The Dark Knight Rises: Review

Every once in a while you get a story that is brought to the screen that not just captivates you but totally draws you in, forces you to hang off every word, and somehow find a way to make you actually stand up at the conclusion and make your cheer for the cinematic achievement you just witnessed.  The Dark Knight Rises is just that.  Every single shot, every not of the score, every line of dialog grips you right from the start and pulls you in and after seeing this film I not only agree with the early reviews that Christopher Nolan has created a masterpiece, but I also agree that The Dark Knight Trilogy might just be the best trilogy through out any genre in cinema.  The Dark Knight rises will take you on an emotional roller coaster that you simply will never want to end.

Breaking it down without revealing any spoilers is going to be the challenge in this review but here we go.  Starting with Bane.  I think Thomas Hardy easily had the biggest shoes to fill in this flick, hot off the heals of Ledger's monumental performance as the Joker I myself was even concerned about how any character and and really any actor could follow that up; answer Bane.  There is not the sense of anarchy that The Joker brought to the last film in The Dark Knight Rises (which I will start referring to as TDKR), instead what you get is a very calm, controlled, calculated criminal mastermind with the physical attributes that can dwarf damn near anybody.  Hardy pulls this off brilliantly, to say the least.  Throughout the film your given little snipits of how the monster of Bane came to be, each time you get more into the legend your become far more interested as well.  Like every villain in Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy Batman is faced to deal with and overcome a whole new breed of evil, which naturally leads to new challenges and lets the viewer be breath taken by different descents into madness.  Bottom line it is unfair to even attempt to compare Bane to The Joker (or any villain for that matter). As much as this film solidifies the legacy of this trilogy it very much so stands on its own, and that in many ways is directly contributed to the intensity of Hardy's performance and the interpretation of what Bane can be as a character.

We got cat woman in this movie too, how could we forget that!  To be upfront, Anne Hathaway did manage to pull off my favorite performance in the role to date, no question about it.  There was not an emphasis on giving the character one liners that are somehow related to cats and she didn't come off as hokey or campy.  That being said she is a character I would have liked to have seen somehow get more action involved with her.  What Hathaway's role reminded me of (not necessarily to a fault) was how Black Widow was introduced in Iron Man 2, the hot chick that just didn't get enough screen time.  She worked for the role, and her role in TDKR wasn't overdone (in retrospect this could be the best thing for the character because I can't think of how you put more of her in the movie without over killing it).

And of course there were some good guys in the movie, one of them being the Batman of course, but we will save him for last.  Gary Oldman, like always, was awesome as Gordon.  I love the confliction written into Gordon's character, it humanizes him so much and makes him so much more relatable.  It also makes his relationship with Blake more complex and only adds to the drama between the two characters but also to the inner workings of the Gotham PD.  A new character Blake, for the most part of the movie, felt like a role player, which is fine when you consider the complexity of the story being told he fits right in and often can act like the glue of the story.  Of course we are talking about Gotham though which leads us to the biggest baddest good guy of them all Batman.  I'm going to assume that if your going to watch TDKR that you have probably seen the first two installments of the series and therefor should pretty much know what to expect when it comes to Bale's Batman.  TDKR stays true to that and the consistency of Bale's performance as Batman works to the films favor, at least in my opinion it did.  He gets a little more dialog when in the Batsuit but it works.  At the same time, if you are one of the few people that has not liked Bale as Batman I don't think TDKR is going to be the movie that changes your opinion.

Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy has been hands down the best Batman I have seen on film to date.  The Dark Knight Rises not only gave me every thing I want in a conclusion to this trilogy but it delivered about 80 minuets more than I expected and every second of it I was fixated on the story I was being told.  I know I talked up The Avengers a lot (and deservedly so) and we still have some pretty big movies coming out in 2012 but The Dark Knight Rises is the best movie we will see this year, both as a stand alone film and as a completion to a trilogy.  I went to see this movie at launch, 12:01 am, and I am already in the process of planing when the next time is I can go see it again.  This movie should appeal to everyone, not just Batman and comic book fans, but for those of us who are fans enjoy it, because I have a feeling it will be a very long time before we see a three piece story done this well again.