Movie Review: The Dark Knight Rises

So yesterday  we decided to go to the cinema. What better excuse for a movie-going experience than  the latest (and final) installment of the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy. Most of the praise about this movie is well founded and the vast majority  of the production decisions hit the spot. It was good, it was big and it was immersive. 

I did not like some of the motivations of the characters. There were moments that I would feel that their actions  were forced in order to move the plot forward and I could not take them so seriously. You could feel some cliches being forced in the actor's lips 'just to have that moment'. Do not get me wrong. I do not mean that all was bad, in fact most was well-thought but some crucial plot twists felt unjustified. 

And since now I got the bad parts out of the way, the good parts. The movie felt big in every sense. The scenes were big in scope, the stakes were big, the action was big(even though not a lot). I particularly liked the pace of the film. It was not rushed and all(...well most) scenes had their place. It was not so much about the eccentric millionair turned vigilante but about a whole group of characters good or bad and their interactions with each other. In fact for a Batman film, Batman was not in most scenes. This was good though because when he was it meant something and there was a purpose to it.

 I said Miaou

I especially liked the Anne Hathaway Catwoman. Not only because she was hot as catwoman, but because  unlike all  psychotic, eccentric, plain mentally unstable, with no real motives, catwomen of previous takes on the Batman franchise, she felt believable. She is the girl next door that fell into hardship and her thieving was out of necessity and not fetich.

This time we get a different main villain. One that has purpose and means and one that can kick the shit out of Bruce Wayne.  He is not the mastermind that hides behind mindless drones but he is the warlord leading the bad guys into battle. We are not used to this kind of villains, usually we get the brilliant asylum inmate with lots of inferiority and misanthropic issues that uses cunning and theatrics. This time we do not. We get a guy that we know is physically not going to go down easily.

 Lovely chap once you get to know him

The acting is good as what is to be expected of this film's cast members but the acting of some of the minor characters might have been a little better. Or maybe it is just me and my issues with their silly motives and unjustifiable actions.

Overall the final(?) installment in the Dark Knight Trilogy is totally worth the admission ticket. It is a very good cinema experience and a film that you will thoroughly enjoy.

      

The Dark Knight Rises Prologue: Incomprhensibility and the Masses

Today I managed to see the IMAX prologue for one of the most anticipated films of 2012, aka Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. The prologue was announced by a staff member at BFI IMAX, something which gathered a fair share of applause. When the 7min prelude ended however, the audience reaction was totally muted. The main complaint over the short is of course well documented, being the fact that the main villain's dialogue (Bane, played by Tom Hardy) is incomprehensible or inaudible. Personally, I managed to get only one sentence out of the 7-8 uttered by Bane, which might say something about my English language level, my hearing problems, or the fact that Bane's dialogue is indeed garbled. Evidence points towards the latter, and Nolan should well be forced to make some compromises in his creative vision of filmic realism and change the sound mix in the final version of the movie.

As for the prologue itself, even with the dialogue explained there are several vague points that are apparently answered by the various viral sites found online. However, that is a relative drawback of the presentation - unlike the Dark Knight prologue, it is not completely self-contained and definitely did not have the same emotional impact, although visually it was much more impressive (featuring an airplane vs. airplane highjacking in Scottish locations). So, as an IMAX presentation it gets high grades (the resolution was amazing, and in fact the IMAX cameras used were much better than the ones used in the main feature, MI:4), but as a teaser it could have been better.