The Dark Knight Rises

Rating: 4/10 (23 August 2012)

The Dark Knight Rises is supposed to be and hopefully is the last of writer/director Christopher Nolan's Batman series. The first film in the series, Batman Begins, I know I gave a perfect rating, but after seeing it a second time, all the imperfections and things I thought were good the first time I saw the film, all turned out to be bad and I had no idea why I even liked it in the first place. The second film in the series, The Dark Knight, was a different reaction from me completely. I thought that it was a great film. I liked how instead of a lot of action and special effects we were given a great character study with a much worthy Oscar winning performance by Heath Ledger as The Joker. The film was extremely dark and bleak and by being so, it avoided all things that could be predictable, or clichÃ©. It was an excellent character study and was very entertaining as well. Now we come to the much awaited third and supposedly last film in this franchise, The Dark Knight Rises. I did have higher hopes about this new one since Nolan achieved perfection with The Dark Knight, but as it turns out I wish I had saved my ten dollar admission fee and done something else instead. Pretty much everything I can think of about The Dark Knight Rises was bad. The acting here is all very limp and flat and doesn't make us care, or connect to any of these characters whatsoever, so it is very hard to feel, or care what happens to them. The film is the longest in the series and you can certainly feel that. It really drags along and several times during the film I wish I would have checked my watch in the darkness of the theatre to see when this thing was over. It just dragged for a very long time. Probably my biggest problem with the film lies in the story however. The script for this film was all over the place. It had non sequitor after another and just these events that did not make one ounce of sense and it all felt extremely out of place. The last half of the film felt almost surrealistic in a way and it was all handled very badly. It all seemed so ridiculous and stupid that I literally could not believe what I was watching before my eyes. The first thoughts that came to my mind was that Nolan and company did not know how to end this series and were blowing any credibility they had along with it. It all just feels so out of place, unbelievable and silly. It's not that it was particularly hard to follow, I felt I got it, but there was not a whole lot to get. It was just a terribly mangled set of ideas that were not put in the final product well at all. Nolan seems to be really big on the scene right now after these Batman movies and Inception (which I wasn't particularly fond of either) and I just hope he can figure out how to construct story lines and characters better and maybe try his hand at a different genre after these because from The Dark Knight and even an earlier film like Insomnia, he does show talent, it's just that this last attempt did not work. I will continue to give his work a chance though and hope he improves as a writer and director. To say this Batman franchise was a failure, would not be accurate. The Dark Knight, I think set a personal best among superhero films and he is to get the credit for that. With that film he achieved perfection in a summer time blockbuster that also appealed to the art house crowds and to people who would normally never see a Batman film. He did that by using a great story and actors and by making it bleak and dark and really grabbing us and forcing to deal with our emotions and that of the characters and he succeeded phenomenally. I would still have to call The Dark Knight Rises the worst film I have seen this year so far and I will probably never watch it again and for my personal advice to Christopher Nolan, is to not put too much in to one story as to overcrowd it and just focus more on characters and believability and less on special effects and making "epic" films. I know he will succeed in the end, just not with this film.