Who are you pretending to be?

SPOILER ALERT:

Don't read this if you haven't seen the movie. Duh.

     Before I get started on my Dark Knight Rises review, I'd just like to say that I really used to enjoy going to midnight (or should I say...midknight!) showings of movies. Midnight showings meant the one showing that the nerdiest of nerds went to, and we could all bond in our love for a friggen movie that we had been waiting for what felt like all of our lifetimes combined. A good number of us would be dressed up, and standing in line could be a five hour event. It was an experience. Living in Seattle, I've come to terms with the fact that midnight showings now mean show up thirty minutes before the movie, and once there, the movie theatre is filled with obnoxious, elitist hipsters (do they come in any other flavour?) who are probably only there to later boast that they went to a showing of a movie that doesn't even exist anymore. Fucking hipsters. I wish, though, that the hipsters were all I had to complain about.
     Christopher Nolan, what happened? I thought you could do no harm. And this is the second time I've seen a movie of his that I actually had low expectations for before going into it. That's right. I expected to not like The Dark Knight Rises. I cringed at the news of Catwoman, and would have preferred Killer Kroc over Bane any day. But that discussion is no longer relevant. The Dark Knight Rises has already been made and seen and all of my hopes for it making my life a better place (which is what it seems to have done for all of my friends on Facebook) are gone. Alright, Aunty, what's your deal?
     Plot: As my friend Ben put it, the movie feels too written. I know that's silly to say because it actually was written, but everything fell too neatly into place at the very end. I understand that's one of the magics of movies. You make something seem unimportant so that when it is important you can catch the audience off guard. But Nolan wasn't very...good...at deciding what deserves weight and what doesn't (I'm even tempted to say that he was a bit Kafkaesque. Importance and unimportance were shot into the wind at some points...). My biggest complaint, and this will tie into another aspect of the movie later down the line of this way-too-long review, was when Bane blew up the football stadium, and he says that blah blah, the bomb could go off kind of whenever, but one of the citizens of Gotham has the device to blow everything up! Now, if you lived in a city like that, wouldn't you, as a person, try to find that person? That fact alone, in my brain, should have driven the city into a state of madness and chaos. This should have caused so much social chaos that Gotham would have destroyed itself before the bomb could. And that was the point, right? To destroy Gotham? Whatever. One more thing: I bet you ten bucks that if everyone in the movie had just stayed in Gotham, we could have shaved an hour off of this movie, or replaced it with better action and deep dialogue/quippy one liners. Instead, everyone was just scattered. Boo.

You'll find that lots of people shoot other people before taking the gun away.

     Realism: Hey, Nolan, you're all about this, yeah? That's why you didn't pick someone like Poison Ivy, or Mr. Freeze, yeah? I only bring this up since everyone and their mom enjoyed telling me this fact. Oh, Nolan is creating such a real Gotham. Oh, Batman is so realistic. Oh, Mr. Nolan doesn't like using special effects. Oh, His Holiness Nolan wouldn't dream of using CGI, and that's why he killed Two-Face before he could really flesh him out as a villain. Well, you know what? Shut the fuck up. The Bat made no sense. And neither did the fact that you can keep men alive for however many months in a cave with no escape. If you can fit a box through a hole, you can fit a man through it as well. But we'll just stick to passing notes. Also, how the fuck did Bruce Wayne get back to Gotham City after escaping that pit in the middle of nowhere? And I'm calling bullshit on Jonathan Blake for his logic in correctly guessing Batman's identity.
     Catwoman: Alright. Look. Anne Hathaway ended up making a great Catwoman, but (and this is a big, black-latex one!) Catwoman is still a worthless villain. She really only commits petty acts of robbery, and she makes out with Bruce Wayne and Batman. Romance is just stupid, ok? Ugh, there, I said it.
     Bane: He was also done very well! I THOUROUGHLY enjoyed any time that man used his fists. Especially when he bashes Batman's mask in. Irreversible, anyone? (Yes, this is my second Christopher Nolan review, and in both of them I referenced that movie. Watch it if you haven't seen it. It's good. Messed up, but good.) But why did he have some weird accent, and why did his voice have to be so distorted to the point that I couldn't understand some of his dialogue? Bane had a lot of good writing to him (even if I didn't really believe what he was saying). And why did it have to be Tom Hardy? I'm tired of seeing the cast of Inception. Please, put them to rest, Nolan. Bane also wasn't cruel enough. The Joker was made of pure evil that had no purpose other than to exist. And that's scary. Bane? Not evil, not really full of substance. Not really filled with anything other than lost love. That's what Mr. Freeze is for, son. Bane's character was flushed under all of the plots going on. They didn't even mention why he wears the mask. Ugh.

I actually thought Two-Face was going to make it.

     Remember when they (the writers) tried to set up that Bane might just be Ra's al Ghul's son? I present a question to my millions of readers: Did you assume Nolan was trying to change the canon, or were you thinking to yourself, you can't fool me, asshole. Because I definitely was thinking that to myself. Nolan, how dare you. What a stupid trick to try to play on me and every other Batman fan in the world.

     What I liked about The Dark Knight Rises: Scarecrow! That's it!
     Also, prove me wrong! But I'm pretty sure the word "rises", in that form and others, was used four times in the movie, in reference to light, war, darkness, and Bruce ("What are they saying?" "Rise.").