation even structures that weren't destroyed would take damage as far as Queens and northern Manhattan all the windows and car windshields in lower Manhattan would break the Empire State Building would literally sway and the Chrysler Building would have floors of broken glass people would die across three boroughs of the city and believe me I'm not saying any of this lightly this is incredibly scary stuff and it gets worse when a nuclear reaction doesn't have any shield it creates what's known as fallouts maybe you've heard of this they've made a really obscure video game series about it I don't know in a very basic sense nuclear fallout is residual radioactive material that's blown into the atmosphere that falls out of the sky after the explosion and shockwave are gone in our model the fallout from this explosion will go the way the wind is blowing or water is flowing luckily most of the water flows out to the ocean along with the rest of the tin cans and dead bodies that are floating in the East River pretty much most of the time anyway and I say luckily with a huge grain of salt that radiation is going to contaminate the ocean for years and with it all sea life which will eventually make its way back to humanity but what we're most interested in is the wind the wind is a whole nother story in Manhattan wind patterns could carry radioactive dust ash or even black rain literal literal black rain rain that is black all the way up the island and out into as far as Connecticut and don't think you'll escape it by taking a weekend at the Han Compton's because this stuff can literally last for years cancer rates in the city would potentially skyrocket from the air and radioactive drinking water and child birth defects would show up all over Manhattan not that you'd be able to get out of the city anyway remember in this scenario there are no bridges intact out of the city and no way to evacuate Manhattan everyone is gonna be there stuck in lockdown in a radioactive field for weeks and here you thought the Dark Knight trilogy was dark before but let's rewind and see if there was anything that could have been done to save the thousands of Gotham lives that were lost believe it or not all of this could have been avoided let's say the Batman doesn't waste the 42 seconds on goodbyes with Catwoman or this tearful farewell with Commissioner Gordon I mean they don't even make sense anyway it's not like he kills himself he ends up with Selina Kyle and could have just sent Commissioner Gordon a postcard saying hey sup I was Batman the whole time psych so let's say that instead of wasting time that could have been spent you know disposing of a massive nuclear bomb Batman actually I don't know did his job and used all that time to haul away the bomb a little bit further now he has a whole other 42 seconds to travel at top speed in the bat copter so bringing back our first model he now has 81 seconds over the water more than double what he was doing before doing the math that would put Batman safely at 6.6 miles away from the coast now outside the blast radius with room to spare in this scenario Batman almost clears the outer boroughs and we still have about a thousand casualties but deaths have been reduced by 75% injuries are reduced 83% to about 24,000 which is still a lot but it's happening in boroughs that are much easier to evacuate and keeps Manhattan almost completely intact if we give him our super scenario where he isn't slowed down at all he can actually get a whopping nine point five miles away well out into the ocean where yes the bomb is still gonna take out a lot of fish but humanity will actually be saved with zero casualties and no injuries based on the model the extra 42 seconds Batman should have spent in the air host Gotham over 4 thousand deaths and literally hundreds of thousands of injuries all of them could have been saved if Batman had just kept it in his pants or his rubberized codpiece but hey that's just a theory all film theory and cut

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 6,531,395

Rating: 4.8806272 out of 5

Keywords: batman, batman dark knight, batman dark knight rises, batman movie, batman comic, gotham, gotham city, christopher nolan, batman bomb, film theory, film theorists, matpat, matthew patrick, matthewpatrick13, Dark Knight Rises, Batman v Superman, film, movie, Dark Knight Trilogy, dark knight, dark knight ending

Id: iQ3aGkLpCSw

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Toastrz]

Why is Film Theory so much better than Game Theory as of late?

[u/teleekom]

He's got pretty liberal attitude towards conversion of metric and imperial units

[u/jed_PK]

Couldn't batman drop the bomb into the water and let the water shield everyone from the radiation.

[u/TimPrimetal]

4:49 So instead of assuming the thing is only as fast as the fastest helicopter in the world, assume it's faster. MatPat, I love you, but some of your math is BS. I raise the Assassin's Creed leap of faith video to you.

ALSO: 8:29 I can, in fact, debate your logic. Chicago was also heavily used in these films as a standin for Gotham. And while the original Gotham City concept was based on NYC, doesn't mean it IS NYC. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Gotham is canonically somewhere on the coast of Virginia or Delaware. Either way, this is a fictional city that resembles New York, Chicago, and other various areas. Doesn't mean it actually is.

[u/unconstant]

I looked up Gotham City here which shows some maps and states that Gotham is in likely in New Jersey. Given some circumstantial and apocryphal evidence about train travel time and relative position of cities and bays the safest bet for the location of Gotham is Atlantic City. This also explains why some of Batman's' main villains are gambling themed?

Next if we look at the geography of the city we can see that in the final scene where batman flies over the ocean, I feel it is safe to assume he is flying directly away from the city not down one of the rivers in the city. Given the math that Matpat uses for distance from the city (6 miles is really closer to 9km) and assuming Batman detonates the bomb in the air we are only concerned with the blast reaching the city at the closest point to the shore.

Next the bomb size used in the video follows the 6mile blast radius from the stadium scene HOWEVER Matpat at 2:51 states the yield is 4 kton. A 4 kton weapon has a far smaller blast radius than 6 miles /~9km (according to nukemap it is ~2 km) at roughly the height shown on in the film. The Batcopter is carrying the bomb slightly over the top of the waves so putting in a 50m airburst I feel is sufficient.

Ok so that takes care of the actual nuclear blast part. Now for the fallout. The fallout from a 4kt weapon detonated about 6 miles offshore would reach almost 40 MILES onshore with a worst case scenario having the last of the fallout end up somewhere around Shamong NJ. EXCEPT that is not the direction the wind blows. Using live wind data from The national digital forecast database this shows prevaling winds pushing the fallout out to sea and AWAY from Gotham. (here is a link to my version of nukemap)

City = Saved.

(I mean no disrespect to Matpat with this rebuttal. It was a great video but I play around with nuke map and read a ton of lore wiki's from stuff I'm interested in so I noticed some of your points could use a bit of work buddy.)

[u/0b_101010]

Thanks Batman!

[u/gizmo1492]

There's also the idea that given Batman planned the entire charade to fake his death, he also had the ability to delay the detonation such that there were minimal to no human casualties.

Seriously, he could plan out the scene such that he fixes his ship to fly the autopilot but not spend his spare time figuring out how to defuse the nuclear weapon if, worse case scenario, he couldn't get it out of the city in time?