4. Smoke and Mirrors
The Dark Knight Rises, in its run time of approaching three hours, should have shown me so much more than it did. What it did show me was fairly epic; a city exploding, football fields imploding, riots in the streets andwell, now that I think about it that was about all of it. It might seem like there was a lot of action, but truthfully I felt like I sat through about thirty minutes of set-up stretched out over two hours, that was sated with around twenty or thirty minutes of compressed carnage. And even that didnt serve to tie up all the loose ends that Nolan invariably created when he started fiddling with characters origins and motivations; ones which have been established over a period of almost a century. And once you start pulling on that thread, theres no stopping until the TDKR sweater is simply a pile of old wool. While the film definitely has its epic moments, I feel like they were too few and far between and more often than not it was the creeping tendrils of boredom that invaded my experience of the movie, as opposed to the white-hot excitement that should have had me by the stones throughout.