Mixed emotions?

Rating: 6/10 (31 August 2012)

This movie has definitely been one of the most anticipated movies of the year. The million dollar question, however, is whether it deserved the noise around and for it. The answer is not clear, I am afraid.
Trilogies are, by default, problematic. It quite scarce to produce three movies that stand at the same level and Nolan's trilogy poses no exception. As is well-known, the new Batman series has been stigmatized by the death of Heath Ledger, which has elevated the second part into an unreachable level. Fair? Perhaps not, but that is a fact to live with.
That said let's move to the movie in hand. The Dark Knight Rises (DKR) has its moments but, unfortunately, its bottleneck lies in the point where the vast majority of modern movies is, i.e. in the script. Indeed, acting is adequate, cinematography is fine, special effects are appropriate but the plot is simply not in accordance with our expectations. In fact, Mr Nolan had several years to work on the script and, therefore, trivial and obvious errors are not forgiven; such errors are not reported herein since other reviewers have made excellent work in pointing them out. One expects that more care would have been placed on the development of a decent script for this trilogy.
Summing up, the DKR is a good movie, with the potential to be much better, but cursed to live in the shadow of the Dark Knight. Probably this is not a good excuse for the sloppiness that we encountered but, nonetheless, can provide some justification. I think 6/10 is fair enough for the outcome that we experienced.