The Dark Knight Rises: Review By MutantFairy

This was a great movie. Watching it, I immediately recognized old Batman stories, Knightfall, No Man's Land & The Dark Knight Returns, which I read a long time ago & it was great to see elements from those 3 Batman stories combined in new ways for this movie. If you haven't read these stories, that's ok, because you don't need to.

Watching Batman get defeated like in Knightfall is not fun. He's the hero & you don't want the bad guys to get the upper hand, ever. But it has to happen so he can "rise" & beat the bad guys. Bane turned into a legitimate villain in this movie. I liked hearing lines reminiscent of the Mutant Leader come out of Bane's mouth when he said "you fight like a young man." Merging him with the Mutant Leader, I thought was a great way to make Bane more of a threat than a steroid-based wrestler, the way he always seemed to me. I had hoped we would hear Batman say something about that later on but he didn't. The "Occupy Gotham City" angle that ended up with Gotham turning into No Man's Land was well thought out as Batman became the only hope for Gotham.

I thought it was funny that batman was surprised at how people figured out he was Bruce Wayne. After 8 years they both show up at the same time, um it's pretty obvious dude. The new bat (wing) was really cool & I'm curious if such a machine could actually fly. The way the story tied back to the first & second films really give a sense of it being a coherent trilogy, a long story with a beginning, middle & end, instead of 3 self-contained stories like the old Batman movies or the Spider-Man movies.

I am so happy that they fixed Bane's voice after that preview. This time Gotham was NYC not Chicago which was a bit weird but they fixed that by giving Manhattan a bunch of brand new bridges which I thought was a nice touch. Although I noticed that a lot of the Inception actors were onscreen, I did not recognize Bane as being Tom Hardy from Inception. Anne Hathaway as Catwoman was great; she should get her own Catwoman movie pre-DKR.