cahubble09

July 22, 2012 12:32 pm The contrivance of allowing the bomb to wind down slowly while the cops languished underground had more to do with the fact that Bruce Wayne's punishment had to be more "severe" than death. And it adds to the utter perplexity of the insanity of mayhem for mayhem's purpose. The point IS that we don't get it. We're not supposed to. If we do then we're as sick and twisted as Bain. Bruce was meant to languish in his hellish prison while watching the city he loved die an extended, miserable death.

July 22, 2012 12:25 pm Blake is both an amalgam AND his own character. It seemed to me a fitting nod to the Robins of the comics without actually trying to insert a Robin into this film series. To do so would have been convoluted and anachronistic. Robin has always had a kind of brightening effect in the comic book, Nolan's vision was so dark that an actual Robin would have been hopelessly out of place.

July 22, 2012 12:19 pm @Papito208: Agreed re Dick Grayson and Tim Drake influences, but I didn't see the Jason Todd angle. Jason Todd took vengefulness (and arrogance) to an extreme, don't you think? The character John Blake didn't seem angry to me in a hyperbolic way (even if his elders referred to him as "hot"), and certainly didn't have the arrogance of Jason Todd. It seemed more like a kind of simmering dynamo which fueled his fight against injustice (wherever he found it).

July 22, 2012 12:11 pm His 'actual' role, vis a vis Batman/Bruce, was evident early on ... an orphan (like Dick Grayson) who solves the riddle of Batman's identity (like Tim Drake) ... It was a very clever way to add Robin to this film without calling him Robin (until the end) or putting him in Robin's costume.

July 22, 2012 12:08 pm It seems like a moot question. The art of making trilogies, IMO, has moved forward by leaps and bounds since I was a kid. I think you almost have to read these films as complete, epic sagas in three acts (I think the creators certainly conceive of them in that way). To compare them to each other or to other third film examples is almost impossible. This film may suffer in comparison to Dark Knight because Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker was so riveting--but I think this was the most complex, holistically complete, and sophisticated of the three. I have added Dickens' Tale of Two Cities to my want to read list as a result of watching this movie.

July 22, 2012 12:02 pm Comparing this to Avengers is like comparing apples and oranges, don't you think? I found them both equally enjoyable, but they are both very different tableaus. I would never be able to choose between them.

July 22, 2012 12:00 pm When I read comments about Bane's voice being unintelligible at times, I thought it was foolish--but having watched the film, I found it frustrating as well. The character became far less imposing as a result, although it was enough to detract from the entire experience for me.

July 22, 2012 11:58 am I enjoyed the ending too. They definitely left the door open for future films, but how does anyone follow Nolan's triptych?

July 21, 2012 8:15 pm John Blake felt to me like an amalgam of both Grayson and Drake (although the Blake/Drake similarity didn't escape me either): on the one hand he was an orphan like Bruce, but on the other his introduction to Bruce involved him showing up at Wayne Manor having already solved the mystery of who Batman really was. This character contained a bit of both origins, if memory serves me correctly. That line near the end of the film reminded me of meeting Neal Adams recently at Mile High Comics. I'd purchased a print he signed of Robin, and I asked him was it Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, or Tim Drake. He looked at me and said with a wink of his eye, "it's Robin."

July 21, 2012 8:07 pm More Bats vs Bane would have been boring. What has made this triptych so wonderful (and earned The Dark Knight an Academy Award nomination) has been the complexity and sophistication of the entire tableau. Taken together, these three films, it seems to me, have been as much a meditation on the archetypal relationships between chaos (as a proxy for freedom) and order, and the responsibility or role of the citizen as anything else (and Nolan, BTW, has given me a new homework assignment in the process, since he apparently stated in an interview that Dickens' Tale of Two Cities served as part of his inspiration for DKR). There were more plot threads woven together in this film than viewers may recognize--I think at least partly because the final tapestry was so coherent. To turn this into a Bats vs Bane, Rocky-style slugfest would have cheapened the final product.