The Dark Knight Rises

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Tyler, Josh

Write Up.

Conflicty feelings won't go away. I think after the giddy highs of The Dark Knight any expectations I had were going to be too high. And this is such a tonally different film than the last two. Bottom line is, at this stage, I gotta say the is my least favourite out of all of Nolan's Batman films.

Some things you cannot fault about it are of course, the tech. Seeing it in Imax last time was amazing too. Even in the fake Imax. This time I was in a regular cinema but the sound was a little more even than it was at Imax.

The performances are mostly good, even if I disagree with the writing of some characters.

Unexpected Ben Mendelsohn!

But again, the rest of the film left me completely underwhelmed. It's like The Nolan Bros. hearts weren't in it any more, they were obliged to make this one and just wanted to get it out of the way to get on to more creative things. Because really, it's a bit of a mess and nothing about the film connected with me emotionally, none of the action excited me, I was confused by the constantly changing tone and found all the plot revelations to be disappointingly obvious and clunky delivered.

It doesn't help that all the plot revelations were speculated by fans years ago, only to have them denied by the film makers but then confirmed within the film. If you know anything about Batman so called twist is obvious and the way they try to hide it shortchanges both villains. I mean, sure in the past Nolan's villains have differed greatly from the ones we know but usually with a good purpose and done well enough to not make me mind at all.

I did like this version of Catwoman, although she's really only in the film to serve a specific point and I would hardly call her a villain. Nevertheless her motivations were clear and highlighted a specific aspect of the whole "rise up" theme running through the film. Her one liners are great even though I think the clash horribly with the serious real world tone the other films set up. But not more so that Banes very cartoonish evil villain plot...

Bane just doesn't work at all for me. The Joker didn't have any specific motivations to his actions. That's what made him scary and dangerous. It feels like they kept the idea for their sequel with Joker but just switch it over to Bane. His motivations are ambiguous as well, but in a bad way. They tell us how he got his mask and why he's been trained but nothing about his actual character. His giant oversized time bomb device just brought back memories of Batman Forever. His fights with Batman are lacking any creativity and amount to nothing more than just some un-bat-like brawling. And his voice is kinda ridiculous, fanboy gripe, but still annoyed me and the way it was mixed in the soundtrack.

Speaking of the soundtrack, uh, on second though, let's not. James Newton Howard, your actual melodic lines are sorely missed.

If you know the characters at all it seems obvious Talia would have to be somewhere in the 3rd film, given how much it relates back to the first and seem as there is only so many female cast members it doesn't take long to figure out what they are setting up. But man, out of all the characters to get short changed she is the worst. One of the more interesting characters just thrown in and then shoved off, even more-so than Scarecrow. That was very disappointing.

While I know I saw action and scale, I never felt any of it. I did feel the running time this time. By the time we got to the end montage featuring contrivance upon contrivance I was just ready to go home.

It's not a bad film, there's a lot of cool stuff in here. It's not what I wanted to see after the first two and what I did see just failed completely to interest me more than any average action flick. Everyone seems to enjoy it though so I'm probably alone on this. Someone accused me of just "not being able to have fun" a rather hypocritical statement from this particular reviewer, that just served to piss me off even more and further taint the film. Unfortunate. I'm glad Nolan's freed up to do other films. I'm glad someone else is gonna take a stab at a new version of the franchise, perhaps one that IS ACTUALLY MORE FUN like all the other Batman films were. Even Dark Knight was more fun than Rises. That film remains my favourite of this series.