The Dark Knight RisesFollow

Just got back from the midnight showing. What'd everyone think?

Also, there are some things that can be seriously spoiled in this movie. Use spoiler tags!

Overall, I really enjoyed it. I thought that the Dark Knight was a little better, but that's like saying Star Wars V was better than VI. Both still awesome movies in the end. The series ended well.

And now for spoiler discussion. You have been warned.

SpoilerIn no particular order:

Bane's death (or lack thereof) was a little bit of a letdown for me. One, we never really saw Bane's face. Two, he was kind of just blasted by Anne Cat-haway and flew off screen into a wall. That said, the whole man behind the man switcharoo was pretty well done, I think. I didn't see it coming, though I should have been expecting something like this in retrospect, after seeing Inception. One does not simply stop being Mal, apparently.

Robin. Ho boy. I had him pegged as the Robin figure from the beginning. Too involved in the final movie for him to be anything else. Though, figuring out instantly that Bruce Wayne = Batman seemed a little off to me. Whatever. The way they ended with him was pretty cool. Though, I'm hoping they don't do a spinoff series or anything. The next Batman movie should be a reboot, despite how sick I am of origin stories. This is a good stopping place, and I know Hollywood likes to milk cash cow franchises for all they're worth, but for the artistic integrity of the series and for the love of God, please let it end here.

Alfred. The funeral scene was excellently played.

One of the themes of the movie, especially towards the middle seemed to be class warfare. I just found this interesting, especially with recent events in politics and economics. Things like the Occupy stuff no doubt played a role in the writing of the script.

Catwoman. I really like how they portray her. In the past she's been extremely hammy and over the top. Hathaway does a good job, I think. She's just a very skilled thief trying to make a living, and gets wrapped up with the wrong people. It worked.

There was a famous image from the Knightfall series that came to mind while watching Bane break Batman in the fight scene beneath the sewer. This was obviously intentional. (Unfortunately, no dinosaur.) People were wondering how close to Knightfall this would stick - I felt like that was a little nod to it.

And Cillian Murphy was pretty funny this time around.

That's it off the top of my head. What'd everyone else think?

Edited, Jul 20th 2012 4:26am by IDrownFish

Apparently opening night was not a safe one
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/20/us/colorado-theater-shooting/index.html

No motive reported yet.

Edit: I'm doing casual searches looking for more information, and there are several eyewitness reports on how they thought the gas and the sound of the gun fire were elaborate extensions of the movie. I mention this because there's a bunch of twitter responses about how heartbreaking and awful that is and all I can think of is how awesome a movie would be if they'd pipe in gunfire sound effects and isolated flashes and bangs and smoke during action scenes to simulate combat like that. Forget 3D, that would be immersion.

Something tells me I should feel bad for thinking that.

Edited, Jul 20th 2012 12:31pm by lolgaxe

You aren't the only one.


Booby trapped home? Sounds like there was something seriously wrong with this guy. It's too bad at least one premier showing of the movie is being cancelled because of this event.

The **** is a 4D movie? Playing every single individual frame from the movie at once?

[quote=Tatham]SpoilerTalia Al Ghul appearing in that plot twist I really @#%^ing hated. I think the ending would have gone better if they just focused on a better send-off for Bane and kept the story that he was actually Ras Al Ghul's son. That twist I totally dug, but the other one... @#%^ that.

SpoilerBut... did R'as Al Ghul actuall have a son? I prefer sticking to the source material as closely as is reasonable, but maybe that's just me.

I think I'm becoming bitter and jaded in my old age.

EVERY twist, I saw in advance. A bunch of characters seemed introduced, just to be dropped or killed or ignored. Several things seemed (to me) to be unresolved or done incorrectly. All that aside, I enjoyed the action.

SpoilerWorthless characters introduced or shown just to die/ignore/disappear
-The mayor, I suppose for continuity's sake
-Gordon's old partner, who dies at the end.
-Catwoman's girlfriend
-The nameless fanatical follower of Bane and she-Bane, who gets shot near the end
-Robin's partner who is shown in all of two scenes, just to die in the second
-Scarecrow never gets his comeuppance


Continuity/general annoyance issues:
- Batman takes the energy battery out of the Bat in order to create the gadget that blocks remote detonation of the nuke. Later, Batman drives the Bat anyway, despite it having no power source.
- I honestly thought Catwoman was a lesbian. Calling this a continuity error
- Robin's worthless for almost the entire last 2/3rds of the movie. He tries to stop the cops from going into a trap... and fails. He tries to save Gordon from assassination... no help needed. He tries to free the cops from the sewers... and gets his partners killed. He tries to save the kids from the orphanage... and manages to get the bridge blown up instead. Maybe all of this is just to show that ROBIN REALLY SUCKS AT EVERYTHING, but if not, that's all I took away from it.

I feel like the movie tried to do too much and took too much time to do so. It felt like its almost 3 hour runtime. It tried to get a training montage similar to the first movie, but it just felt out of place to me. I guessed who the boss was before the movie was half over. The only parts I thought were really well done was Alfred at the end, and pretty much anything with Ann Hathaway. Anyway, the movie was nowhere near as good as the second, IMO. It wasn't terrible, but I'd put it only slightly above Spiderman 3 in quality (ie, worth seeing to finish the trilogy, then forgetting because it just wasn't a great movie).

SpoilerThe best scenes in the movie are the Alfred scenes. I wouldn't be surprised to see Michael Caine get a few awards his performance. I thought Hathaway as Catwoman was well done if nothing special. I think she could have done more with the role, but the story didn't allow for it. The villain switch was poorly done and fairly easy to see coming, I could have done without it. Finally, Bane just wasn't that interesting as a villain. The problem is the that the mask covers too much of his face. Part of what made Ledger's Joker so good was the way he animated his face. You can't really have Bane without the mask, but it did make for a poorer villain. I liked the movie, and it did make for a good ending to the trilogy, but it could have been better.

As small side note, having lived a short drive from Pittsburgh for most of my life, it was kind of neat to see the city so prominently displayed on the big screen. Sure, there have been plenty of movies shot in Pittsburgh, but I think that is probably the biggest.

Lastly, the trailers were pretty lackluster. I was happy to see the one for The Hobbit, and the new Superman teaser looked interesting, but that was it.

Edited, Jul 22nd 2012 12:33am by Turin

I liked the trailer with the gangsters shooting up the theater through the screen.

... what? I couldn't have been the only one they didn't pull that from!?

Me being not the biggest Batman fan (I like him a lot as a kid, because of the older movies [Nicholson's Joker, and then the next movie and of course the Animated series), I liked it. It was a good closer. I saw it all coming, but that is OK. I do dip in and out of the Batman world so I knew what to expect.

I'm bummed it is the last of it's set, but maybe we get a Nightwing movie out of it? I would have liked to have seen a few other villains on the big screen.

As for previews: The only new-ish one I saw was the Superman one. There was a chick behind me who seemed a little too excited about it. At the end of the movie that chick turned out to be a guy...it was weird.
I would have liked to have seen the Oz one. I'll have to youtube it here, this is the movie that is suppose to explain how the "wizard" made it to Oz, yea?

Side note about the movie: a LOT of people gasped and moaned when the torn flags were shown.

While definitely not a bad movie, I wasn't all that impressed with it honestly. I knew going in there'd be no way it could live up to Dark Knight, so I went in with lowered expectations but was still disappointed.

Bane, while not a "bad" or "cheesy" villain, wasn't a great one either. The mask "masked" a pretty good actor & his motivations, which are eventually explained, were uninteresting. The one or two scenes where his eyes showed genuine emotion either took place in a flashback or during conflict resolution that was completely sudden, unsatisfying, & unexplained.

I knew the twist Spoiler(French chick being Talia Al Ghul) because I'm a geek & while that improved the plot, that resolution was also rather lame. There're also a couple cheesy/campy lines which detracted a bit from the previous work- because there's nothing I remember even the least bit cheesy in either of the other.

And the worst part about the Dark Knight Rises? It's the last Nolan Batman movie, probably ever. It has a happy ending & leaves room for a sequel. A sequel that will suck in comparison to any of the 3 previous Nolan Batman movies, be it a COMPLETE reboot, recasting, or continuation of the Nolan movies. IT. WILL. SUCK.

Anne Hathaway is one of the brightest spots, the action scenes look great in IMAX (but nothing that outdoes anything in Dark Knight), & Alfred is amazing (but missing for a decent chunk). Bale is good too. The Dark Knight Rises isn't quite the epic it's predecessor was, but it's a good bookend to the series wrapping up stuff started in Begins.

I actually thought Bane's voice was the best part of his character. It seemed to fit him well, at least imo.