Nolan's weakness resurfaced; TDK is still the best

Rating: 7/10 (17 November 2012)

It is a huge undertaking to create a concluding movie meant to super cede TDK, which is still the best action film I have watched in a long time, and overall TDKR didn't disappoint, but it could have been better in my opinion.
The same fast-paced elements are there, and I liked the fact that this movie is an overall bird's eye view on all key characters rather than too much camera focus on the main heroes/ villains themselves. Also, in almost all superhero movies, the main characters are too one dimensional (1-D), in that they are either too cool or too depressed and never change across time, but in this film some of our beloved characters have 'changed', and therefore appeared to be more human.
One main problem is that I have realized that Nolan CANNOT excel in creating epic physical catastrophic effects as compared to psychological catastrophic effects. TDK (with the Joker) was the reason for the latter, and understandably Nolan have chosen two aspects for this movie to match up to TDK's ambitions - one is that if TDK was Batman in a crisis, TDKR is Batman in his downturn; another aspect is the villain this time, though far less brilliant than Joker, is more direct & devastating in terms of his aggression. The former aspect worked really well for the first 1.5 hours as we see that Batman/Wayne's reputations were no longer what they used to be, their lives were hell and Batman was ultimately a human like the rest, in that he had turned out to be tardy and useless as well.
However, Nolan's failure becomes more apparent in the second half of the movie when all of the COLLATERAL damage comes in - too much physical destruction going on but failed to cover up for too many unrealistic actions because the story had to go on at a pace way too fast. Also, I have yet to watch a movie with 'bombastic' actions going on and managed to escape all forms of cliché elements - Nolan has failed in Inception, and he failed again in this test too. Unlike TDK, TDKR has finally given in into convention in certain ways and that has cost a big rating penalty from me..for example, an injured, bankrupt and gadget-less Wayne apparently had no problem returning to a city where the villain had made extensive attempts to destroy all access points and maintained strict control over them.
Still, overall I liked this movie as it could have been much worse (according to almost all sequels historically) and manages to live up close to or on par with TDK, though sometimes I wonder if Inception was an audition process for Marion and Joseph's part in TDKR :)