Guest Review : The Dark Knight Rises (IMAX)

It has been almost 10 days after the international release of The Dark Knight Rises. As expected, it has stormed the global box office and as at to-date, it has grossed over US$374 Mil globally and still counting. 

Watching movie is just like appreciating food, they are both very subjective i.e. for any movie, there bounds to be people who like it as well as those who don't like it. Same fate applies to The Dark Knight Rises. This is especially so since Christopher Nolan has raised his standard so high in "The Dark Knight" that make it extremely hard for him to outdo himself. In any case, this version of Batman Trilogy under the charge of Christopher Nolan is already a Classic, regardless of the movie reviews.

As usual, my friend Ben has contributed his well written guest review here (with spoiler alert):

"The biggest strength, and sadly the largest threat, of The Dark Knight Rises lied in its predecessor “The Dark Knight”. TDK was widely received as a masterpiece in modern superheroes action movies, with both critically acclaimed and hugely commercial success. Hence it wasn’t surprise that many has high expectation to watch the concluding chapter to Chris Nolan’s TDKR.

With such high expectation, TDKR had to really raised above everything in order to match that. However as the saying goes, with high expectation comes high disappointment. Don’t get me wrong, TDKR was a good action movie, with strong casting and production value. The long screen hours of more than 2 ½ hours definitely well deserving of the movie ticket money. Unfortunately TDKR failed to raise up on par with TDK with plots holes and lazy writing. 

While TDK argued about whether absolute evil arise from absolute good, TDKR talked about Anarchy , whether chaos would come from absolute order and vice versa. However the execution plus the script merely scratched the topic, which was a surprise considering the length of the movie.

One of the grips lied in the super convenient occurrence of information; Alfred knew so much about Bane that he should head the CIA? John Blake could tell who was Batman just by merely one look? Bane got to know about the truth of Harvey Dent from the script in Gordon’s pocket? The list really goes on, and Chris Nolan got away with this because everyone watching this wanted to like this film. 

There were too many portions left unanswered, how did Bane know about the Applied Science lab? Granted that he might have gotten the info that Batman is Bruce Wayne through the league of the shadows, but how could he have known the Applied Science since only Bruce and Fox knew about it? How did Bruce Wayne walk from the prison back to Gotham? With no recourses and connection, how did he sneak past the guards, and could even pin point where Selina was? Why did Bane even bother to throw Bruce into that prison which apparently had no guards and with a means of escape as long as one know how to climb and jump? With such planning of bringing Gotham down, wouldn’t Bane find a better way to let Bruce watched how anarchy torn his beloved city apart?

Speaking about anarchy, I would have love to see more scenes on how Gotham survived the few months under such ruling. That would elevate the whole movie from a mere superhero to a deeper social drama, which incidentally TDK did very well. Sadly the chaos scenes probably lasted 15 minutes and suddenly the streets looked cleaner and lesser people. 

I could go on and on with the problems with TDKR, even though I would really want to love the movie. The DK trilogy was still by far the best superhero adaption to the big screen. I would have expected much more for this one. "

Cheers!