Movie Reaction: The Dark Knight Rises

Formula: The Dark Knight + A Little Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze

Cast: This movie has an embarrassment of riches in the cast. Much more so than even The Dark Knight, Christian Bale takes the back seat a lot hear. It's hard to remember a superhero lead that demanded the screen as little as him, which is said as a compliment. Anne Hathaway is oh so wonderful and narrowly edges out Scarlett Johansson for hottest comic book woman of the summer. Gary Oldman does everything he can in the scenes he's given. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a wonderful everyman perspective of the movie, and a little more. Marion Cotillard is really good in this, although it doesn't feel like the kind of role she relishes in as much as other's I've seen her in. Tom Hardy, well, is no Heath Leger. That just wasn't going to happen. No one expected it either. He's exactly the kind of enigmatic villain this movie needed. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine both are great, even if they basically serve the same purpose in the movie, being the sagely advisor. Shit, I know I'm forgetting someone. It doesn't matter. This movie serviced the entire cast better than any movie I've seen with this many leading-caliber actors in it.

Plot: I'm avoiding spoilers. You could make an argument that the run time did not need to be that long. I certainly thing The Dark Knight had a better overall narrative, but this was the final movie that had to happen. Nolan has been building toward something with this franchise and this is it. There's a lot of tropey-feeling beats, sure. I never found them a drag on the movie though. It is dense. It is layered. It is wonderful.

Direction: If there is a better [proven] director out there than Christopher Nolan, then I don't know of him. No director handles a $100 million budget as masterfully as he does. Rarely can someone make something that functions as both a film and a movie, as well as he does time and time again. I know there's some haters out there, but I honestly don't understand why. The man makes movies that are artsy and layered and makes them into blockbusters with broad appeal. That is a rare skill.

Elephant in the Room: What about the shooting? Much like the Batman story itself, this series has been oddly attached to tragedy. First, The Dark Knight is forever tied to Heath Leger's iconic (a word overused, but honestly feeling like an understatement in this case) performance and death before it's release. Now, The Dark Knight Rises will always be tied to this madman who stole the show, and I don't mean Bane. It's certainly made its initial record-breaking potential moot. In the long term, I don't it will hurt it because the news rarely has the shelf life of a great movie. It's such a shame that no one will be talking about the success of the movie, but instead they will be reporting the tragedy that it is unfortunately linked to.
Also, if anyone tries to pull the "don't you think the content of movies like these are in some way responsible" angle, I am done with you. That is an asinine thing to say. Crazy people are crazy. If it wasn't this that gave him the idea, it would be something else. You can blame our culture in general, but don't single out this movie due to one tragic example.

To Sum Things Up:
I came in highly biased, but this is the best movie of the year so far. I'm not a huge Batman fan in general, and Christopher Nolan is one of those director's whose movies I liked first and then I realized he directed all of them. So, something had to convince me that these are great, and I think it's a "the cream always rises to the top" situation. This movie is so fucking good. Where The Avengers was an almost perfect popcorn featured, The Dark Knight Rises aspires to be much more and succeeds. It is rare that the word 'epic' feels appropriate. Before Nolan's Batman trilogy, the last great example was Lord of the Rings. This movie caps an extraordinary accomplishment and it is deserving of all the praise it receives. The only real knocks on it I can find is that it's a little long, parts feel sort of familiar (although a lot of this is intentional), and I still like The Dark Knight better. Then again, I think for The Dark Knight to feel complete, it needs to have this third movie to wrap it up.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend