MOVIE - The Dark Knight Rises

I will start this review by saying, I love what Christopher Nolan did to the Batman franchise. He brought it back to the dark roots and the realism of a psychologically damaged man dressing up as a bat and beating the tar out of the city’s criminals. He left the camp at the door and at no point throughout any of the three movies did I feel compelled to recall the name Joel Schumacher.

That being said, the conclusion to the trilogy left a lot to be desired. It was a good movie, don’t mistake me on that. But it could have been a great one, and instead of taking a risk of alienating portions of American audiences, which traditionally struggle with complicated plots and hate unhappy endings, Nolan and company played it safe and wound up with a solid B+ when they could have had a runaway A+.

That’s right. I place the blame for this movie’s failings squarely on the shoulders of the American viewer. So what exactly are the weaknesses of this movie?


 * 1) Complexity Issues
 * 2) *Unnecessarily made connections between characters / storylines that did not need to be there. There was a lot of effort to bring every thread of plot together in a nice package at the end of the movie, making everything interconnected (save for anything involving the Joker directly) and this simply was not necessary except to appease movie goers who cannot handle multiple, non-connected or loosely connected storylines. This lead to…
 * 3) *An incredibly predictable series of “twists” to make sure the audience could follow what was happening. In order to tie everything together, the plot needed several layers of back-story and “reveals” but they needed to be accessible and understandable. Suffering the backlash of Inception, in which large groups of audience members panned the film for being too confusing, Nolan and company took the safe route with The Dark Knight Rises and left the rest of us with a wrap-up that was telegraphed from the beginning of the movie and unnecessarily crammed down our throats.
 * 4) Amazing Individual Scenes but A Lack of Cohesiveness – This may seem strange given point #1, but what happened with this movie and its attempt to join everything together is that instead of focusing on one long riding story with individual players within it, we got what felt like several individual scenes about different points in time that were then clumsily brought together at the end of the overall narrative. Instead of an epic novel, we ended up with a collection of related short stories, in which the last short story told explained explicitly how all the other short stories were related, as though it wasn’t obvious enough already. The positive of this is that all those individual scenes were incredible – emotionally moving, visually stimulating, evocative, etc.
 * 5) A Gutless and Toothless Ending – The end of the movie, on top of being incredibly predictable, also ripped the teeth out of the main villain, who up to that point was one of the most elemental, brutal, and flat-out best villains in the Batman franchise. He suffers an abrupt and pitiful demise after transitioning from terrifying evil mastermind to simple brutish subservient thug. And as for the fate of Batman, Nolan simply chickened out.

So if this movie was so poorly put together why do I give it even a B+? Well, as mentioned above, despite the connectivity issues, the individual scenes were awesome. The first fight between Bane and Batman was one of the crowning achievements of the entire Nolan franchise. But if I had to pick one reason alone to give this movie at least a B+, it would be Catwoman. Anne Hathaway absolutely nailed the character. The line delivery, the way she moved, he facial expressions, everything. Catwoman was absolutely perrrfect.

So to conclude, I liked this movie plenty, but I didn’t love it and I place the blame for that on you, America. Your stupidity and desire for easily understood, feel-good-ness took The Dark Knight Rises from A+ to B+. Plus, I can’t be all that mad… I got through the entire viewing and no one got shot.