I was trying to figure out why I didn't like "The Bat" but I think I know why now, every time it's shown I felt completely disconnected from batman, the whole machine was fucking awesome but I felt removed from batman and the situation whenever he was in that thing.
Yes. Their take on the Batwing (as I'm going to call it), in addition to the central plot macguffin of the fusion reactor left me thinking of one thing: the Iron Man movies. The sequence where Batman has the missiles chasing him as he flew through the city towards the end was a near verbatim ripoff of the sequences where Iron Man flies away from rockets and flying bad guys in one of the movies (can't quite recall if it was Avengers or IM1/2). It just didn't feel like Batman to me, it felt like Iron Man.
Same with the concept of the sticking in some kind of renewable energy technology and using that as the stakes when the bad guy steals it. It was the arc reactor tech in IM1/2, and while it's not exactly the same, it's a very similar feeling plot device to me in TDKR. I'm not quite sure how they could have remedied this, but nuking the city felt WAY heavy handed compared to the fundamental philosophies of the League of Shadows.
First of all, their entire organization would have gone up in the blast, including Talia and Bane. For an organization that takes the longview on major problems, blowing yourself up to destroy one city doesn't make sense. Second, if the philosophy behind destroying a city when it reaches the peak of its decadence is to allow it to return to balance, how does nuking a city accomplish that? It will be completely uninhabitable for decades from the radiation. It goes against their philosophy of restoring order and makes these villains seem like thugs who want to destroy the city rather than forward thinking, though misguided, good guys. I so very much liked the moral ambiguity of the LoS's ways, it's what made them interesting to me.
Finally, their logic behind why they still wanted to destroy Gotham felt flimsy to me. It seemed like Batman had won, he had cleaned up the streets and fixed Gotham's problems, largely owing to the Dent Act after he hung up the cape. But they try to rationalize it by revealing Dent as a villain who murdered 5 people, not Gotham's white knight. But how does that invalidate any of the things accomplished by the Dent Act? Are the things that Gotham has achieved since the lie was told any less real because they were based on a lie? I don't know, maybe. But does it warrant nuking the entire city? Not in my book.
There are other things I can nitpick, like how Bane's competence at setting up the city for a destruction was absurdly overexaggerated and unrealistic or the fact that a fusion power reactor is not the same a nuclear bomb, but on the whole I still enjoyed the movie immensely, mostly on an emotional and cathartic level. It was a fantastic ending to a trilogy, bringing back so much of the stuff that I loved from BB and putting together an epic story where the stakes were extremely high and felt real to me.
