Movie Review – The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

The big day had finally arrived, and once again the fans are going crazy for Batman.

My friends and I took part in AMC Theatre’s The Dark Knight Trilogy promotion.  It was a Batman movie marathon that started at 6 pm with Batman Begins and concluded with the 12:01 am showing of The Dark Knight Rises.  Seeing The Dark Knight on the big screen with an enthusiastic crowd was worth it.

And then 12:01 am finally arrived.  The movie theater showed a few movie previews (including a teaser for 2013′s Superman movie, Man of Steel), and then it was on to the main event, the epic conclusion to this Batman trilogy.

The Dark Knight Rises begins eight years after the events in The Dark Knight.

The movie actually begins somewhere in Asia.  We see several hooded prisoners arrive at a small airstrip and get taken aboard a small, twin-engine aircraft.  This is actually an aircraft by the CIA, and the agent wants to know the whereabouts of Bane.  The plane takes off and the CIA agent begins his interrogation of the prisoners.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

The third prisoner is actually Bane (played by Tom Hardy) himself.  He (speaking in a weird voice) tells the CIA agent that getting captured was actually part of his plan.  We see a C-130 cargo plane fly above the CIA airplane, and several commandos jump out the back of the C-130.  They’re all attached to ropes as they quickly descend and attack the CIA’s aircraft.  The commandos physically attach cables and “capture” the CIA’s aircraft.  Bane is freed by the commandos, and they also capture a Russian nuclear scientist that was on board the aircraft.  The CIA’s aircraft is then detached and crashes on the ground, making it look like the Russian scientist was killed in the crash.

The movie then transitions to Gotham City.

Crime is down significantly in the city.  Most of the mobsters are now in jail thanks to the heroic symbol of the late Harvey Dent and the powers of the Dent Act.  Batman is still being hunted by the police for his presumed crimes from the end of The Dark Knight, but nobody has seen Batman for eight years.  Coincidentally, nobody has seen Bruce Wayne in that same amount of time.  Hopefully nobody will put two and two together and finally figure out that Bruce Wayne is the masked crime fighter . . .

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Wayne Manor hosts a memorial to the late Harvey Dent to remember the fearless District Attorney and what he stood for in the city.  Commissioner Gordon (played by Gary Oldman) is tired of living a lie and covering for Dent’s actions.  His wife separated from him and took his children to live in another city.  He’s about to give a speech telling the truth about what happened the night Harvey Dent died, but he doesn’t at the last minute.  That speech gets tucked into his jacket pocket to be saved for another day.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

During the memorial, Alfred Pennyworth (played by Michael Caine) has a maid (played by Anne Hathaway) take some food to one of the upper rooms in Wayne Manor.  She’s specifically told to set the food on a table and then leave the room, but, of course, she takes a look around that part of the house anyway.  Bruce Wayne (played by Christian Bale) suddenly appears, scaring her with a close shot from a bow and arrow.  We see that Bruce is now limping with a cane, presumably still suffering from his injuries after battling Harvey Dent and falling from the warehouse.

Bruce notices that one of his safes has been opened, a safe deemed unbreakable, and his mother’s pearl necklace is missing.  The maid is wearing the necklace, and when questioned about how she opened the safe, she escapes out the window.  The theft bothers Bruce, but what bothers him more is the fact that the mysterious woman, this “cat” burglar, also lifted Bruce’s fingerprints from the safe.

Bruce does some researching and determines that the maid who robbed him was actually Selina Kyle, a woman with a lengthy criminal past.  During this time period we also see that Bruce has been suffering from depression after the death of Rachel Dawes during The Dark Knight, and this is putting a heavy amount of strain on both him and Alfred Pennyworth.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

We see Selina meet up with her employer, businessman John Daggett, in a bar.  Selina brings along a congressman as her escort to the bar.  She exchanges Bruce Wayne’s fingerprints to Daggett as part of a deal for special software that could purge her criminal past, allowing her to live a normal life.  Daggett betrays her and pulls out a gun, so Selina informs him that her “date” is actually a congressman who had been “missing” for some time.  It was really the congressman’s phone that was used during the exchange for Bruce’s fingerprints, and just now the police are arriving and swarming the bar.  Selina is able to escape the bar as Daggett and his men battle the cops.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Commissioner Gordon is with the police as they attack Daggett’s armed men at the bar.  They pursue the men down an alley and into a sewer.  Gordon leads the police through the sewer, but they’re ambushed and Gordon is captured.  Gordon is taken to Bane’s underground layer in the sewer.  Bane is angered by the men bringing him Gordon, and while he’s dealing with his men, Gordon escapes into the water.  During his escape he’s shot by Bane and severely injured, also losing the Harvey Dent “truth” speech that was tucked into his jacket’s pocket.

One of the police officers, a younger cop named John Blake (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), finds Commissioner Gordon and saves him.  While recovering in a hospital, Commissioner Gordon recognizes the honesty and tough mentality of John Blake and promotes him to detective.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Detective Blake visits Wayne Manor to give Bruce a message from Commissioner Gordon.  Apparently nobody in the police department wanted to believe Gordon about a criminal mastermind secretly living in the city’s sewer system.  While there, Det. Blake tells Bruce that he knows he is Batman.  Supposedly he figured it out a long time ago when he saw both Bruce Wayne and Batman when Blake was a kid at the orphanage.  He urges Bruce to return as Batman as the city needs him again.  Bruce shrugs it off, but he’s more focused when Blake also informs him that his company is crumbling to the ground.  The orphanage that used to receive donations from Wayne Enterprises hasn’t received any financial assistance for quite some time.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Bruce Wayne makes his grand reappearance to society at a fancy ball.  There he finds and dances with Selina, who was still wearing his mother’s pearl necklace.  Bruce tells her that he knows her secrets and then he takes back the pearl necklace.  After Selina leaves the ball, Bruce briefly meets Miranda Tate (played by Marion Cotillard), a champion for clean energy programs.  When Bruce leaves the ball, he realizes that Selina stole his valet slip and thus stolen his car, telling the valet worker that Bruce planned on taking a taxi home.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Bruce then pays a visit to Lucius Fox (played by Morgan Freeman) at Wayne Enterprises.  There he learns that the company is nearly bankrupt thanks to tremendous funding to secret projects that never materialized.  While Bruce is there, Fox takes him to the Applied Science warehouse and shows him a new flying machine nicknamed the “Bat.”  Lucius tells him that it works fine, but, like the Tumbler, it’s just another “toy” that sits around in the warehouse.  The only glitch with the Bat is that its autopilot system doesn’t work too well.  Fox recommends that Bruce takes some time to fix it.

Bruce and Alfred do more research and learn some of Bane’s identity.  They learn that he was outcast from the League of Shadows by Ra’s al Ghul some time ago.  Bruce underestimates Bane, referring to him as more of a mercenary than a super villain.  Bruce killed Ra’s al Ghul and assumes that he’ll be able to handle Bane.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

A day or two later, Bane and his men attack Gotham’s stock exchange.  Bane’s men take hostages and use special software to make unknown trades in the market.  It takes some time for the software to do its work.  The police quickly arrive and surround the building, but Bane and his men use motorcycles to escape with a few hostages as their shields.  Batman makes his grand reappearance on his Batpod after an eight-year hiatus, and he and the cops give chase to Bane and his men.  They race around the city until the man with the software is finally stopped.  Batman is too late, and whatever the software was doing has just completed.  The cops swarm his scene and Batman now has to escape them.  Just about every police car in the city chases Batman until they seemingly corner him in an alley.  As the cops are about to capture him, Batman easily flies away in the Bat.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Alfred Pennyworth talks to Bruce and informs him that he’s retiring as Bruce Wayne’s butler and the overseer of Wayne Manor.  Alfred is afraid of Bruce continuing on his path of being a superhero, and he fears that Bruce will ultimately kill himself while doing so.  After first losing Bruce’s parents thirty-some years ago, and then seeing the suffering of Bruce after losing Rachel eight years ago, Alfred can’t take it any longer.  If Bruce can’t give up being Batman and living a normal life, then he’s leaving.  Before going, Alfred shares a dream he’s always had of going to a restaurant, looking up, and seeing Bruce with a wife and child at one of the tables.  We don’t see Alfred again until the very end of the movie.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

The next morning’s newspaper informs Bruce Wayne that it was *his* financial account that was being used during Bane’s attack at the stock exchange.  The software used Bruce’s account to make horrible trades and transactions that bankrupted him and his company.  Bruce Wayne suddenly went from being a billionaire to nothing overnight.  He’s financially ruined.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Knowing that he’s losing control of Wayne Enterprises, Bruce meets with Lucius Fox and has him appoint Miranda Tate as head of the company, taking it out of his possession.  Fox then meets with Miranda and shows her the secret nuclear fusion reactor that Wayne Enterprises had built underneath the river.  The reactor project was nearly complete when it was cancelled.  It turns out that somebody could remove the reactor’s core and easily turn it into a nuclear bomb.

The board of directors meet at Wayne Enterprises, and John Daggett, who believed that he was about to gain control of the company, is furious when he learns that Miranda Tate is now in control of it.  Bruce foiled Daggett’s plans for a takeover.  Daggett then meets with Bane and expresses his displeasure in him, and Bane easily kills him.  While this is happening, Bruce Wayne finds Selina Kyle and visits her home.  She agrees to meet with Bruce’s “big friend” (a.k.a. Batman) and take him to Bane.  Selina warns him that a storm is coming.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Back at Wayne Manor, Bruce and Miranda spend some time together and seem to fall for each other.  She offers for her and Bruce to fly away in her private jet and leave everything behind, but Bruce refuses.  He intends to stay and fix the problems in Gotham the way he sees fit.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Batman meets with Selina in the subway system, and she leads him to Bane’s secret lair.  Selina tricks Batman and locks him in a cage with Bane, betraying the caped crusader.  Batman and Bane fight a huge battle, and Bane wins when he lifts Batman and slams him onto his knee, supposedly breaking his back.  Bane removes Batman’s dented mask before his men take away the broken man.  While Bruce Wayne is taken to Bane’s old prison in southern Asia, Bane and his men break into the armory at Wayne Enterprises and steal Batman’s vehicles and equipment.

Selina Kyle attempts to flee Gotham, but she’s captured at the airport and thrown in jail with the charge of kidnapping the “missing” congressman.

Ready to battle Bane and his men, the police department uses nearly every single cop in the city and they enter the sewers.  Sgt. Blake is busy piecing together the clues of Bane’s attack on the stock market.  When he realizes what’s about to happen, it’s too late.  Bane and his men trigger a series of explosives that collapse sections of the sewer’s tunnels, capturing pretty much the entire Gotham city police department underneath the city.  In addition to capturing the police underground, most of the bridges and tunnels leading to and from Gotham are also destroyed, trapping the remaining citizens within the city.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Part of the bombing took out the playing field at a football game.  Bane and his men arrive there and address the shocked fans.  He shows them the nuclear core of Wayne Enterprise’s fusion reactor and also brings forward the Russian nuclear scientist who helped build it.  The scientist confirms that he is the only person who can disarm the bomb.  Bane then kills the scientist and warns the people not to try to escape from Gotham City.  He tells them that an anonymous person is holding the trigger to detonate the bomb, and it will explode if anybody attempts to flee.  Unknown to the people, the bomb is on a set path of decay that will cause it to detonate in five months regardless of whether the trigger is used or not.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Bane leads his men to one of Gotham’s prisons and makes a speech in front of the news cameras.  He reads from Commissioner Gordon’s planned “truth” speech and reveals the truth about Harvey Dent.  This is used to show the citizens of Gotham how their trusted government has been lying to them for all this time.  He uses this as justification for freeing all of the prisoners who were unjustly held from the Dent Act.  Bane also makes a speech about how the people should essentially take back “their” city from the rich people.  The prisoners and other people do just that, breaking into mansions and expensive hotels to get their “revenge” against society’s upper class.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Gotham city sinks into a cold winter.  The streets are quiet from inactivity.  All production has stopped.  Bane’s men are in control of the city, but that dream of attacking the rich people and getting revenge has left the city in even worse condition than before Bane’s attacks.  The trapped policemen are receiving supplies of food and water, but Bane’s men keep them underground in the tunnels.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Dr. Crane (a.k.a. Scarecrow) is acting judge in a complete mockery of the judicial system.  One by one, members of Gotham’s high society are put on the stand and forced to choose either death or exile.  Dr. Crane explains that they’ve already been found guilty by “society,” and he’s just carrying out the sentencing.  The exile involves crossing an icy river to the main land, but as we see, the ice is thin and people just fall through it and drown in the freezing cold water.  The exile is a fancier way of carrying out a death sentence.

A small resistance forms with Detective Blake, Commissioner Gordon, and a few policemen who were in hiding during Bane’s initial attacks.  They secretly move around the city and try to identify which constantly moving truck is actually carrying the nuclear bomb.  Det. Blake also drops secret messages to the men trapped underground, keeping them informed of what’s taking place above them in the city.

Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne is trapped in the same jail that once housed Bane.  It’s a supposedly inescapable jail where only one prisoner, a child (believed to be Bane), escaped years ago.  A prisoner doctor helps fix Bruce’s back.  It’s a slow process, but Bruce rebuilds his body in jail.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Bruce Wayne walks again and attempts to escape from jail by climbing the infamous rock wall.  But he fails.  Twice.  Each time a rope around his waist catches him in a rather painful manner.  One night Bruce has a “vision” of Ra’s al Ghul (played by Liam Neeson), and he learns that it was Ra’s who was the mercenary who impregnated a woman and dishonored a sultan.  The woman he impregnated chose to go to prison instead of Ra’s, and while in jail she gave birth to the child.  That child later escaped from the prison, quickly becoming a legend to the prisoners.  Bruce heals and tries to escape a third time.  He summons the strength and makes the jump, climbing up and out of the jail.  We see Bruce drop down a long rope before leaving, presumably allowing the other prisoners to escape as well.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Commissioner Gordon and his men are captured by Bane’s men.  They’re taken to the court where Gordon requests death instead of exile.  Dr. Crane orders for Gordon and his men to be killed . . . . via exile.  That evening Gordon and his men are forced to make the walk over the icy river.  Suddenly, Bane’s men are silently taken out and Batman appears.  He has Gordon ignite a massive Batman symbol on the bridge, giving the citizens of Gotham hope that their beloved caped crusader has returned.  Bane is shocked when he sees the symbol burning brightly in the night.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Batman meets with Selina and offers her the special software she was seeking in exchange for her assistance in freeing the trapped prisoners.  She agrees and Batman lets her use his Batpod.  Batman, Selina, and the resistance officers quickly free the trapped police officers.  Commissioner Gordon leads his entire police force to City Hall where they battle Bane and his men.  A massive fight ensues between the convicts and the cops.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Batman and Bane meet again and fight on the steps of City Hall.  Their fight continues into the building where Miranda Tate was being held hostage.  Batman frees her and keeps fighting Bane, smashing his mask and causing him tremendous pain.  Just as Batman has the upper hand, Miranda stabs him with a knife.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Miranda Tate reveals herself to be Talia al Ghul, the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul.  She explains that she was the child born in the jail, and she was the one who made the legendary escape from it.  Bane was really her protector in jail and fought the other prisoners to defend her.  The mask that Bane wears gives him a continual flow of gas to dull the injuries he suffered in jail.  Miranda is also the “anonymous” person with the trigger for the nuclear bomb.  She tries to detonate it, but the signal is jammed.  Commissioner Gordon was able to identify the right truck and attach a special signal jammer to the nuclear bomb moments before Miranda squeezed the trigger.

Like in Batman Begins, it was the League of Shadows again running the show with the other villain (in this case Bane) being the symbolic leader.  This time around it was Talia al Ghul (a.k.a. Miranda Tate) being the mastermind behind the grand plot of bringing Gotham to its knees, punishing it with a false sense of hope, and then ultimately destroying it with a nuclear bomb.  She’s doing this to carry out her revenge against Batman who killed her father, Ra’s al Ghul, at the end of Batman Begins.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Furious, Miranda leaves Bane to kill Batman while she makes a run for the nuclear bomb, intent on detonating it herself.  Bane regains his strength and beats Batman.  Before he can make a killing blow, Selina Kyle suddenly appears on the Batpod.  She fires its cannons and kills Bane.  Batman runs for his Bat and flies after Miranda and the nuclear bomb.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Miranda issues a remote command to flood the secret fusion chamber.  The chamber was the last way of stopping the bomb from decaying to the point of it detonating.  Batman is able to use his Bat to fly around and force Miranda to stop the truck.  Her truck crashes and she’s mortally wounded and dies.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

With only a few moments before the bomb’s nuclear detonation, Batman attaches a cable to the bomb and uses the Bat to fly away with it.  Batman mentioned that the autopilot doesn’t work, and he has to fly the Bat himself.  Everybody watches as Batman flies far over the water and then presumably dies when the bomb finally detonates in a nuclear explosion.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

Sadness overwhelms Gotham city as Batman sacrifices himself to save innocent lives.  The people erect a statue of him in City Hall.  At Wayne Manor, there’s a tearful memorial as Bruce Wayne’s casket is laid to rest next to his parents’ graves.  Commissioner Gordon, Lucius Fox and Alfred Pennyworth can’t believe that their friend is gone.

As part of Bruce Wayne’s final wishes, Wayne Manor is converted to an orphanage, protecting the ability for orphaned children to have a temporary home.

Detective Blake resigns from the police department.  At first the worker is confused to his identity, but then she sees his full name on the form and likes it.  Blake admits that his middle name is John.  His first name is Robin.

We then see Blake follow a set of coordinates and discover Bruce Wayne’s secret Bat Cave that’s hidden behind a waterfall.  In the city, Commissioner Gordon discovers that one of the spotlights has the Batman symbol once again.  Remember that the spotlight used to signal Batman was destroyed in The Dark Knight.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – (c) Warner Bros. Pictures

There’s a final scene of Alfred sitting in the restaurant that he told Bruce Wayne about before retiring.  Alfred looks up from his seat and smiles.  The camera pans over and we see Bruce Wayne sitting with Selina Kyle at another table, smiling and waving to Alfred.

And that ends The Dark Knight Rises.

There’s no question that the ending of the movie leaves room for a fourth Batman movie as part of this current franchise.  Blake’s character was clearly destined to becoming a secret crime fighter, whether it would be the role of Batman’s assistant OR if Blake would take over the role of Batman himself.

As far as Batman, the citizens of Gotham believe that he’s dead along with Bruce Wayne.  You could look at the final scenes of The Dark Knight Rises in two different ways:

First, it’s presumable that Batman somehow ejected from the Bat and was safely underwater when the bomb detonated.  He could have had the Bat on autopilot for the last few moments of flight.  The autopilot feature worked, but Lucius Fox warned Bruce Wayne that it still had some problems.  It’s presumable that Bruce tinkered with it and got some features of the autopilot working, such as the somewhat simple ability of carrying out straight and level flight.

Second, it’s still possible that Batman was killed at the end of The Dark Knight Rises and Alfred was still overwhelmed with emotions and simply hallucinating at the restaurant.  The bomb would have vaporized Batman during detonation, so there wouldn’t be a body in Bruce Wayne’s casket anyway.  The death of Bruce Wayne could still lead to the rise of another person taking the costumed role of Batman in the series, such as John Blake.  This could still work with Robin being a partner in fighting crime, or Robin taking the role of Batman himself.  After all, Robin did inherit the Bat Cave at the end of the movie.

So was The Dark Knight Rises a good movie?

Initially, my girlfriend and I were very disappointed in the movie once it finished.  Not because of the ending but because the movie itself just felt incredibly lame and over-hyped.

After completing this review, I’ll change my impression of The Dark Knight Rises from “complete crap” to “it was okay.”  It wasn’t great like Batman Begins.  Nor was it freaking outstanding like The Dark Knight.  The Dark Knight Rises is just merely okay as a Batman movie.

One of the problems with The Dark Knight Rises is that the movie forces a lot of politics on you.  I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be entertained by a solid story rather than political talking points straight out of today’s screwed up headlines.  The whole “wealth envy” and “occupy” movement was taken too far in the movie.  Conveniently, it was one of the major storylines that was not resolved by the end of the movie.  What kind of crap is that?

I had a bad feeling when I saw some news headlines pop up a day or two ago when Bane was being compared to today’s political leaders.  Sure enough, both the Selina Kyle and Bane characters had rather political opinions about everyday life in the movie.  We’re supposed to feel justified for Selina’s thievery because she’s striking back against those evil rich people.  She’s a bit of a hypocrite though as she wasn’t exactly stealing to help her poor friends.  At first she was stealing to help herself, and then she was stealing from Bruce Wayne for the software that would purge her criminal record.

Aside from the politics, The Dark Knight Rises didn’t feel much like a Batman movie.  For starters, there actually wasn’t much of Batman in this movie.  It took a while to bring out his character, and we really didn’t see him again until the ending.  This movie would have been better titled as Bane Rises.  Oddly enough, 1989′s Batman movie suffered from the same problem of focusing too much on the villain (Jack Nicholson’s version of the Joker) and not the character that inspired the movie.

The whole segment where Bane’s men occupy Gotham lasts for way too long.  It just keeps going on and on and on and on until Batman finally returns to save the city.  And, oddly enough, despite all the policemen begin trapped, you really don’t see any of the average citizens milling about in the city.  You have to wonder how those millions of people trapped in the city are surviving while leaving the streets practically deserted the whole time.  The only people you really see on the streets are the resistance police officers who don’t seem to attract the attention of Bane’s men until later during the occupation of the city.

When Bruce Wayne is in jail it revealed that his back didn’t really break, but one of his vertebra was out of alignment.  This explains why he wasn’t permanently crippled and disfigured.  I just question how much he further injured his back when falling twice from the rock wall.  The jarring force of the rope’s sudden stop is powerful enough to dislocate joints and break bones, especially from heights like what we saw.  That wasn’t exactly the soft stop of a bungee cord.

The story felt weak with Bruce recovering from multiple severe injuries so quickly while in a third world country’s jail.  That’s a fast recovery period without the assistance of modern first aid and therapeutic devices, too.  We’re supposed to believe that Bruce Wayne was transported to the jail in a remote part of southern Asia, recovered from his injuries (several times), and able to make his way from the middle to nowhere back to Gotham, all in less than five months.  I get it that a person’s determination has a great influence on his or her recovery from injuries, but the speed of Bruce Wayne’s recovery process seemed a bit far-fetched.

Much to our disappointment, Batman does NOT drive the Tumbler in this movie.  You see him once on the Batpod, but other than that he just flies around in the Bat.  The Bat itself was overused and provided an easy escape for him in a couple of scenes.  Come on!  Let’s see Batman think of a really cool way to escape the cops and Bane.  Let’s see him trick and outsmart them like he’s known for doing.  Don’t just say, “Oh, his flying machine was there the whole time” (like in the alley after being chased from the cops, or next to the building when he and Selina escaped from Bane).  That’s so easy of an escape that it’s actually insulting for a Batman movie of this calibre.

Sadly, The Dark Knight Rises is full of too many negative talking points.

The actors were good for the most part, and the music and action scenes were as good as you would expect from this franchise.  The problem though comes down to the story, the most important part of the movie.

On a side note, I really didn’t care for the Selina Kyle / Catwoman character.  Her fight scenes were okay, and I get the whole cat burglar angle, but if felt like the character itself was still missing something.  Perhaps it was that the only Catwoman reference was to her being known as a “cat” burglar.  It also seemed weird that Bruce Wayne would still be with her in the end despite her robbing him on two separate occasions (his fingerprints & mom’s jewellery first, his car later) and then her betraying him to Bane, displacing his trust in several major ways.  Yes, she does save his life in the end, but it didn’t seem like enough to offset the ways she deceived and hurt him earlier.  I thought the Catwoman character was handled better in 1992′s Batman Returns.

One could argue that the female characters don’t get the attention that they deserve in Christopher Nolan’s telling of the Batman stories.  We hardly knew anything of the past relationship between Rachel Dawes and Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, Rachel had very little screen time and development with Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, and Selina Kyle’s character has basically no background or Catwoman references in The Dark Knight Rises.  Sure, we learn a lot about Bruce Wayne and Batman, but what good are the supporting characters when you know so little (if anything) of their own history?

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – movie trailer

I went into The Dark Knight Rises knowing virtually nothing about the movie.  I saw a trailer for it a little while ago.  Other than that, I’ve only seen the TV spots and a few news headlines relating to the movie and the stars in it.  Figured the less I knew about the movie then the more I would enjoy it.  Sadly, even without knowledge of spoilers and everything else, this was still a lousy movie experience.

The Batman enthusiasts around us were very quiet during The Dark Knight Rises.  They applauded at the beginning and ending of Batman Begins, and they applauded for a few of the Joker’s scenes and the end credits for The Dark Knight.  For The Dark Knight Rises, the people only applauded when Bruce was revealed to still be alive and when John Blake said his first name was Robin.  These same people were silent when the end credits began rolling, unlike during the previous two movies.

Is it too late to ask Christopher Nolan to re-make The Dark Knight Rises and actually make it a movie worthy enough to be part of this series?

Bruce Wayne – “Why didn’t you kill me?”
Bane – “Your punishment must be more severe.”

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NOTE – The screenshots were added after The Dark Knight was released to DVD.