Right, I've got caught up with The Dark Knight Rises and well, frankly, I thought it was disappointing. Not terrible by any means but very, very average and by far the weakest of the Nolan Batman trilogy for me.
At no point during the film did a really engage with the characters of the story that was unfolding, because the characters were hardly developed and the story often didn't make sense and then ends on something ludicrous before having a cheat of a coda.
The film opens with Bane mounting a raid on a CIA plane to capture a scientist. A scientist who apparently is the only person in the world capable of turning a nuclear reactor into a bomb. This seems unlikely. It's a sequence however which is probably the most interesting action set pieces in the film. It is pretty cool but unfortunately also comes at the start of a film which runs for nearly another three hours.
Anyway we switch to a charity benefit which exists to remind us of Harvey Dent and the end of the last film. We find Bruce apparently largely crippled, for no apparent reason. We are told that Batman disappeared for eight years right after the death of Dent. So we meant to believe that despite Bruce not doing his thing for years his body has accumulated a number of serious injuries whilst he sat around at home.
Had it been eight years of him fighting crime then yes I could accept that the damage has built to leave Bruce struggling. But no, we are told a few times that he just stopped after that night. That chase with the police must of gone really badly.
Anyway soon we have Selina Kyle stealing Bruce's fingerprints (she is the best thing in the film, more on that later) to sell to an evil business man. Said evil man is in league with Bane in a plot to take over Wayne Enterprises. Together they mount an attack on the stock exchange to effectively bankrupt Bruce. However apparently despite physically taking over the exchange it appears they didn't need to.
For as this sequence moves on it appears the criminals can do their thing via Wi-Fi. Not only that but whilst in the midst of a high speed motorbike chase no less. Erm. Oh, and at not point do they use the fingerprints in this plan. So basically the fingerprint element is only an excuse to get Selina to meet Bruce.
The Upshot of all this is that Marion Cotillard's Miranda can get her hands on a fusion reactor for her evil plan. Despite the fact that her comrade Bane appears to know exactly where it is and basically just takes it.
So why bother with the whole stock-exchange, bankrupt Bruce to take over the company thing? If it was she learn how to flood the facility to stop it being used to disarm the bomb then surely they could place guards or even better just blow it up after they are finished with it. Yes basically the first third of the film serves no purpose if you think about it for two minutes.
Anyway, once Bane and co have their bomb, he fights Batman, easily defeating him and sending him to a prison in a foreign backwater, whilst swearing to torture his soul. Bane then spends five months just not really doing anything after taking over central Gotham and threatening to blow it up.
We have a few scenes of chaos and then apparently this translates just as empty streets everywhere despite there being no police on the streets at all.
So Bruce talks to a crazy old man who conveniently tells him half a story and never mentions the child he keeps talking about is a girl. Gets over his broken back, escapes and gets back to Gotham in what appears to be less than a day. Hmm.
Once he gets back he releases all the trapped cops (who seem fairly healthily for men trapped underground for five months) fights Bane (this time winning after thinking punching him in his obvious facemask is a good idea) is betrayed by the woman he's gone to save (about which we don't really care as she's been in about five scenes before this and Bruce has known her for all of about a week) and then seemingly sacrifices himself to detonate a nuclear bomb over the bay next to the city ( a 4megaton bomb as we are told. So er, yeah, I'm sure Gotham will be fine with that being detonated a couple of miles away), only he obviously doesn't.
Oh and all through this Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a good, honourable beat cop. So basically the story is simple but the first part is irrelevant and the shock betrayal is muted because the character behind it is under developed and it seems we are meant to believe Bruce loves her. But there really is no connection between the two. So Bruce looks shocked and the audience just shrugs it's shoulders.
And that is one of the main problems with the film, characters just aren't developed. For example Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle is the best thing the film. She is sassy, cool and capable. She however never is anything really beyond this. We get no real sense of her motivation or her past or role in things. She seems to be indebted to Bane's gang but we never get an understanding of why. If anything the character is mostly functional, showing up whenever Bruce needs help or the plot needs to be moved on.
As mentioned Miranda is not sufficiently developed to make her betrayal feel like anything, leaving us with Bane as the main villain. He also fails. Hampered by the fact the re-mastering of his lines after bad feedback to the initial mix meaning it never seems like he is actually saying his own lines but just being overdubbed by someone else entirely. His physically capable and seemingly smart but as mentioned his plan overall seems confused, and his is dismissed almost as an afterthought in the final third of the film. In fact his two figths with Bruce are both underwhelming and fairly dully choreographed.
So, yes the shadow of the Joker hangs over this film too; no-one here has his presence.
Elsewhere the secondary character perform their function and little more. But a key factor is we don't really get a reading on Bruce either. Is he supposed to be grieving? Maybe, but he seems to lurch from impassive to slightly annoyed and back. In one key scene where Alfred delivers what should be devastating news he just basically walks up the stairs. There is no visible reaction. And his great anger just comes across as someone a bit ticked off. (Also he goes from one scene refusing to use guns to the next where he is letting lose with the cannons on his flying heli-Bat thing)
The film is solidly lensed but there are no truly striking images or sequences, nothing comes close to the second film's police van chase for example. Hans Zimmer's score repeats most of the beats from the opening instalments and occasionally actually works to drown out what characters are saying.
So, yeah overall, disappointing. And the coda is not open interpretation as people suggest. Inception is built around questioning what is real. Nothing in this film does that, we are not lead to question the reality of anything. So there is absolutely no reason to question the reality of the scene of Alfred seeing Bruce and Selina (who he never met, he only saw her photo, so why would he imagine her?).
