10. Don't Rely On Audience Intellect
The Problem One thing Michael Bay has got right in his career - though he actually goes way too far - is the idea that big summer blockbusters have to be as blatant as possible. Head-scratching conundrums like the end of Inception, or the various mysteries of The Shining have no place in this sort of film-making, because it simply feeds those who seek to pick films apart, especially when they come with an inflated budget and a summer release date. It also encourages audiences to fill in the gaps themselves, and unfortunately, that doesn't always fit with the typical summer blockbuster audience - they are there to be thrilled and entertained without much effort in return, and though it sounds like a reductive profile, Hollywood will continue to cater to it as long as box office returns confirm it. But if you ask this type of audience member - or indeed the cynical nit-picker - to come up with story details themselves, or give them enough rooom to interpret certain events themselves, you end up with a disgruntled audience, and when a film has aspirations to be a summer block-buster, the term "I didn't get it" is Kryptonite. Though it might seem in contradiction to the assertion that Nolan should have let the audience work out for themselves if Batman was indeed dead, there shouldn't have been any open questions in the Dark Knight Rises. It was supposed to be the full-stop on the story arc, the very end of everything Nolan had created up until that point, and leaving loose ends would simply encourage fans and critics to assume a fourth film will come along, potentially distracting from Warners' endeavours to reboot.
How To Fix It As before, the script should have been better, and there should have been no room for the kind of interpretation that the presence of unintentional plot holes encourages. It might sound like unnecessarily pandering to assumed tastes based on harsh profiling techniques, but blockbuster audiences do not want to be tested - which is why something as big as Inception is ridiculously suggested to be a sort of exotic curio, and not an industry standard. In short, do not leave too much room for questioning. What do you think? How would you have dealt with The Dark Knight Rises' biggest flaws? Share your thoughts below.