Batman has had a plethora of versions to his tale told in movie formats; some have been crowd pleasers, others have caused fan outcries, and over the entire cinema lifespan of the character, the peaks and valleys have been very back and forth throughout, from the highs of the Tim Burton era to the complete lows of the Snyder-verse, despite being deemed the greatest comic book character ever, he isn’t always portrayed perfectly. One of the saviours of the caped crusader was then underground director, Christopher Nolan, who decided to bring the character back with a new trilogy with a fresh slate with new talent and direction. After Batman and Robin, people were pleasantly surprised with Batman Begins and even further blown away with The Dark Knight, often considered one of, if not, the best comic book movie ever made. Then came the monumental struggle of topping that film with the conclusion which was already facing issues with one of the lead villains, The Joker, having to be dropped after actor Heath Ledger’s tragic passing. In 2012, against all odds, the film was released, and the initial response was insanely positive. However, after a passage of time, the cracks were starting to come for the movie and people started to find more and more issues with the penultimate film to the trilogy, seeing that The Dark Knight Rises wasn’t as good as it was built up to be. Years after the events of Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne (played by Christian Bale) is brought back into the fight for Gotham after a mercenary named Bane (played by Tom Hardy) arrives to finish of the plans of Ra’s al Ghul, his former master. Along with the cat burglar, Catwoman (played by Anne Hathaway), Batman is faced with a larger issue when a nuke is left within the city of Gotham and the entire city is held hostage inside. The race is on to defuse the bomb, stop Bane and cleanse Gotham of its sins once and for all. Lifting the pressure of following up The Dark Knight of the film’s sleeves, its painfully clear that this movie wasn’t fully planned out correctly as this is still a horrible follow up film as well as a terrible ending for an otherwise very impressive trilogy.

Using Christopher Nolan for these movies means that each one is able to encapsulate both the pros and cons of his directing style. The man is a very capable director, proven by the previous films and his pros are highly noticeable in them; the cinematography, the pacing, the direction, and the overall cleanliness of the product. While the motivation and structure of character and story can sometimes be lost among the long instances of speeches in the films, each monologue is used effectively in furthering the story, just in a longer than necessary way. Dark Knight Rises just has every negative thing about Nolan’s writing stuck within itself; an over-obsession with mindless dialogue, characters with little to no explainable or interesting motivation, and a film that is far more impressed with looking good as opposed to being fulfilling. With a plot that in one half is a complete redo to the trilogies first movie, and the other half being a completely incomprehensible boring mess, the conclusion isn’t a wrap-up of past themes and ideas, but rather a complete overhaul of plot in order to make a full length film. A world that was once incredibly defined with stable reasoning with its character’s intelligence and attitudes towards events goes completely out the window for characters acting complete 180s of themselves, people that randomly know things that they shouldn’t know, and actions that are so sporadic and pointless that it only furthers in dragging the film out. The film constantly drags its feet with its climax which lasts over an hours length and takes what looked like an epic climactic battle in the streets level brawl finale into something that has little weight due to the lack of proper build up and clarification.

The characters, even in the previous films, were not the most interesting versions of said characters, but with great worldbuilding, mostly adult acting and an intelligent script, the film was able to create its own versions of these character while sticking true to the darker themes of the source material. Here the characters are either painfully stupid, weirdly sidelined, out of nowhere throwaways, or just forgettable people. The only two that managed to sidestep this issue are luckily enough the two actual good elements of this movie. Catwoman and Bane. Bane as the villain has his fair share of issues; including the originals source already being pretty boring, the fact that his plan is a shadow of someone else’s goals and make no sense by the film’s end, or the fact that a reveal towards the end only manages to demean his character even more, but the character is played pretty effectively by Tom Hardy, his presence and size is a formidable one and he even gets a few good lines in here and there. Catwoman is very similar; she is not written to be interesting in the slightest (the only drama she gets is whether she’ll be a good guy by the end), but the character’s style and attitude is fun to see in this universe and Anne Hathaway is clearly having a lot of fun in the role. The returning character have little more to do in the movie; with people like Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and even Christian Bale feeling like afterthoughts in the film. Batman is not an interesting character in his own movie, since the movie feels so unnecessary that there is nothing left to do with the character, leaving an already shaky depiction of the character and making him even less developed. The new actors are good enough but having nothing to offer character wise, with instances like Joseph Gordon Levitt and Marion Cotillard.

To the film’s credit, it is still an impressive looking film with the typical shine and polish that comes with most of Nolan’s work except with a heavier focus on the city which does look quite nice in the daytime and the wide-screen shots do help give the locations some nice scale and size. Nolan does usually have a good talent for his overhead shots of cinematography and this does lead to some pretty nice shots that not only work on the grander level, but are filmed in such a clear steady way that even the slower moments work pretty well. Even though Nolan has a habit of having a bit too much dialogue in his movies, this franchise has done a decent job at least making the discussion mean something in the overall story, whereas here the writing is so muddled and the story is so confused and haphazardly put together, that the lines are either incredibly forgettable or just meaningless words of philosophy as they impact nothing in the overall story (the moral of the Dark Knight was evident and the writing supported that, this movie has no moral so the writing comes across as mindless).

On the surface, Dark Knight Rises doesn’t look like that bad a movie; it has good people behind it, it has good director, it has good actors, it looks very nice, it has amazing advertising, there’s a lot of reasoning why people would believe it to be good. But when the plates are laid out on the table, everything done with the writing element of this movie, to the plot holes, to the backtracking, the character direction, the forgettable silly dialogue, the awful pacing, the downright pointless feel of the overall picture, and the disappoint felt to a rather underwhelming conclusion to a trilogy that boasted some pretty heavy hitters, it’s a massive disappointment in that regard. Bane and Catwoman are fun to watch, but aside from them, this movie doesn’t rise above anything that has not already been done so much better elsewhere. Not Batman and Robin levels of terrible, but certainly not worth a watch, Nolan deserves a lot of praise and recognition for a whole lot of reasons, but sadly this is definitely not one of those instances.