Dark Knight Rises *there be spoilers here, seriously don't click if you don't want spoilers*

Just got back from it. I really enjoyed it, it surprised me and gave me what I wanted out of it which was a lot of fun action and some twists that caught me off guard.

I don't really want to go in-depth into it, but there are a few things that come to mind that bothered me some.

There was just a smidge too much convenient movie timing for me. So many characters showing up 'in the nick of time' where in many instances they really shouldn't have had any idea where said character was. Or the travel time just seems very clipped, especially the long distance between Gotham and The Pit. The way it's shown in the movie you'd think the place was just a hop skip and a jump away. They do illustrate that a month passes but it goes at such a quick clip it feels like too much passes within a single jump cut. Obviously it would've been anticlimatic to show 'the journey' or anything and it's more for the story telling, it still seems too quick and easy. I was also put off by the liberal use of the "SURPRISE!" as something jumps on screen that by all rights the characters should've seen well ahead of time, particularly 'The Bat'.

Second was Bane's mask, which rolls into my third point. I still don't quite get what the function of the mask was. Something about a plague, painkillers, and being horribly disfigured. I just never really caught the exact purpose, like what exactly it was doing for him other than 'holding back the pain', so, was it like a continuous dose of painkiller? It seems kind of contrived when, y'know, painkillers can just be taken. It seemed more just a gimmick because 'He's Bane' than serving any realistic purpose that could've have been done with something more practical.

Which actually rolls into my next point. This movie feels much more like a direct sequel to Begins than Dark knight did and it kind of removes what I felt was one of the themes of the Dark Knight and that is the growing 'madness' of superheroes. The whole escalation of 'you fight thugs wearing a mask they're going to start coming up with their own masks'. The Joker exemplified this so perfectly and was a true 'Super Villain', Two Face was leaning into that 'madness' of being a 'freak' which to me has always been part of the appeal of the Rogue's Gallery. Bane and by extension Talia are villains, but in a more realistic terrorist feel. They're almost a step backward. That's another reason why Bane's mask doesn't work for me because it feels so superficial. It felt more like a tacked on ornament than anything truly defining about the character.

Even Scarecrow's cameo plays into that feeling. We're introduced to the whole mask/supervillain feel in Begins and even in Dark Knight he's still running around as The Scarecrow. But in this he's simply back to 'Dr. Crane'. It was a wonderful cameo and I quite liked it, but it felt less like he was 'One of the Freaks' and more like 'Just Another Criminal' in this.

Even Catwoman, actually. It's never about BEING Catwoman, it's never even a thought that she's a 'costumed freak', she's literally just a cat burglar and by coincidence her preferred outfit happens to have goggles that flip back to 'kind of' look like cat ears. But that's about it.

I'll be honest I was never that big on the whole 'League of Shadows' thing. It worked well enough as a set up for begins, and thematically it makes sense to bring it full circle but at the same time I kind of think it's disappointing to book end it like that so much.

Still I really quite enjoyed it. The gripes I cite above are really relatively minor, they're hardly make or break for the film. I enjoyed all the characters and the twists legitimately caught me by surprise. The action was great and it had a few moments that really hit me right. While I wasn't thrilled with the characterization of Catwoman as it pertained to her being any kind of superhero/villain, I think her personality was just perfect and Hathaway did a killer job, I just think her theme was a little mishandled. Bane was great too as a very imposing and downright frightening character, his voice just gave me chills. But really thinking on it now it just feels like they dialed back the 'superhero' feel a notch below even what Begins had (which was already, and practically, minimal to begin with).

I do agree a bit that it's not really a proper ending for batman, it felt less like 'The Dark knight Rises' and more like "Bruce Wayne Ends".

Certainly food for thought but at the same time, get your moral positing and symbolism out of my superhero movie. I agree with you and I think you're right but at the same time, I don't really want it to be that 'simple' and black and white. I really just don't want that point made at all because to me it's dipping too far into the realm of the real and the practical instead of the fantastic that batman and the superhero genre really represent. it's a great ideal, but not the one I really want to have.

Then again I'm an escapist

So is Bruce Wayne dead or is he alive? All that we saw at the end was very ambiguous...from Alfred seeing what he saw, could that have just been something that he imagined or did he actually see Bruce? To Lucious Fox wondering if he could have done something different to perhaps save Bruce from having to manually pilot the Bat...and finding out that Bruce had indeed fixed the auto pilot....

Reason I say this is that the timer only showed 5 seconds left with Batman/Bruce still in the cockpit....could he have escaped?

Yeah, he lives. The movie doesn't give us any reason to doubt that what Alfred sees is any kind of delusion.

As for the internal shot... he could've set the autopilot and ejected well before, we don't know what kind of ejector system The Bat had. Apparently it was enclosed instead of like the ejector seat on a jet where the canopy is released and the chair jettisons separately.


Also I was a little sad to see the EMP gun only got use in the initial motorcycle chase. You think he could've given it to someone.

Why would Alfred imagine his perfect wife to be Selina Kyle? He never witnessed any of the romantic fascination Bruce had with her. For all he knew, she was just a jewel thief he took an interest in tracking down, nothing more.

There's more evidence to support he escaped and survived. It's just not ambiguous in the -slightest-.