The weak link of the trilogy, but still an awesome Batman movie.

Rating: 9/10 (10 August 2012)

The Dark Knight Rises is the conclusion to Christopher Nolan's trilogy of Batman movies. I absolutely loved the first two, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I'd go as far as to call them perfectly done Batman movies. Unfortunately, The Dark Knight in particular set a pretty high standard for itself, and I think from the beginning it was hard for Rises to top it. But after seeing it twice now, Rises is easily my least favorite of the trilogy, and the only one that I actually had problems with.
The Dark Knight Rises takes place a whole eight years after The Dark Knight. Gotham City is in peace time, and has been thriving on the lie that was created for it by Batman. Because of it though, Bruce Wayne hasn't put on the Batman suit in eight years, and has since become a recluse. He's forced to return, however, when a terrorist known as Bane invades Gotham and intends to destroy it.
I will say, before I get into my nitpick problems, that this movie is still definitely awesome. Just because it's not up to the standard of the first two doesn't mean I didn't still love it. There's a lot to enjoy in Rises. There's epic moments, great action, rich character interactions, fitting music, and some really memorable scenes. When characters go through pain, you feel it with them.
The cast didn't disappoint at all either. The returning players delivered everything you'd expect from them. Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman (possibly his best performance of the trilogy honestly), Michael Caine as Alfred, Gary Oldman as Gordon, and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, all of them were just as great as they were before. The newcomers were just as great. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a new cop named John Blake, and he honestly carried the movie by himself at certain times. Tom Hardy plays the villain Bane, and although I wasn't as much of a fan of the character as I expected to be, Hardy's performance was awesome. He has a mask on the whole time, so a lot of his acting is simply done with his eyes, and it's so easy to overlook how great he does it. And finally, Anne Hathaway plays Catwoman...err, Selina Kyle. Her character honestly might have been my favorite in the movie. Hathaway just really delivered and exceeded expectations, and she was just a real treat to watch.
Now, to some of the things I didn't like. These are all minor things, and as such I really didn't have any MAJOR problems with the movie. There were just a collection of minor things that tended to irk me.
For one thing, the movie runs at almost three hours long. Movie length doesn't bother me, it's that even at that long of a runtime the movie still felt slow for the first hour, and then rushed for the rest of it. I just feel like they tried to squeeze way too much plot into one movie, and so if some stuff was cut, I think it would have been beneficial. I think one thing that could have helped that is cutting out a character, Miranda Tate. If I could pick one character that really just wasn't that interesting, it'd be her.
I also feel like they spent too much time explaining some thing, and then not enough explaining others. The movie is very dialogue-heavy, and normally I love dialogue a lot, but it just seemed to be put in the wrong places at some points. Sometimes images speak more than words, and I think that's what this needed at times.
The editing was terrible at times. The movie didn't do well with time lapses, because it actually takes place over the course of about half a year, and it didn't feel like that a lot of the time. And then other time lapses honestly made no sense. There's a scene where a stock market is being attacked (no spoilers, it's in the trailers), and it's day time. It's said in the movie that only eight minutes pass in there, and yet when they leave it's pitch dark night time. That's just lazy editing.
The sound editing bothered me too. There's times when it's hard for characters to be understood. The biggest offender of this is Bane. Since he has a mask on, his voice was created in the sound editing process. There's times when it's hard to understand him, and then there's times where he sounds like he's talking on a microphone, even in the opening scene when he has a bag on his head and his voice should be muffled. I don't blame Tom Hardy for this, I blame the sound editing guys.
Finally, I hated the ending. Not completely, but certain aspects of it. Still, I can't go into details without spoiling it. Basically though, something that goes in hand with that, is that I don't mind when a superhero movie changes the mythology, as long as it's done well. And, I wasn't a fan of how it was done here.
It may seem like there's a lot I hated about the movie, but really there wasn't. These are all just minor complaints, and really a lot of them I didn't notice until I thought about it more later on. It's still an awesome movie, and I do have to say I think it was a fitting conclusion to the Batman trilogy.