rachelleneveu | IT'S BATMAN DAY!!!!

I can’t think of anyone else I know who loves Batman more than my father. As a child I never read any comic books, but I knew the stories like the back of my hand, got to watch the movies as soon as we had enough money to buy a VCR. My bedtime stories weren’t fairy tales or something out of children’s books; Batman’s war on crime and continual struggle for justice was what I heard before going to sleep. I wanted to grow up to be Catwoman. I still do.

My dad loves Batman and passed that love on to me, so when I saw that the AMC near me was running not only midnight showings of The Dark Knight Rises, but were screening all three of the Nolanverse movies in succession, I made sure that I got tickets.

Highlights of the Night:

+ How small our screening was. The AMC is a decent-sized theatre, but they don’t advertise in the paper anymore so while the Regal was packed with people lining up all down Transit just to get in for the midnight show, our group for the trilogy was small with maybe 50 people, tops.

+ Realizing that two cast members of Game of Thrones have been in this series: Aidan Gillen as a CIA Agent in the beginning of The Dark Knight Rises, and Jack Gleeson as a little boy Rachel meets on the streets of the Narrows in Batman Begins. I feel entirely justified in making "bitches be crazy" jokes with both Harper and my dad throughout The Dark Knight Rises, now.

+ The people in our section: the young couple in front of me who spent most of the three movies kissing, the super-excited girl who kept shaking her hands so wildly the joints in her fingers snapped and clicked, and the three guys sitting next to us: one who thought Harper and I were Asian, one who kept spilling all his food, and the one who kept making a noise like the weird hybrid offspring of a gasp and a giggle every time something he liked happened onscreen.

+ Talking the finer points of DC vs. Marvel with a couple guys in the lobby while waiting for The Dark Knight to start.

+ Harper has finally agreed that I am leading a life that could possibly end in the occupation of “Batman Villain.” According to her, I’d be an “oversexed librarian with shiny hair” who is also some kind of cyborg and will try to electrocute Bruce Wayne at some point. Sounds about right.

What I Liked:

+ Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Detective John Blake, because he is probably the only person who acted like a real human being in this movie, and aside from Gordon, he’s the only one who has any sense of honor, logic, understanding of what Batman truly means to the city of Gotham.

+ Alfred, but I always like Alfred. He is the only consistent purveyor of good sense in these movies and I love how even now, he’s the only person who calls Bruce out on when he’s being an immovable ass. Plus, Michael Caine is a BAMF, so.

+ Marion Cotillard was excellent, as per her usual, and I totally called her character’s big reveal, like, three months ago when I saw the extended trailer. Go me.

+ CILLIAN MURPHY’S CAMEO. PERFECTION. And not just because they give him one of my favorite lines, or because I like seeing Scarecrow again, but because his mere existence is a reminder of how truly fucked Gotham’s legal system is. Batman’s caught him in every single movie, tossed him over to the real police in every movie, and he keeps showing up. He’s like a bad penny or a weird ex-boyfriend or “Teenage Dream” on the radio every time I go into that café in the Burchfield.

+ For a cesspool, Gotham really is a beautiful city. Chicago was a good choice, Mr. Nolan.

+ Surprisingly, Christian Bale as Batman. I have a lot of issues with him – I love him as Bruce Wayne, but I can’t find him believable as Batman, and not just because of the stupid voice he puts on when he’s wearing the mask – but I found myself actually liking him, here. It’s a weird feeling.

+ The little epilogue they give us for what happens after Batman destroys the bomb. Honestly, I can’t think of any better way to end this series, and those last five minutes were just wonderful.

What I Didn’t Like:

+ How slow this movie is. I get that in the first two movies there’s a war on, and peacetime and wartime are and should be paced differently, but there was so much in this movie that could have been sped through or just not included at all, and it drags for the first 15, 20 minutes.

+ How much it relied on the first movie to fill in plot gaps and backstory. Something that I really loved about The Dark Knight was that if even if you didn’t know the basic Batman formula (rich orphan + grudge / vengeance + fancy cape/mask combo = vigilante justice x explosions/face punchings²), you could still follow along. It worked on its own. This movie doesn’t do that, and if I hadn’t seen all three movies in a row there definitely would have been parts where I wouldn’t have had a real idea of what was going on, or what the characters were referencing.

+ There was never a moment where Bane felt like an immediate threat to me. Was he a good villain, with lots of minions and explosives at his disposal? Hell yes. Tom Hardy did a great job, especially on the physical side; Bane is an imposing character, but for figure as powerful and charismatic as he’s supposed to be, I couldn’t see anything in him that would inspire the levels of loyalty and devotion his followers have for him. Compare him to Ra’s al Ghul or Harvey Dent or the Joker, who you can’t look away from whenever they’re onscreen, who are the very definition of “magnetic personality” (especially in the case of the latter), and he’s nothing. The only thing he has is his strength, which is a powerful motivator, but that to me isn’t enough to explain how he’s able to turn Gotham into a literal prison and make himself their king.

+ Bane’s mask. I honestly couldn’t make out about half of what he was saying. The terrible Sean Connery-esque voice that he was using didn’t help, either.

+ Anne Hathaway’s interpretation of Catwoman. Don't get me wrong: she was clever, and agile and tricky and manipulative the way Catwoman should be, but I feel like there were huge chunks of her character just missing. There was nothing in her performance that made me want to care about her – not even her “vulnerable” moments, where Bruce/Blake/The Audience are supposed to be seeing past the hard, streetwise exterior she puts on, are in any way believable. They tried their best with her, I know they did, but this was the most disappointing part of the movie for me.

+ Also, ~~WHY THE FUCK WAS THERE NO BATGIRL~~ I’m still mad about Christopher Nolan completely writing out Barbara Gordon in favor of giving him a useless son to lecture the importance of Batman on, but completely shuttling off Gordon’s family off-screen in the very beginning of the movie, when they’d at least set up the son to be someone halfway important in The Dark Knight, was a stupid choice.

The Dark Knight Rises isn’t the weakest of the series – that’s an award I reserve for Batman Begins – but seeing all three movies in a row really just highlighted how much better the second one actually is. The Dark Knight had better villains, better delivery, and was just an overall better movie than the first or the last movies. The villains in The Dark Knight (Harvey, Joker, even the mobsters) were ten times more believable than Catwoman or Bane, and while the terrorism and destruction occurring in this latest installment is very well done – the detail in it, and the sheer amount of patience and willpower it must have taken for this whole plan to even work – none of it feels real. The destruction and mayhem happening in The Dark Knight was an immediate threat, whereas everything going on here feels nothing even close to that.

In some ways The Dark Knight Rises feels like a letdown, but mostly it feels like finishing a very long novel; for the tone and style and everything else this series had to offer, this is a good ending – there are no unanswered questions, nothing else I’d like to see. Nolan’s closed the book and set it back on the shelf and for all its faults, I enjoyed the movie, and I think most fans of the first two would as well.