Verisimilitude

Rating: 10/10 (1 August 2012)

I know it's a bit of a pretentious title but it sums up for me what I felt about the film.
For those who thought it was unrealistic or had plot holes, I say watch the opening plane hijacking scene and tell me what's realistic about that. In case you hadn't noticed it's a superhero movie. What did you expect? For those who thought Bane should have been three inches taller and not have changed his nationality, I say it's a film not a faithful rendition of the original.
I picked verisimilitude as my watchword here because, whatever its faults, TDKR seemed true to me. I managed to avoid reading anything much about the film before seeing it but as soon as the character Blake appeared I understood who he was going to turn out to be. Everything the characters did in this film seemed to be absolutely in tune with my conception of the Batman. I believed every one of them and they never did anything out of character as far as I conceived of their personalities and behaviour. It's absurd because I'm just talking about fictional movie characters based on fictional comic book characters, doing things that are physically impossible and yet they seem true.
And yes there are things that were annoying such as the Darth Vader resemblance caused by Bane's mask and the strange compression or expansion of time that so many have mentioned. But these problems are far outweighed by the look, the sound, the pace and above all the emotional involvement that this film supplies.
The best assessment I've seen from a critic is that broadcast by Mark Kermode on Radio 5 Live. He describes what he really, really wanted to see from Tim Burton's original Batman movie and how the film fell short. This was the Batman film he always wanted to see and it was the one I always wanted to see too.