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The Dark Knight Rises (***WARNING SPOILERS***)


Lemonade

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I thought it was good, but not great. I think it could have been so, so much better if it had a 15 certificate, for a start. With Bane, you're relying on his sheer physical strength/taste for violence to make him a convincing bad guy. If we'd seen him being a bit more physically brutal - pulling off faces rather than swatting aside policemen in bloodless Power Rangers fashion - he would have been a lot more terrifying. The anarchy scenes when people are being pulled from their houses could also have been a lot more convincing. I know there was no chance it was ever going to be anything other than a 12A, but I think a bit more simple blood n' gore would have made the film a LOT better.

There were a few plot things that annoyed me. I wasn't particularly looking for them but they were a few pretty glaring ones. How did Bruce/Batman instantaneously get back to a cut-off Gotham from the middle of what looked like a Middle Eastern desert? The swiftly-decaying bomb getting chucked about. Bruce/Batman scaling a sheer rock face sans knee cartilage. Catwoman is a thief, right... so why is she AMAZING at hand-to-hand combat? The League of Shadows training explains why Bane and Batman are good fighters, but she's just a burglar, no?

I didn't buy the whole Bane-being-in-love thing either. I thought I had his motivations nailed down but then that came up and sort of muddied the waters. Didn't he hate Miranda's dad for rejecting him? Why would he want to 'carry on his work' with her? I might be getting my wires crossed there so if someone could shed light on that it'd be appreciated! Same goes for catwoman - she was all for anarchy until it actually started, then suddenly she's wistfully picking up artefacts and saying 'this was someone's home'. No shit, what did you think would happen?!

It was undoubtedly entertaining but it just didn't seem to stick to its internal logic.

Also, Marion Cotillard has to win some kind of razzie for the most unintentionally hilarious on-screen death.

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I didn't buy the whole Bane-being-in-love thing either. I thought I had his motivations nailed down but then that came up and sort of muddied the waters. Didn't he hate Miranda's dad for rejecting him?

Would you hold someone responsible for a decision one of their estranged relatives made? No. So how he feels about her dad is fairly irrelevant.

Catwoman is a thief, right... so why is she AMAZING at hand-to-hand combat?

Why not? She can also ride a motorcycle and is a gymnast. Turns out all of those things come in pretty handy in a Batman movie. Perhaps she can play guitar like Jimi Hendrix too, but there was never any call to show that during the course of the film... but if there had I wouldn't have wanted to see her taking lessons as a child to explain how she learned. I just accept the fact that she has acquired those skills somewhere down the line for whatever purpose she might need them for in the fictional town of Gotham City.

Same goes for catwoman - she was all for anarchy until it actually started

No she wasn't. She was talking a good game, hiding her true feelings with a veneer of nihilism which Batman never bought into from the very start. He always thought she was better than that, and in the end he was vindicated in that belief. All Selina Kyle truly wanted was a fresh start, nothing more, and what happened to Gotham never brought her any joy at all.

How come Bruce Wayne grew a shaggy beard whilst in the prison for 3 months, but the policemen who were underground didn't?

Razors were amongst the essential supplies they got. Keeping themselves respectable reminded the policemen and women (who liked to keep their legs smooth and underarm hair manageable) trapped underground that even though they were imprisoned they were still Gotham's finest. This maintenance of basic hygiene standards helped to keep morale high for the showdown at the end of the movie.

Fun fact: The trapped men and women of Gotham PD also raised their spirits with camp fire singsongs, charades and impromptu orgies.... but like the scenes showing Anne Hathaway playing guitar these were cut from the final movie due to time constraints.

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As far as logic holes go I did wonder why his leg still worked when he had to climb the pit and why the fall with the rope around him didn't fuck up his back again. I suppose he still had the leg device and the rope has a bit of give in it.

I also wondered why the freed police men ran at the criminals who were carrying machine guns instead of hiding in the surrounding buildings and shooting at them from positions of cover. But then, that wouldn't have looked quite so visually impressive and maybe they just didn't have the time to do that.

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Ultimately it was a good film about a man in a bat costume, with some great acting performances, which made perfect sense on an emotional level and was truly heroic.

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Definitely far too long. The 3 or 4 hours between Bane breaking the Bat (I can't decide if I love or hate how much that scene was underplayed..) and his escape from the pit could basically have been replaced with a montage and the film wouldn't be much worse off, really.

Hardy played a fucking blinder as Bane. The voice was what it was, same as Bat-Bales voice. A necessary evil. I did think, though, that after Batman punched fuck out of Bane when Bane that he sounded too much like Darth Vader for my liking. And he was also fucking difficult to understand in places. Overall though I think he nailed it. Ledger's Joker gets a lot of good press because Joker is such a heavy-handed, eccentric character and Ledger gave the impression that he was genuinely fucking nuts when he played him. The other side of that coin, though, is that role would have been pretty much completely imposible to over-act, whereas if Hardy had tried to play Bane as too much of a hardman it'd have ended up looking like some parody Schwarzenegger role. So I think Hardy deserves all the praise Joker got. I'd have liked to see Bane rip faces off but I think the fact that he handed Batman's ass to him without breaking sweat got it across pretty well just how badass he is.

You don't go from having no knee and a "vertebra sticking out of your back" to climbing a sheer rock face and kicking Bane's ass in 5 months. I don't care how many push-ups he did. I'm also reasonably sure, although it was explained the bomb had 5 months until detonation, that the timer on the bomb said 57 days when they load it into the lorry, but I may have misread. Nonetheless I'm willing to accept it on face value that it happened, suspension of disbelief etc. What I don't accept is that a child made a jump that no grown man ever has. Infact, that whole but irritated the balls off me. I got that he had to do it with no rope but figured it'd play out that the rope actually holds you back, or is some physical constraint, which would explain why nobody else managed it. So the whole "you need the fear" schtick annoyed me.

I called that Bane wasn't Ra's' kid, that he was the protector in the pit rather than the child, but not that the lassie was Ra's Jr. I actually thought they'd kill off Fox when the reactor chamber flooded, too. Caine was great but the scene at the grave was a little soap-opera-y for my liking. I did like the idea of Alfred totally losing his shit given that he's always been such a calming influence in Wayne's life but it was just a bit... much.

Overall I'd say it was a fitting end to the trilogy but it was far too long. I probably won't watch it again in any hurry. I'd probably rank the films BB=TDK>TDKR purely because BB is the only one which never really felt like it was dragging. It wasn't afraid to just shove in a training montage and leave out 20 minutes of unnecessary detail.

Still a fucking cracker of a film though.

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Most qualms relating to how Batman did this, or how Batman did that, can be answered by: "because he's motherfuckin' Batman."

Having watched the first two, I'd probably say BB>TDK=TDKR, but overall it's my favourite trilogy of films ever (apart from the original Star Wars, but I wasn't around when they came out". So, aye: the best trilogy of films to come out in my lifetime.

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