The Dark Knight Rises

Right, so I've managed to catch "The Dark Knight Rises" and frankly, I found it a bit disappointing. Spoilers abound.

Let's talk about the basic premise of the film. Batman has been out of action for 8 years ever since the death of Harvey Dent. Personally, my own opinion is that this could never happen because Batman, as a person, is way too driven to just sit around for 8 years. This is a man who trained for god knows how many years just to go around and fight people dressed as a bat, who is haunted and scarred by his parents death and who has vowed to try and prevent it from happening to other people. Of course, I'm a comic book reader as well so my view is a bit biased. 


So anyway, Bane then comes in and wrecks shit in Gotham, forcing Batman to stop him. To be fair, I didn't think much of Bane. His accent was too strange and I kept trying to place it but couldn't. He also tended to mumble some of his dialogue; again probably because of his mask. The last thing I didn't really like about him was really just because I didn't understand why people didn't just SHOOT HIM. Seriously, guy's not wearing armor on most of his extremities and he tends to go around walking out in the open. A sniper shot to the head and boom, your troubles are over. The guy doesn't even bother trying to hide. As a villain, I definitely prefer the Joker from the previous movie. 

Batman tries to stop Bane, fails, gets his back broken and then thrown into a really shitty prison known as the pit, where apparently the only deterrent to stop people from escaping is the fact they have to climb out of the pit, which is said to be impossible. Except Bane did it once. Funny thing is how there are no guards nearby guarding the entrance to the pit and apparently anyone can just go there and drop the rope the guards use to lower new prisoners into the pit and let the prisoners escape. Seriously? WTF. Also, another issue is how they fix Batman's broken back by; and I'm serious here, hoisting him up via a harness and then punching him in the back and letting him lie in the harness until he can stand. CONGRATS! Why didn't all the doctors think of that way? Why bother to heal people when you can just FUCKING PUNCH THEIR MEDICAL PROBLEMS AWAY!?!?


So anyway, Batman "recovers" and then goes back to fight Bane. He wins and a bunch of really predictable plot lines are then resolved with the expected and predictable resolution. 


What didn't I like about the film? The really really shitty writing for one thing. Here's one example, where the cop is telling Bruce Wayne "I know who you really are" and then he goes on to explain how when he was young, he saw Bruce Wayne visit their orphanage and realised he was an angry little orphan on the inside just like him, so he realised Bruce Wayne was Batman from that. WTF?!?! So any angry orphan must be Batman by that logic. Seriously wth. And what is with the sheer number of people who seem to know who Batman is? And let's not forget the "punch you till your back mends back" way of fixing a broken spine. Let's not even get into the fact that for some reason, Ras al'Ghul and his entire frigging family all seem fixated on destroying Gotham. Seriously? Why? I didn't even get it in the first movie and I still don't get it now. What is the big deal with Gotham. Not to mention there are several scenes which are either badly written or badly edited together which makes it seems like Batman can frigging teleport or be in multiple places at once. Like when they cut between two scenes, one with Gordon being forced to walk onto the frozen river and then cut to the young Cop being beaten up and roughed up by thugs. Then they cut to Batman saving Gordon and then cut to the cop being saved by Batman. HTF does that work?!!? If you're going to edit the 2 scenes to be next to each other, I'm going to assume they're taking place at the same time. There's pretty much no way for Batman to suddenly appear in 1 place and then rush to the other place within that short amount of time. 


And the fight scenes aren't much better. Case example 1, where the police march against Bane's army. Both sides have firearms although the police are carrying handpistols and Bane's army are carrying ak-47s apparently. Apparently, the police decide to walk in a huge crowd, like protestors; despite the fact that doing so is suicidal against sprays of bullets and grenades, and instead of shooting from a distance, they decide to run and fight the thugs hand to hand. -_- WTF indeed. 


The fight scenes involving Batman weren't much better. I suggest the fight choreographer for The Dark Knight Rises go and watch the Amazing Spider-man to see how good superhero fight choreography goes. My main issue was that for some reason, Batman keeps jumping in to fight everyone hand to hand. I have no idea why. He jumps head on into a crowd of gun-toting thugs to save catwoman. He goes to fight Bane hand to hand. Dude, he's Batman. He CHEATS. That's the good thing about Batman. He knows he's a mortal. He's not going to just jump into a gang of 10+ thugs and fight them all hand to hand. He's not the karate kid. He'll probably soften them up with same teargas, maybe stun a few of them with taser batarangs etc. Even the fight scene between Bane and Batman was horribly boring. It was like "Oh look, it's 2 guys punching each other...in street brawling style..." Um...kay. There was really nothing special about them fighting, there was no sense that EITHER of them were trained fighters at all. 


I did like the cinematography and the directing of the movie though. A lot of the scenes had visual impact and you could really feel the flow of the movie. It's just that the writing and bad fighting scenes really pulled it down for me. Overall, I just felt that they tried to put too many storylines together, what with Talia, the league of Shadows, Bane, Knightfall, the breaking of the bat etc. I really felt that the entire Knightfall saga could have easily made a good third movie by itself.