Why We Hate The Dark Knight Rises
Every fanboy that ever lived simply adored The Dark Knight Rises. They entered screenings with mouths agape and spent the next three hours refraining from blinking, out of respect for each individual frame, and hanging on to every shred of dialogue from Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonah's script. To the fans, Christopher Nolan movies are untouchable, and The Dark Knight Rises proved no different. Some of them were so enthusiastic, they immediately went to rate it on IMDb (some without even seeing it, which is really dedicated) and made a calculated decision to propel it as close to the #1 ranking as possible, because some things in life are that important. Some of us, however, just thought The Dark Knight Rises sucked. Everyone expected greatness from the sequel to The Dark Knight, even more-so after it was to follow Nolan's best film to date, Inception. But The Dark Knight Rises arrived in cinemas missing something. It lacked coherency, vibrancy, soul, and a colour palette stretching beyond grey and blue. It was a flawed film, most people would admit, but didn't the positives make up for the negatives? NO. Below are five reasons why The Dark Knight Rises sucked, hard. Spoilers follow, obviously.
5. The Tone
The Dark Knight Rises is a film about a billionaire who takes on the persona of a bat to fight crime. Sounds fun, doesn't it?! Except it's not. Dressing up as a winged rat and beating up perps for kicks is a very serious business, actually, and Christopher Nolan wants you to get that. So, for good measure, he throws in Catwoman and a huge-titted man in an iron gimp mask just so you know how serious this all is. In almost three hours of sheer misery, things go from bad to worse for literally everyone involved in the story, especially Bruce Wayne, who by the end has been so jerked around that you'll think Job had it easy. None of the poor souls in the film can even bear to smile by the end, things have gotten so shit. This kind of tone would be too grim and self-serious for a film about the Holocaust; for a comic book movie, it's just plain ridiculous. Killing off innocent characters at will and turning Gotham into the Warsaw ghetto, there is absolutely no doubt that the Nolan brothers want you to leave the cinema thinking about how life is often terrible for no discernible reason. Sure, there are one or two gags. But when the height of humour in this film is Batman growling "This isn't a carrr", you wonder which comedian ever thought that was funny. Then you watch an interview with Christopher Nolan, and the question is answered.