The Dark Knight Rises |OT| The Legend Ends (Warning: Unmarked Spoilers Within)

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After this thread, I'm basically expecting the film to be terrible. Good to know.

It's not terrible. I found it very disappointing and there's a lot of things I didn't like about it, specifically Nolan treating the audience like idiots on several occasions, but terrible? In no way is it terrible. Van Helsing is terrible, The Hunger Games is terrible, Transformers 2 is terrible.

I would say it's overall disappointing, but the filmmaking is really good so it never feels mediocre or anything, it just made me think "what the fuck" with some of the storytelling decisions and blatant, on the nose shots and dialogue.
 
The Hunger Games has the most mystifying response I've seen a movie get in a long time. It was distinctly mediocre at best.

But that's for a different thread. :p
 
It's not terrible. I found it very disappointing and there's a lot of things I didn't like about it, specifically Nolan treating the audience like idiots on several occasions, but terrible? In no way is it terrible. Van Helsing is terrible, The Hunger Games is terrible, Transformers 2 is terrible.

I would say it's overall disappointing, but the filmmaking is really good so it never feels mediocre or anything, it just made me think "what the fuck" with some of the storytelling decisions and blatant, on the nose shots and dialogue.

I guess we can thank people who thought Inception was "complicated" for that.
 
Wow the film is incredible. For me it's TDK > TDKR > BB. The minus point for me is that story flow skip too fast a bit for my taste. BUT anyone calling that this is a bad film is insane.

Just got back and I agree with this entirely.

How can anyone walk out of that movie and say 'it wasn't that good'.

Incredible... Everything about it. I thought I would hate all of the new characters included but I didn't. At all. In fact I thought that Hathaway's Catwoman was an amazing addition. Just an incredible film.

Add this trilogy to the small list of classics.
 
Just popping in on my phone to say that I loved it, as did my friends.

It certainly gets "comic bookish" at parts, and there's some obvious pandering to casual audiences with the use of flashbacks, but still, it was everything I could have hoped for. Theater cheered many times.

Don't know how it ranks with the other two, but its consistent with their quality.
 
I actually watched it on Monday, but I was under lock and key until yesterday. I saw it on IMAX and it was absolutely incredible.

I don't want to get too into it, so I'll just say I liked it more than The Dark Knight. Nolan did an amazing job. Fantastic.

Finally saw the movie yesterday night. Slept on it and gathered my thoughts this morning. Still can't believe the movie is finally out after 4 years of grueling wait. This is gonna be my spoiler-free review. I will post the spoilerific review in the other thread shortly.

Yeah, you're thoughts are pretty much my own. Awesome!
 
I liked it a lot. Somewhere between 'a bit better' and 'not as good' as TDK. Wasn't a huge fan of Begins, in fact, I don't even remember a whole lot about it.
 
Mediocre movie that went on way too long, there was too much Bruce Wayne and not enough batman being batman. Bane just didn't have the presence I expected he is supposed to be a sort of super powerful monster and he just comes across as the strong guy that pops up midway through an 80's action movie to give the hero a slight challenge. I don't think there was any really memorable sequence or dialogue. Nolan just playing on the recession in a crude way to give Bane's motive and his ulterior motive isn't given enough time and hence isn't explained well apart from being the fulfilment of a prophecy. Don't get me started on the action scenes that were downright terrible, Bane's power wasn't conveyed enough for me. His fights with Batman were poorly choreographed with not much going on and the big action scenes just lacked any sort of energy it was like a bunch of fat people fighting with no energy or any real imperative. The ending was pretty good, I don't think there is any other way he could get closure on the trilogy and it was foreshadowed well.
 
Mediocre movie that went on way too long, there was too much Bruce Wayne and not enough batman being batman. Bane just didn't have the presence I expected he is supposed to be a sort of super powerful monster and he just comes across as the strong guy that pops up midway through an 80's action movie to give the hero a slight challenge. I don't think there was any really memorable sequence or dialogue. Nolan just playing on the recession in a crude way to give Bane's motive and his ulterior motive isn't given enough time and hence isn't explained well apart from being the fulfilment of a prophecy. Don't get me started on the action scenes that were downright terrible, Bane's power wasn't conveyed enough for me. His fights with Batman were poorly choreographed with not much going on and the big action scenes just lacked any sort of energy it was like a bunch of fat people fighting with no energy or any real imperative. The ending was pretty good, I don't think there is any other way he could get closure on the trilogy and it was foreshadowed well.

The fighting was always poorly choreographed so that doesn't surprise me. Just a bunch of disorienting cuts that don't give any context to the fight.
 
The fighting was always poorly choreographed so that doesn't surprise me. Just a bunch of disorienting cuts that don't give any context to the fight.

It's better than previous movies, you can at least see what happens, there are few cuts during the fight and everything is clear. It's just that the fighting is quite boring.
 
It's better than previous movies, you can at least see what happens, there are few cuts during the fight and everything is clear. It's just that the fighting is quite boring.

The fighting was always poorly choreographed so that doesn't surprise me. Just a bunch of disorienting cuts that don't give any context to the fight.
What is your baseline, are you expecting MMA fighting/Bruce lee/hulk smash?

Fighting was fine.
 
Catwoman's goggles doubling as the cat ears? Genius!

Nolan really pulled a Ledger with Hathaway, giving a typecast actor with flimsy roles into a position for a great performance. Burton can keep his fetishy non-canon Catwoman, this is the most definitive version on screen of this character.
 
Catwoman's goggles doubling as the cat ears? Genius!

Nolan really pulled a Ledger with Hathaway, giving a typecast actor with flimsy roles into a position for a great performance. Burton can keep his fetishy non-canon Catwoman, this is the most definitive version on screen of this character.

Amen. It could be because my expectations for her character were monumentally low, but I thought she was one of the better parts of what was an incredible movie.
 
Catwoman's goggles doubling as the cat ears? Genius!

Nolan really pulled a Ledger with Hathaway, giving a typecast actor with flimsy roles into a position for a great performance. Burton can keep his fetishy non-canon Catwoman, this is the most definitive version on screen of this character.

Anne Hathaway has been in a ton of great and varied films . Heath Ledger too. . .
 
It's a mess, but an absolutely glorious mess with its heart in the right place.

Yeah I can give it that. I just fucking wish it was cleaner because the ideas are there, it's just sloppily executed for the first hour. Once it gets into the groove it finally becomes an enjoyable flick.

I will never put this above the first two though, it's impossible. Yeah yeah ferry scene blah blah but neither film was as messy as this.
 
Louis CK wasn't joking when he said we reach for the top of our shelves with words nowadays. Nothing can ever be "below average," or even "bad." It has to be mediocre, terrible, the most disappointing movie since _____. Small flaws are magnified to extreme lengths with anything popular. Terrible should be the type of word reserved for a later Jackie Chan flick or something.
 
Louis CK wasn't joking when he said we reach for the top of our shelves with words nowadays. Nothing can ever be "below average," or even "bad." It has to be mediocre, terrible, the most disappointing movie since _____. Small flaws are magnified to extreme lengths with anything popular. Terrible should be the type of word reserved for a later Jackie Chan flick or something.
On walking out of the theater I swear to you my reaction was genuinely "that was terrible". It felt like a disjointed bloated barely-coherent movie that was trying to run three plots at once while juggling multiple themes in the air. Since I've had time to think about it and understand what was going on I've mellowed a bit, but man it did not make a good first impression on me.
 
Louis CK wasn't joking when he said we reach for the top of our shelves with words nowadays. Nothing can ever be "below average," or even "bad." It has to be mediocre, terrible, the most disappointing movie since _____. Small flaws are magnified to extreme lengths with anything popular. Terrible should be the type of word reserved for a later Jackie Chan flick or something.

Yep. Hyperbole is commonplace now with basically every opinion across every medium... Especially movies and games.

I got into an argument here last year in the MW3 thread with people who said the trailer made the game look like 'shit'. I mean... Shit? Shouldn't that be reserved for gratuitously bad, vomit-inducing visuals?

I knew reaction would be the same with a movie so big, but really I've seen bad movies, and plenty of mediocre ones. I would be hard pressed to hear a salient argument for putting TDKR into those categories.
 
People keep mentioning Spiderman 2 as their favorite superhero movie but I prefer First Class and Thor (fuck yes Kenneth Branagh). In my opinion tighter movies than both of Nolan's batfilms (haven't seen Rises yet).
 
It's a major loss that Branagh won't be coming back for Thor 2. I feel like Alan Taylor will just try to mimic the Shakespearean style and grand scale and not do it nearly as well.
 
They screw it with First Class ending. Both McAvoy and Fassbender were the movie. The sequel should have been them being all buddy to then turn Fassbender into Magneto. They rushed it incredibly.
 
BB >= TDK >> TDKR
This movie has definitely made me appreciate TDK more. Most of my big problems with it were only worse in TDKR so it looks better by comparison.
 
Louis CK wasn't joking when he said we reach for the top of our shelves with words nowadays. Nothing can ever be "below average," or even "bad." It has to be mediocre, terrible, the most disappointing movie since _____. Small flaws are magnified to extreme lengths with anything popular. Terrible should be the type of word reserved for a later Jackie Chan flick or something.

Similarly, fanboys can come out of a screening thinking "masterpiece", "perfect", "greatest trilogy ever" "Best superhero movie since ____" as soon as the credits roll.

Cuts both ways. We live in a IMDB world where 2/3rds of the ratings are either 1/10 or 10/10. Everything is either "Awesome" or "sucks", no in-between.
 
It's not terrible. I found it very disappointing and there's a lot of things I didn't like about it, specifically Nolan treating the audience like idiots on several occasions, but terrible? In no way is it terrible. Van Helsing is terrible, The Hunger Games is terrible, Transformers 2 is terrible.

Given some of the questions/theories in the spoiler thread, I can't totally blame him for that.
 
BB is so overshadowed by DK and DKR. One of my friend's (who I saw DKR with) didn't even know it was a trilogy, and that BB was the first film.

BB felt like a Batman movie to me. The other two have felt like action movies that happen to have Batman in them. TDK because of the focus on Joker and TDKR for...reasons I won't get into in this thread
 
Similarly, fanboys can come out of a screening thinking "masterpiece", "perfect", "greatest trilogy ever" "Best superhero movie since ____" as soon as the credits roll.

Cuts both ways. We live in a IMDB world where 2/3rds of the ratings are either 1/10 or 10/10. Everything is either "Awesome" or "sucks", no in-between.

Fair enough, but I'd argue differently. Let's use a scale out of 10 here. Now, let's also go off the premise that TDKR is (with criticisms valid) an another solid movie with certain factors letting it down. Wouldn't it be a lot to closer to something like a 7/10 than a 3/10 (which a word like "mediocre" would suggest)?

Obviously opinions are subjective, but to me saying TDKR was mediocre or terrible is ridiculous hyperbole unless you genuinely thought it had few or no redeeming qualities.
 
BB is so overshadowed by DK and DKR. One of my friend's (who I saw DKR with) didn't even know it was a trilogy, and that BB was the first film.

Well that's to be expected on some level, since TDK made about 3x as much in the box office, but yeah it's still unfortunate. What Batman Begins did as far as comic book origin stories is gonna be very tough for any movie to beat. The first hour or so of that movie is basically perfect.
 
Fair enough, but I'd argue differently. Let's use a scale out of 10 here. Now, let's also go off the premise that TDKR is (with criticisms valid) an another solid movie with certain factors letting it down. Wouldn't it be a lot to closer to something like a 7/10 than a 3/10 (which a word like "mediocre" would suggest)?

Obviously opinions are subjective, but to me saying TDKR was mediocre or terrible is ridiculous hyperbole unless you genuinely thought it had few or no redeeming qualities.

Yup, few redeeming qualities is the camp I'm in. I posted a huge list in the spoiler thread of all the problems I had with the movie. There are maybe...thirty minutes of it that I actually enjoyed, most of it broken up into two-to-three minute chunks of occasional good dialogue or action.
 
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