Great finale with too much going on

Rating: Null/10 (21 July 2012)

I went to see the trilogy at this movie's premiere so it is very easy for me to compare this with the two earlier movies: Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. As part of the series (and obviously belonging to it with all included references) I suppose this would only be fair. To be sure to have seen everything correctly, I watched this again as a solo.
Let's start by saying I am a huge fan of Christopher Nolan's series and see this as the best real-life superhero series out there to date. With that, I honestly have to say that with this feature, DC actually still gives Marvel a chance.
Although this movie starts off absolutely fantastic, about halfway in it goes down the drain quite a lot for that far too much is going on in far too less time. The more the movie progresses from then on, the better it gets, but also the more absurd and totally unnecessary events take place. This made it seems like this was actually supposed to be a 4-hour feature or maybe even two movies instead of just one. There definitely was more than enough material for that.
More specifically: the main story was more than fine, the fillers were less than decent. People arise from the death once too often, the good guys are being deceived once too often, the cops were in trouble once too often and got over it a tad too strongly, in each of those cases the events not only not adding a single thing to the story or movie, but even making it a lot more sloppy as a whole (especially compared to the earlier two movies that were a lot cleaner as for that, making them much more powerful and realistic). A really big pity if you'd ask me, because overall it is an incredible movie with a good story and an amazing amount of potential.
Good thing that the acting and characters were spot on, in particular that of the good guys because Bane was an okay but not really great villain compared to what we have seen in the earlier movies. In the end, all he can do is fight well, and look and sound plain evil (more so than being intelligible). I think the movie either needed a villain that wasn't overly special (unlike the ones in the previous movies) or maybe one that was a lot more mad (like Scarecrow, the Joker, Two-Face, etc). But Bane unfortunately was floating in the middle and therefore couldn't really catch my attention till his very last, non-evil appearance. On top of that, the actual mastermind behind all evil in this movie just shouldn't have been evil at all.. for that this involved the cheapest and most classic plot twist ever. If only it would have added enough, but it didn't.
Leaving all bad behind, the brilliance of this movie shows (without a doubt) in the final couple of minutes, which forms the entire movie. This truly was a fantastic ending to the trilogy and was not just back on, but even over par with the previous movies. Only this already made watching the rest of the movie worth it. The previous movies, obviously, were still worth more though.
In the end, this movie is quite enjoyable but especially is a good representation of the comics. In comics, this amount of events and plot twists is acceptable and quite average, but for a movie it quite obviously is far too much. No idea why they made it like this. It definitely made a good movie, no doubt, but it did not make one that lives up to what we have seen before or which is nearly as memorable.
As much as it hurts to say this, once again the third movie of a fantastic series failed in getting on par with the earlier movies, while I never saw any of those have as much potential as The Dark Knight Rises. The only major mistake was that Nolan forgot to kill his darlings. It would have made it much better if not perfect.