The End of an Era

Rating: 8/10 (20 July 2012)

Nolan made Scarecrow into a force of biological warfare, he made The Joker into a nightmare of modern knife crime and now he has made Bane into a hulking leader of a mass terror organisation. He has pulled one of the best super heroes in history into the modern day and made them more sadistic, harrowing and brutal than they have ever been.
Bane is the epitomisation of a brute, he's a hulking figure that gives Batman the physical test that he hasn't faced as yet in Nolans films. Not only does this give a further feeling of completion to the trilogy, having Bat's skills tested in every way but it also put's Batman in scenarios that he hasn't been in before, unable to better his opponents by punching them in the face.
I feel sorry for Tom Hardy, he's bound to be rife with comparisons with what Ledger did to the Joker. Nevertheless he pulls it off as well as anyone else could though, a careless monster with a twinge of sadness in everything he says. He still steals any scene he's in with his methodical and minimalist yet explosive depiction of a man who has been through hell and wants everyone else to go through it too. It might not be quite as memorable as Ledger, but he deserves recognition non the less.
Everyone else pulls their weight, Bale, Freeman, Oldman and Caine reprise their roles without flaws. Bale in particular hits home as the ageing and weathered Bruce Wayne. Hathaway, Cotillard and Gordon-Levitt also join the ensemble positively and up the ante for the rest of the cast to play off excellently.
No one is the star of the show more than Chris Nolan. One of the slogans for this film is 'The Epic Conclusion' and epic could not be a better term to describe it. Some of the set pieces are literally jaw dropping and are well worth going to see in IMAX. Spectacle is something that Nolan does very well, cutting down on the CGI wherever possible and instead opting to have hundreds of genuine extras adding a sustained feeling of realism to the scenes, adding all the more impact.
The pacing is the main problem, the first hour or so is too engulfed with introducing everyone to new characters and making us actually like them. Spliced in is some action sequences to keep our attention up, but generally it drags its heels at the start. This is entirely forgivable, even for people with so much story telling talent as the Nolan brothers, mainly because once the end gets going you don't care about what's happened, you become consumed by the way the story unfolds and can't wait to find out what it's building to.
Another problem I had was that it lacked some really different and outstanding cinematography, don't get me wrong, Pfister does a great job as ever and shoots everything ravishingly. The problem is that in Batman Begins they had the pulsating shot from POV of victims of the Scarecrows poison that nearly punched you through the screen. In The Dark Knight you have the swooping sonar shots that showed the surrounding location in a really interesting way. But alas there is no such shot like this in Rises, which is once again forgivable but a shame.
The third film is always going to be the hardest of the trilogy, but in the safe hands of Chris Nolan there is no worries. Blending the spectacle of Dark Knight and the soul of Begins makes for a film that is equally on par with both, contributing to what will easily stroll into everyone's top trilogy list. May god have mercy on anyone trying to reboot this.