My Thoughts After Watching 'The Dark Knight Rises'

(Photo Source: Warner Bros.)

A fair warning: negativity will reign supreme in this post.

Back when The Dark Knight came out, everyone was talking about Heath Ledger's role as the Joker, and then he won the Oscar posthumously. This very much intrigued me. So I watched Batman Begins, and could care less about it. Then came time to watch TDK. And I loved any and every scene that the Joker was in, but that's as far as I will go. I found it to be a boring film, with all these characters just talking to each other the entire time in dark rooms--boring!

So when I recently sat down to watch The Dark Knight Rises, I didn't have very high hopes. And because I had such low expectations, I wasn't let down at all. I'll use the same descriptor again: TDKR was extremely boring. There was too much whispering going on instead of talking at a normal decibel level. I didn't understand Bane as a villain. Bruce Wayne/Batman is a very flat and two-dimensional character with no depth to get me to become invested in what he was doing at all, and Christian Bale didn't really do anything to change my perception of this supposed superhero.

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Since I've spent all this time on the negativity train, I'm going to finish up by mentioning the few moments that I did enjoy. The football stadium scene followed up by the freeing of the prison inmates is probably the best part of the entire film. And the quality definitely improved from the climax to the end--there was suspense, resolution, saying goodbye to Batman (I won't miss you, that's for sure), the emergence of Robin. And the two best actors were Anne Hathaway and Joseph Gordon Levitt.

So there you have it: The Dark Knight Rises, like its two predecessors, is, to put it simply, not a good movie at all. When it comes to superhero flicks, I'll stick to Spider-Man (aside from #3). Because that way, I can watch a film where the superhero actually has superpowers, he's got a backstory you can relate to and you actually care what happens to him, and there aren't endless scenes that give you restless leg syndrome.

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