People want to believe

Rating: 5/10 (9 August 2012)

Wannabe, wanna be, therefore it is. Let's face it: Dark Knight was good, a very good film, but frankly it was almost exclusively that good, because it was a sort of adaptation of Alan Moore's "Killing Joke" and because, despite the hysteria of Heath Ledger's dramatic and unfortunate death, The Joker was a great one, a master villain. I will not compare it with Jack Nicholson's because that one was exceptional. Ledger's was very good, almost excellent. The residual memory emerges from this point; people want "The Dark Knight Rises" to be a sequel of that excellency, as I did, as Nolan forced us to believe so... as some kind of religious belief keeping us blindly seeing the way it was supposed to be, but it wasn't. It wasn't indeed, as the first of Nolan's trilogy it was a disbelief and a mime of the second. Without a matured anti-hero, this Batman collapses.
Somewhere somehow if not already at the plane, I started to feel I was being fooled by the Hollywood machine, again and again; my "want it to be as so" was there no more, vanishing, while I gradually started to notice the annoying, repeating and exaggerated soundtrack pushing me for a critical pause. Hans Zimmer made me seriously question about everything in this movie, existentially, if indeed I was facing the terrifying possibility of seeing another 2 hours of hollowed clichés noised by a syrupy music... another disappointment to add. You name it, Star Wars, Prometheus, Conan... I tried, I really did, I even said to myself to take it easy at my criticism and expectation, but there was no emotion to attach with, instead the music was continuously persisting in forcing the spectator to delude himself that indeed there was, like a crazy frantic miraged dance going to nowhere subliming the emptiness.
Simply put, the narrative didn't allow me to empathize with the characters, all of it was forced like an hyperactive quest to push the audience for an illusion of a final master piece, an idea that would be preferable not to be discarded, like a comfortable thought as nice as a wall separating the movie from the spectator. We were comfortably eating popcorns nicely throwing the bags to the floor.
I didn't like Bate's Bat forced voice, I don't like his costume, I haven't felt jubilated when he arose from the ashes, I kept wondering about Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns": what a pale reflex this film was revealing itself, bad omen I was getting bored, I wondered about the time of the intermezzo that would never come. I felt myself observing a hysterical sequence of forced dramatic situations, not realism, not Bat's Gothic existentialism. There was no voyeurism, there was no personal attachment, there was no time to feel emotionally connected... there was right in front of your nose... another banal Hollywood film using a Batman's stamp, a "Bruce Wayne's" costume fairy tail.
You have to be given compassed storyline hidden behind a door's hole, like preparing for the battle tasting a good cup of old wine expecting the confronting dilemma of mirroring yourself, like Alan Moore's and Frank Miller's Batman art of questioning... not this artificial and plastic speaking dolls acting for a spoiled audience, for statistics and budget and major gross openings! Michael Caine, I would punch your nose, how could you let this happen?.
Everyone speaks about Bale's voice... heck with it! But of course it's strange, but of course, you just have to wonder you are a human being deprived from your childhood, although a noble guardian of a child's innocence... his own lost one... no? Great potential, great inner thought, great professional and passionate commitment and study, Tom Hardy's personification... but not properly explored by his director. You weren't given time or you weren't properly presented to his drama simply put. It was illustrated as just another sketched brute villain, with an Ah...! here he is, surpassed by the next one, Ah... he is no more... and after a Oh...! a magical ethereal Batman is again, with his darn forced bad ass voice, right from the canonic pit of the survivors to smack the forces of evil... (Joel Schumacker... no?)
I won't spoil the storytelling although I was spoiled by this film's lack of depth rich of busted expectations. Like every popcorn movie, this one innovates itself... it's Gothic an it has wings; obviously satisfies one's expectation behaving as just as commonly as a epidermic chain of pretentious tragic sensations, clichés, totally predicted and totally comfortable. And don't tell me this is just a comic movie, don't be so intellectual you say... Oh yes? Don't throw me that load of crap, because Nolan wanted this trilogy to surpass the previous ones using as trump two of the most darker comic book authors: Alan Moore and Frank Miller. If anything was to be expected, it was fulfilling expectations!
At the end, nothing new is added only sustained by its historicity and by the programmed acting of it as a frantic piece of firework conquering claps and tears from the crowd. This is not for a Batman apologist. This is equal to what was pretentiously challenged except for now the difference is merely dressed in kinky black and pompous tricks of magic.