Review of The Dark Knight Rises (2012) by Zanadar — 27 Jul 2012

Ultimately the problem with the movie is the plot makes no sense at all. As I'm endeavoring to not give away anything, so I'm going to be intentionally vague. There is no logical explanation for the actions of the villains in this movie. Nothing to justify why they are doing what they are doing, and even if you work past that and accept that they just are, what they end up doing doesn't even make sense in the context of their stated goals. Unlike the insane, but methodical plans of the Joker in the second movie, the bad guys in this are just plain insane, and yet they play it far more straight-faced than the aforementioned previous antagonist did.

The next problem is the action. The whole "comic book movie" excuse that gets banded around so often can really only make up for so much. The core of the issue is that in Nolan's Batman universe, bullets seem to be more precious than diamonds. For some reason this did not feel quite as obvious in the previous two installments as it did in this one. Every action scene has mooks running up to Batman or other characters with guns in their hands to be easily disarmed. The frequency with which this happens in staggering. Barely anyone ever fires their guns throughout the movie and when they do, they make Stormtroopers look accurate. This culminates in a massive all out battle in which literally thousands of people suddenly forget the deadly projectile launching devices more or less all of them are holding and start laying into each other with whatever is available on hand. The sheer absurdity of the scene makes it impossible to ignore the issue even if you'd intentionally not payed attention everyone running up to martial arts specialists to be easily disarmed up to that point. All of this casts an absurd, practically silly light on the action that really detracts from the movies tone.

Next problem: Exposition, exposition, exposition, exposition, exposition...you can see where I'm going with this. A character enters a plot important room and they start spouting exposition about it to people who quite obviously and unmistakable already have this knowledge beforehand, and nobody questions why they are being told something they already know. The sheer volume of exposition in this movie pushes the already ridiculous runtime past the point of tolerance.

Honestly, I feel tired of this movie. I felt tired of it by the time it finally ended on it's awful cop-out ending, I felt tired thinking of all the things that really did not work in it, and I feel tired listing them here. I'm sorry, it just really isn't a good movie on almost any level, which is a crying shame seeing as it's predecessor is one of my personal favorites.