The Dark Knight Rises

Right, so I finally watched The Dark Knight Rises, as I watched The Dark Knight over a year prior.

I didn't like TDKR as much as TDK for a few reasons, mostly except for the reference to Batman leaving and Harvey Dent, everything with the Joker and the chaos he caused is swept under the rug. You know how for every movie, there's that "Darkest Moment" time when it seems that the villain seems to win, and the hero is dead/incapacitated? Yeah, well, for this movie, it goes on for way too long. After confronting Bane (the villain) in the sewers, Bane breaks Batman's back and sticks him a prison in the Middle East, which is mostly a huge pit with no plausible escape. Meanwhile, Bane, the criminals that Gotham City had put away, and his philosophy of "the people" ruling and taking from the rich destroys infrastructure, kills people, plunders and kills the rich through kangaroo courts featuring Dr. Jonathan "Scarecrow" Crane as the "judge", with a sadistic policy that involves killing people through slow strangulation, neck snapping, and a "lose hope until you pray for death" philosophy. And this goes on in-universe for five months. To make matters worse a clean energy source-turned-hydrogen bomb would blow in five months anyway.

When Batman finally returns to kill Bane, the attractive female board member Bruce Wayne entrusted with the energy source and one of Bane's hostages was evil all along, which means that even if Bane hadn't shown up, Gotham was doomed anyway. Even the ending isn't particularly upbeat, though there is a new origin story for Robin.

But more interesting is that even though some people have compared that Bane is a play on Romney's "Bain Investments", the character of Bane and his cohorts is the philosophy of Occupy taken the logical extreme. They even LOOK a bit like Occupy members. It's even more obvious if you know that Bane's character was created by political conservatives.

It's also a bit frustrating that while Bane is extremely skilled in hand to hand combat and wears a bulletproof vest, NO ONE thinks of shooting Bane in the head. But as a movie, it is very well done, both from a cinematographic and plot perspective, even if it is extremely violent.

Carbonizer says: YES, if you know what you're doing. This does not follow the "Marvel formula".