The Dark Knight Rises. There be SPOILERS here.

It was awful in the extended trailer shown before MI:3 IMAX. You couldn't understand it, nor, I suspect, were you always meant to understand it. But, boy, they fixed the hell out of it in post. Hardy was using inflections in his voice to make himself be heard, and once you hear those inflections magnified, he sounds like Jeeves.

 

Looked beautiful. Good performances all around, but fuck was that a lovely neoliberal wet dream of finely crafted propaganda. Ayn Rand would have whipped out her cock and finished to completion any number of times during that flick.

 

Finally saw it last night and, though I wasn't blown away by it as I had hoped, I did enjoy it.

It was certainly too long. It felt every bit a 3-hour movie and even though I have a good attention span, that was too long for this one.

I didn't think Catwoman added much to the movie. Hathaway was OK in parts (the scene where she sells Wayne's fingerprints, in particular), but she just didn't have the ferocity I think she needed. She fell short of Michelle Pfieffer's portrayal. If they had removed her character entirely, I don't think I would have missed her.

The Robin reveal was dreadful. My friends and I speculated after the scene where he meets Wayne that he was Robin, but we were a little tripped up by the fact that they called him John Blake. When the woman says he should go by his legal name, we expected it to be Dick Grayson (or perhaps even Jason Todd). To call him Robin as his legal name was absurd. I thought that if they wanted to obscure his identity, they could have called him Blake and revealed his legal name was Dick Grayson. The fanboys would have known it was a reveal for Robin, and the non-comic readers wouldn't have noticed one way or another. At worst, if they really wanted to hammer the reveal home for the non-comic readers, they should have named him Dick Grayson and then said his legal name was Robin. The name issue was probably what irritated me most in the film.

Lastly, it needed more Batman. The plot certainly made it obvious why he wasn't in it as much, but there were some long stretches where you just wanted to see Batman kick some ass.

As some others have noted, Batman clearly already fixed the autopilot and ejected, gliding to safety. As for escaping the prison and getting back to the city, there's just no need to really show it. The movie was long enough as it was. The viewer just has to trust that Bruce Wayne/Batman still has his ways even without Lucius or Alfred. He wasn't inept, after all.

As for what I liked: I thought Tom Hardy was awesome as Bane and I loved the voice. There were one or two lines I missed, but mostly he was pretty easy to understand. He was also freakin' huge. Hardy almost definitely has done a cycle or two in his day.

Inception:


Warrior (which was very good, BTW)


The Dark Knight Rises:


He didn't quite measure up to Ledger as the Joker, but who could (especially with a mask covering most of his face for the whole film)? He was a better villain than Ra's Al Ghul.

I'm amazed at how much of the film was done practically instead of with CGI and it really added to it. The plane stunt was done on wires, they actually set off explosions under the pitch at Heinz Field, etc.

I liked that Bane's plan was set in motion and took the course of several months (years?) to come to fruition. Instead of the usual supervillain plan that takes all of a day to execute, this plan showed some real evil mastermind behind it and it allowed the film build up to what I thought was a very good climax.

If The Dark Knight was four out of four stars, I'd give this a solid three out of four.

I liked the assessment of OOP (I think) that The Avengers was more fun, but this was the "better film."

 

I still haven't seen this movie, but I object the description of 'Warrior' as 'very good.'
Or even 'good.'

 

Wow, really? It's one of the better movies I've rented in the last six months. I thought the acting was excellent (Nick Nolte and Hardy, in particular) and the cinematography meshed well with the gritty tone of the story.

It wasn't on the same level as The Fighter, of course, but it was quite enjoyable, I thought.

 

The "pitch"?

 

Yup. That was me. Thanks.

I see your point on the Robin thing. I didn't hate it, but it was odd. Kind of took me out of the scene.

I think the real name they should have gone with was Tim Drake. Of all the Robins, the character in the movie most fit Tim Drake, who is more of a detective than the other two in the comics.

 

I'm not familiar with the Tim Drake character, but I wouldn't have been opposed to that. It just seemed odd to make up a completely new Robin character and, worst of all, make his legal name Robin. Kinda defeats the purpose of Batman telling him to conceal his identity.

It definitely took me out of scene.

 

I understand the thinking behind the legal name being Robin, but yeah, it was too distracting.

In the comics, Tim Drake was in the audience the night Dick Grayson's family was murdered. He later saw Grayson, as Robin, do a move that he recognized from the circus show and that helped him figure out that Grayson was Robin and Bruce Wayne was Batman. Drake was the third Robin after Grayson and Todd. He was different from Blake in that he still had both parents when he first became Robin.

 

Nah, Grayson would be the natural fit to stick with the comics, as Grayson moved from Gotham to another city (Bludhaven) and became a cop. By night, he was Nightwing.

Regardless, having him be Robin John Blake allows an easter egg without taking a literal interpretation from the comics. Odds are that when everything reboots after Man of Steel, we see a new take on Batman and Robin. Chris O'Donnell Robin was lame. Now that we've seen it can be done in a less dorky context, I think people will be open to seeing Robin in costume again. Will we see the traditional red/green/yellow? Doubtful. It's just too bright. Something tells me it would be another black suit but without the full-helmet-mask.

 

Saw it, and it had its moments.

. . . but while I'm no virgin, I'm getting more than a little tired of dark shit with 'WAY too much gratituious violence.

 

There were elements of all three thrown in there, but Drake was the one who got there mostly on his intelligence and detective skills, which were what they played up about Blake in the movie.