Member review

Well, it's been quite a trip. Since Christopher Nolan stepped on the scene, the Batman films have changed significantly. He started life in the golden age of comics, and gained momentum with the subsequent films by none other than Tim Burton. Then it all went quiet, with not a sniff of Bat-news at all for a number of years. At last though, by the will of some greater entity or not, Mr Nolan made Batman Begins, and received universal critical acclaim. The Dark Knight took Begins and expanded on it further, creating arguably the best Batman ever, not least because of the inclusion of The Joker. This brings us back to the present, with Dark Knight Rises. Does the final Batman beat its incredible predecessors? Well, how do I put this. No, but it gives it a hell of a try. The Dark Knight Rises takes place 8 years after the events of the 2008 film The Dark Knight. Batman is all but gone from Gotham City, as he has been blamed for the death of Harvey Dent and so is a wanted criminal. However, with the rise of a masked murderer who only goes by the name Bane, the whole of Gotham is at stake, and so Bruce Wayne must don the mask once more to stop his city's demise. It's a set-up that inevitably leads to the deadly car chases and classic fist fights the series has become known for. It also allows for a greater scale than the previous films, which is one of the few things that Rises does better than them. The amount of explosions and enormous gun fights has been cranked up to 11 in a style similar to Iron Man. Gone is Batman's ninja stealth mode and in its place is an angry man with a thirst for gasoline-fuelled justice. This could be a good thing or not, depending on your point of view. For fans of Iron Man and Thor, you'll love the free-for-all warfare of Gotham City, not a million miles away from gun-fights with Hydra's army in Captain America. For those of you who have been sold by Batman's gadgets and clever, intelligent stealth takedowns (like where he uses the sonar in Dark Knight), you'll be disappointed by the lack of style he has here. He comes out in the daylight for crying out loud! "Nobody does it like Batman" has always been a key selling point, but here, well, EVERYBODY does it like Batman. It's disappointing to see the caped crusader lose his touch in combat, but can he make up for it elsewhere? Actually, no, not really. There's a good hour of Rises where you will be bored. That's an unavoidable fact. Nolan expects fans to be happy with seeing their beloved Gotham in a new, almost disaster movie light. The truth of the matter is that we're not that happy with sitting around watching Bane laugh menacingly over crumpled victims for 60 minutes. Bane isn't even that good a villain either. If it had been the Joker asking the poor so-and-so whether or not he'd seen his scars, it would have been bearable, but as it is you'll just try to remember the good times in the midst of all the editing faults. This is a recurring feeling when watching Rises: remembering the best parts of the previous films, and when a film's best moments are not its own, but its predecessors', you know there's something wrong. It's not all bad news though. When you take The Dark Knight Rises out of the same picture as Begins and Dark Knight, you'll find a film which, yes is slightly too long, and yes has unoriginal action and yes has fairly dull characters, but there's a good concept at its heart, and one that is darker and more adult than other superheroes. Look past its, okay, very glaring shortcomings and there's a fantastic story (the best in the series), with an earth-shattering twist near the end, a brilliant script and that same Batman charm we fell in love with in 2005 with Batman Begins that still puts him at the top of the superheroes. So the worst instalment of the trilogy, then, but that's just because of the overpowering shadow Rises is living in. Doesn't matter who you are, you cannot fail to be captivated by The Dark Knight Rises' charm, despite its major flaws.