[Spoilers] The Dark Knight Rises

Also:

For a pit of utter despair that was hell on Earth, everyone was really nice and supportive! They even got TV reception.

Not to mention the free medical.

Except... the rope didn't go to the top.

True, but it did go above the "leap of faith" part. The whole pit thing could have been handled better I think but it was clearly meant to be symbolic.

I just assumed, as I figured most people assumed, that the rope went as high as a person could free-climb, to a point where there were no more handholds, but since the wall was easiest to climb there up to that ledge, they hooked the safety rope as high as they could right there, and then the leap of faith was required to get to a spot on the wall at that level that had more handholds to be able to reach the top.

Apparently, I was wrong to assume that, because lots of people seemed to feel he could have just climbed the rope, or perhaps climbed the wall closer to the ledge he was trying to jump to. I find it very odd that people are unwilling to accept the best possible answer and instead immediately jump to the "this movie didn't explain everything in perfectly clear detail so it's totally dumb!!" answer instead.

The mechanics of it are less dumb than the overall portrait of the ultimate horror in prisons, which fails from top to bottom in terms of the movie's lore, as a training montage and as a delaying plot device. But they are still pretty dumb and deserve whatever they get, and Nolan is lucky that there's so much else going on that most people will cut it some slack.

Or that it was was dumb because it was dumb.

And, furthermore, unsporting.

Finally saw this and must say I was rather bored. Stupid villains with stupid motivation (I'll take crazy over "Gotham must be erased... just because" any day). I liked Bane up to the point where he was relegated to the role of henchman and summarily dispatched by a sidekick. And like The Empire trying their luck with a second Death Star, the Dark Brotherhood of Bumbling Monks still having the hate on for Gotham is just lazy.

I've never read much in the way of super hero comic books and what little I did was Marvel stuff, and yet this movie held no surprises for me. Every little "twist" and betrayal was just signaled so heavily that I don't know how anybody with any movie experience could miss it - no I didn't know that lady was Ras-somethings daughter, but I knew from Bruce's second scene with her, that she was involved and would betray him.

Keldroc said it best... except the part about liking it. Clunky foreshadowing and no tension. It wasn't Joel Schumacher horrible, Nolan is way to competent to fumble that badly, but it was pretty 'meh'

And Bruce Wayne is a dick. Withholding cheap clean energy, because it can also be made into a fucking 4 megaton fusion bomb... something we've known how to build since '52 (not the fusion power thing, but 4 megaton fusion bombs are really nothing). Hell, instead of stealing Bruces discarded toy, Bane could have used his extraordinary powers and borrowed one of the ones the Russians still have lying about.

My favorite part of the prison of kittens was the advanced rope chiropractic care.

Oh, the 'I'll just punch this vertebra back in place'-school of physiotherapy?

You mean up until the end of the movie? Boy you sure showed them.

I don't think I was trying to show anybody anything.

Bane was cool. I liked the actor and I liked how he looked and talked - his menace was real, even though his motivation was unconvincing. But something happening at the end of a movie can greatly take away from what has gone before, and I thought Banes reveal and dismissal did that.
Just the same way that if you don't just pretend the movie doesn't exist, then Newts off screen demise in the very beginning of Alien3 makes almost everything Ripley does in Aliens for naught.

Watching TDKR a second time drives this home even further, when you're watching Bane do all this stuff and now you know it's not even his plan. Does the character no favors, and for no good reason considering the Talia reveal doesn't really make anything better or more interesting.

One of the key reasons Alien 3 is completely indefensible. Also an apt comparison.

I sat bored for almost three hours today. How disappointing. The only thing this movie did for me was redeem the Bat Cycle thing, whatever it's called. I went in not knowing anything, I left not caring about anything except how Robin was wasted.

I saw this over the weekend and felt like it was okay but not great. As others have said, it spent way too long doing things that just weren't that important and tried too hard to shoehorn an excessive number of characters and plotlines into the concluding movie in a trilogy. The pacing is just weirdly inconsistent. It's two hours and forty-five minutes long, and it doesn't use all that time wisely; it drags at odd points but then tries to force an unnatural amount of exposition into short segments, in part because it's got too many things happening to cope with elegantly. We didn't need Talia at all, we didn't need the lolfusion bomb thing, we didn't need random police force subplots. Bane was good as a villain but I don't feel like we really got a sense for him being one of the rare antagonists whose intellect rivals Batman's.

Tom Hardy, Michael Caine, Anne Hathaway, and JGL turned in great performances though, so that's something. I don't regret seeing it and at least two of those three hours weren't wasted, but I don't plan on seeing it again.

Something occurred to me when you mentioned Michael Caine, and that is how poorly Alfred is written. How do you make an actor as mischievous as Michael Caine seem so ineffectual? He essentially serves as the convenient character who encourages Bruce Wayne to do whatever the plot requires.

I went back and watched The Dark Knight, and in that movie, Alfred encourages Bruce Wayne to be the symbol that the city needs. You get the impression that Alfred is fully behind the whole idea of Batman. Which is consistent with his role in Batman Begins. You even got a hint of Alfred's back story as a veteran.

Yet here, he's completely changed his mind, and wants Bruce to quit. What a waste.

Yeah, that discontinuity was pretty jarring. I thought Caine did a great job with the role they stuck to his character, but the fact that his character did a 180 between the last movie and this one was bizarre. Seems like there was a lot of hand-waving when it came to inconvenient plot issues this time around.

I also got around to seeing it this weekend (and was impressed by how full the cinema was on a Sunday afternoon weeks after it opened), and I agree almost completely with SuperJay. Good, not great overall, some great individual performances, but ropey continuity and some real pacing problems.

Too damn loud, though. I hate coming out of the theatre half-deaf.

e: much like the guy at the start who has the gun fired by his ear.

Yeah, good point - the music and general volume were a distraction. Several times during the movie I couldn't hear dialog over the so-called background music. I'm probably just getting old.

Nope, unless we're all just getting old at the exact same moment, I think there's a serious audio issue with that fucking movie.

http://www.cracked.com/article_20012_if-dark-knight-rises-was-10-times-shorter-more-honest.html

That link was fantastic.

So true.

EDIT: I thought the style was familiar. I loved the original Star Wars scripts The Editing Room did.

Another!

How the Dark Knight Rises should have ended:

Oh my god! Why didn't he just flood the room?!

The Avengers one is also pretty funny but I am too lazy to look it up for you.

Yeah, the Avengers one is great. The Iron Man one too.

Man, I really don't know about some of the changes they've made for the director's cut: