Well, I just got back from this.
It was okay. It wasn't anywhere near as good as The Dark Knight or even Batman Begins, I didn't think. But it was still alright.
Probably my main complaints would be, for some reason, a lot of it just was corny and induced eye rolling from me. I've heard people say it's the most emotional film of the three, but I felt it was the least, and also felt it essentially copped out and didn't take any chances with the ending. No one of any particular importance dies in the movie, no one the audience has developed a connection with or cares about. Nothing really bad happens to any of them. In TDK, Rachel dies, and Harvey Dent is mentally and physically mutilated. Nothing like that here.
I don't know. It just felt... empty to me. And it didn't really feel like a Batman movie to me. It didn't have the sense of adventure or crime fighting that the first two films did. In the first two, you felt like Batman was what he was. A man who fights crime, whether it be organized crime, petty crime, or super villain crime. But it was still crime.
They tried to up the stakes in the film, by having the whole city be in peril, at risk of being blown up by a nuclear explosion. But it didn't FEEL like the stakes were higher. Nothing in particular felt ominous or threatening. Nothing really had me on the edge of my seat, or feeling particularly tense.
Bane was an okay villain, but his voice sounded ridiculous, and really, there wasn't much Tom Hardy could do with his face covered. He had essentially the same expression the entire time, these wide, angry eyes. He wasn't even a quarter as dynamic or engaging or enthralling as the Joker. Not anywhere near. And even though Bane was a physical force and kept snapping necks left and right, I never felt the kind of tension or fear or intimidation from him as I did the Joker. There was nothing likable about Bane, nothing which held you captivated. He just kind of seemed like an _______ who you wanted to get his face beaten in.
Speaking of which, the final battle between Batman and Bane was anticlimactic as hell. He just punches Bane's mask off, and suddenly Bane turns into the _____ of the century, whimpering on the ground and crying. I don't know. Tom Hardy tried his best, but it's just not a very good character, and he didn't have much to work with. When I came out of watching TDK, I was so thoroughly taken with the Joker and the film as a whole, and I didn't feel that at all here.
Another thing was that the film felt very disjointed in terms of timeline and pace. One minutes Batman's getting his ass beat by Bane and dragged off to the other side of the world, and the very next scene, it's three months later. And then it's 20 days until the bomb goes off, and the next scene, its 12 hours. There was no real sense of the passage of time, no real feel of it.
Ann Hathaway was good as Catwoman. I liked her a lot, though it wasn't anything special. Really, nothing in this film was. Joseph Gorden Levitt was good too. But again, nothing spectacular.
And I just had an issue as well with Batman's own characterization. He didn't feel like Batman to me. He has in the previous two films, but here, he seemed like something else entirely.
On top of which, and bear with me, but the Joker's absence in this film was glaring. It was essentially the Joker's actions in the last film which the entire plot of this one was predicated on.
Batman retires for eight years because of what the Joker did, killing Rachel Dawes, and corrupting Harvey Dent, which Batman took the fall for. First off, I think it goes well against Batman's character that he would just retire and retreat into seclusion because of tragedy. His whole crusade is based off of tragedy touching him. So it's not believable to me that he would just quit like that. But essentially, Bane is able to beat the ____ out of Batman because he's been on the sidelines for eight years and is in physically bad condition, and then Bane reveals that Harvey Dent was really a horrible guy and killed all these people to throw the city into a state of despair (which we never really see, by the way). All of this is a direct result of what the Joker did in the last film, and yet we get not mention, not even an allusion to the Joker, and his absence was painfully apparent. It also kind of craps all over what was established between Batman and the Joker in TDK. When the Joker says to Batman "I have a feeling you and I are destined to do this forever", that was a powerful and compelling moment, and summed up so perfectly what their battle really represents. The eternal struggle between chaos and order, creation and destruction. But because the Joker just disappears in this new film, isn't even mentioned or referenced, we as an audience have no idea what happened to him, and it just causes all of what was established and created between Batman and the Joker ring hollow. Which I think is really a shame and too bad.
And while the special affects were of course spectacular, I never felt more wowed or even as wowed by any of it as the effects and actions sequences from TDK. I don't feel anything in this new film matches or tops either the street fight scene from TDK or the Hospital scene.
This movie just felt empty to me, and in part even corny and mockish. I didn't feel any real threat from Bane or his men or what was going on. The climax, with the battle between the police and the mercenaries felt rushed and boring and anti-climactic.
Just in general, it didn't feel as real, or as emotionally impactful or as tense as either Begins or TDK. And it didn't feel to me like a Batman film.
There were a few things I liked. I liked when Bruce first put on the suit again and went out. That had an air of excitement and possibility to it. But it quickly plummeted from there, with Bane taking Batman out (which was a pretty good fight scene, but not great), and then we don't even see Batman again until the end of the film.
As an overall film, I'd give it probably a 7 and a half or eight out of 10. As a Batman film, probably a 6 or 7 out of ten.
It could have been better, and I think they should have stopped with TDK, to let these characters go on living in people's imaginations.
