I wasn't a fan. I'm going to say that now. Was it a good movie? Yeah, it was good. Like pretty much every other movie that tries to go into gritty realism and deliver a story that's supposed to be deep and show a hidden side to humanity. The advantage of Nolan's previous movie was the fact that it was Batman, so the message was generally that people were good. And in Nolan's previous movie they did it so much better. Beyond that, the story was pretty predictable, with one exception that's more my fault than anything.
There be spoilers ahead.
Okay, the twist. Talia Al Ghul. Why? Why didn't they make her the main antagonist? It would have rounded off the series perfectly, Talia's a much more interesting character than Bane, we could have understood our main antagonist, and we wouldn't have spent the majority of the movie learning a backstory for a character only for "Surprise!" all of that story is actually this character's and Bane's really nothing more than a glorified henchman. Seriously, go back to what we learned about Bane. At the end of the day we learned that the League of Shadows broke him out of prison, something that a large portion of Gotham can say due to the first movie, and he was too brutal for them. Okay, that knocks the League of Shadows down a peg, what with them previously being an army of murderous ninjas that were only a finger point away from slitting the throats of an entire city. Lets not forget that that included civilians. Children. Jophrey Baratheon would have been the only acceptable loss there.
The entirety of Bane's backstory was given to Talia at the last second. Which, I got to be honest, I didn't see the twist coming because I started getting angry at Talia not being there. Wanna know why I thought Talia wouldn't be there? Because I didn't think anyone would be dumb enough to put their main villain front and center for the last ten minutes of the movie! Seriously, we spend the entirety of a movie learning the backstory of a character that we only knew for ten minutes, and amping up a character who, in the end, get's shuffled off the stage so offhandedly that you can really tell he was the henchman now.
Okay, the good parts. This movie was probably the best example of Bruce Wayne as a character and Batman as a character that I've seen in a Batman movie. That bar's pretty low, but we get to see Wayne reacting to his new place in life after retiring as the Bat, and I found the whole shut in thing a great way to show Wayne as just the alias of the Bat. The Bat was gone, the Alias was gone. And, naturally, the prison time was pretty great.
And Batman. The few times Batman showed up in the movie were kind of great. I'm going to say it right now, the scene in the sewers with Catwoman walking past the guards while Batman disappears them can sit beside some of the lesser fights in Avengers (Better than Hawkeye vs Widow, below Coulson vs Loki). Something the series has done really well is the whole symbolism of the Bat and the theatricality. I loved those scenes.
And Catwoman! I felt like she was the only person in the movie who had a personality. I mean, Batman's supposed to be the quiet shut in type, Alfred disappears, and Morgan Freeman was great when he was on the screen, but that was pretty rare. Bane had a cool thing he was doing with his hands on his vests like he was wearing a fancy coat at all times. But everyone but Catwoman was so very bland to me. Catwoman was fantastic. She added a liveliness to the movie that was very in with her character in the comics.
That's pretty much it, but I have to bring up on little thing. What's with the super heroes sending their billionaire genius's with all the cool toys off into the distance with the massive explosion that going to kill us all? Tony Stark and Batman both flew Nukes away and "Surprise!" walk it off, and even Spider-man had to defuse a gene bomb on a skyscraper. For that matter, why was Spider-man the only one to actually fix his problem as opposed to letting it blow up a little to the left? I think Tony Stark could defuse a nuclear device while moving at Mach 4, what with being able to make a never before thought of battle suit in a cave with pop cans and having made these bargain basement nukes for years, and Batman not only found out how to turn his weapon into a bomb the second he found out it was possible, he figured out how to defuse it the second after. There's got to be a better way than depending on your inherent immunity to nuclear explosions.
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