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Movie Review: The Dark Knight Rises
Unless you've managed to not watch anything in the past three weeks, you're aware that Chris Nolan's final Batman movie is out. With Christian Bale as the low-talking caped crusader, The Dark Knight Rises is two hours and forty-five minutes of of fun. While it lacks a stand-out personal performance like Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight, it is still a decent ending to this round of Batman movies. There are plenty of familiar faces, and a few new ones as well. Read below for my take on the movie, but be warned: there might be a few spoilers.
The movie starts out eight years after The Dark Knight. Batman has taken the blame for the death of district attorney Harvey Dent, and has disappeared from the public eye. Thanks to the passing of "The Dent Act," organized crime has been wiped out in Gotham, and the police find themselves increasingly obsolete. That all changes with the arrival of the villains. Since it was decided at some point in the 90s that all comic book movies needed at least two villains, in The Dark Knight Rises we have Bane and Catwoman.
Bane is played by Tom Hardy. Despite what Rush Limbaugh suggests, Bane is not connected to Mitt Romney, but was introduced in January 1993 and is best known for breaking Batman's back during the Knighfall comic series. He was even played terribly by a professional wrestler in 1997's Batman & Robin. I must admit that I was worried after reading reviews about how hard it was to hear Bane speak that the movie would degenerate into a low-talking competition between Hardy and Bale. They must have fixed the audio issues, because Bane's voice is certainly loud, if not the clearest at all times. To get an idea of what Bane sounds like, imagine Bill Cosby speaking with an English accent through a Darth Vader filter. The Bane in the movie shares little with the Bane from the comics, so he might not be to the liking of the purists, but he does a decent enough job of being a moderately intelligent juggernaut, and is the main villain in the story.
Ann Hathaway dons the cat ears as Selina Kyle, better known as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises. All to often, female characters are little more than Kung-Fu cliched eye candy in comic movies. Nolan avoids this with Hathaway, but barely. Instead of a hot chick in a skin-tight, black leather outfit who is one bad fall from becoming the headliner at the local furry convention, Hathaway is a hot chick in a skin-tight, black leather outfit who plays a small but important role in the overall story arc.
Plenty of old characters reprise their roles, including Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, and Michael Caine as Alfred. Some old villains even show up for this final installment. New to the mix this time are Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Matthew Modine, who play the cop everyone likes to love and the cop that everyone loves to hate, respectively.
For those of you who like the military look of Nolan's Batman vehicles over the more stylized Bat-vehicles of past movies, this one does not disappoint. The Batbike gets plenty of air time, as well as multiple Batmobiles driving around the city. This time around, the Batcopter makes its debut. While I think it looks more like something the Space Marines would fly around while fighting Aliens, it is consistent with the franchise's aesthetics.
Overall, a large portion of the story reminds me of a post-apocalyptic movie, with a Gotham that has existed in anarchy for many months. There are some decent fight scenes, including a small army of mercenaries fighting thousands of police in the streets while Batman and Bane duke it out in front of City Hall. There aren't a lot of surprises, and there aren't any stand-out performances, but there isn't a lot to dislike either. This was supposed to be the last of Nolan's Batman movies, but the ending leaves the possibility of another wide open, and I would not be surprised if another was made (assuming Rises makes enough money). So many movies — comic movies in particular — degenerate quickly with each sequel, and having to exist in the shadow of Heath Ledger is a daunting task. The Dark Knight Rises does a good job of stepping out of that shadow, however, and delivers for me, the best story of the series.
Bane is played by Tom Hardy. Despite what Rush Limbaugh suggests, Bane is not connected to Mitt Romney, but was introduced in January 1993 and is best known for breaking Batman's back during the Knighfall comic series. He was even played terribly by a professional wrestler in 1997's Batman & Robin. I must admit that I was worried after reading reviews about how hard it was to hear Bane speak that the movie would degenerate into a low-talking competition between Hardy and Bale. They must have fixed the audio issues, because Bane's voice is certainly loud, if not the clearest at all times. To get an idea of what Bane sounds like, imagine Bill Cosby speaking with an English accent through a Darth Vader filter. The Bane in the movie shares little with the Bane from the comics, so he might not be to the liking of the purists, but he does a decent enough job of being a moderately intelligent juggernaut, and is the main villain in the story.
Ann Hathaway dons the cat ears as Selina Kyle, better known as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises. All to often, female characters are little more than Kung-Fu cliched eye candy in comic movies. Nolan avoids this with Hathaway, but barely. Instead of a hot chick in a skin-tight, black leather outfit who is one bad fall from becoming the headliner at the local furry convention, Hathaway is a hot chick in a skin-tight, black leather outfit who plays a small but important role in the overall story arc.
Plenty of old characters reprise their roles, including Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, and Michael Caine as Alfred. Some old villains even show up for this final installment. New to the mix this time are Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Matthew Modine, who play the cop everyone likes to love and the cop that everyone loves to hate, respectively.
For those of you who like the military look of Nolan's Batman vehicles over the more stylized Bat-vehicles of past movies, this one does not disappoint. The Batbike gets plenty of air time, as well as multiple Batmobiles driving around the city. This time around, the Batcopter makes its debut. While I think it looks more like something the Space Marines would fly around while fighting Aliens, it is consistent with the franchise's aesthetics.
Overall, a large portion of the story reminds me of a post-apocalyptic movie, with a Gotham that has existed in anarchy for many months. There are some decent fight scenes, including a small army of mercenaries fighting thousands of police in the streets while Batman and Bane duke it out in front of City Hall. There aren't a lot of surprises, and there aren't any stand-out performances, but there isn't a lot to dislike either. This was supposed to be the last of Nolan's Batman movies, but the ending leaves the possibility of another wide open, and I would not be surprised if another was made (assuming Rises makes enough money). So many movies — comic movies in particular — degenerate quickly with each sequel, and having to exist in the shadow of Heath Ledger is a daunting task. The Dark Knight Rises does a good job of stepping out of that shadow, however, and delivers for me, the best story of the series.
too many guns and killings. I fear that some impressionable youth will try to imitate batman and get himself hurt. Or even worse, someone will imitate the villain and kill innocent bystanders will guns.
The government needs to step in and forbid such violent movies that glorify guns and violence. PG-13 ratings by MPAA isn't working. And guns need to be banned, period. Only military and police should have guns.
I didn't like it much.
It felt like the script needed another good once-over and a trim. It's a thematic mess and takes about twice as long as it ought to to introduce the characters and (poorly, repetitively) present their motivations. Some of the delivery was pretty wooden, especially in the first half, but that may have been the result of mediocre editing (there were also a couple awkward cuts, IMO, so maybe that was it) or the piss-poor dialog. Filled with painful talking-to-the-audience exposition that's so bad it was comical—again, a writing issue.
For the entire first half I was worried that I'd walk out hating the movie, but fortunately improved somewhat, nearer the end.
The audio was poor. A fair bit of the dialog (not just Bane's) was hard to pick up. Bane sounded like he wasn't even in the same room—more like a voiceover— an effect which, it seems to me, can only be called an outright mistake on the part of the filmmakers.
The ending's OK I guess?
Way too soon. Not even a CAM release available.
100 people die per day on our roads.
We cannot review cars?
Are we ready for frank discussions of people getting shot at the theatre, and the likelihood that their traumatized kids will turn into becaped vigilantes?
I never thought of that - the irony of this whole incident.
Usually when shit like that happens, people blame the object of the killing and not the individual.
Kid dies from a drunk driver? Not the driver's irresponsibility! It's the fact that drunk driving laws aren't strict enough and we need to search everyone randomly at checkpoints regardless of probable cause. And if you protest then you approve of drunk driving!
More than likely, those kids who lost their parents or other loved ones in that ridiculous incident will make them life long proponents of gun control and even the elimination of our Second Amendment right here in the US. They won't blame that individual - they'll blame our gun laws and our gun "culture".
I'm sure if the nut case used molotov cocktails, they would be screaming at the ease of getting gasoline or some such.
We always want to blame the one thing that "caused" the problem. The trouble is that there are always a multitude of reasons and causes. Time will tell if the killer was mentally ill, a member of some sort of anti-movie militia, neo-NAZI, or just some very angry person that needed to "get back at society" or any combination of those and then some. And then there is the issue of why he felt that way. What primed the pump? Was he abused as a child? Did he grow up in an alcoholic family? And so on.
It's easy to blame an individual or his methods but we should really ask ourselves why is our society producing these people? Or why aren't we discovering ill folks and getting them the help they need or if necessary confining them? We can eliminate the methods (guns, gas, fertilizer, CO2, car exhaust) but these disturbed folks will find a way. And some folks in the past of convinced their countrymen and their military to do it for them.