2. The Sound
The score for The Dark Knight was great, right? So how do you top that? Well, you make it louder. Louder, that is, than standing under the turbine of a jet before take-off. As he stuck in some earplugs and strived to go way past 11 for The Dark Knight Rises score, it seems composer Hans Zimmer grabbed copious brass, strings and the deaf horn players from Inception before telling them "give me noise". The result is a soundtrack that seems like it's genuinely annoyed at the viewer, that actually wants to hurt the persons listening by arranging a meeting between their eardrums and tinnitus. The incorporation of mass chanting into the music is an interesting touch, but it's as unsubtle as everything else Zimmer conducts up here. The score only serves further to drown out dialogue already buried under blasting sound effects, which aurally turn punches into gunshots, gunshots into explosions, and explosions into detonations of the atom bomb. At the climax of the film, when an A-bomb does go off, it makes hardly any sound at all, almost like the sound effects team realised they had reached the pinnacle of noisy stuff and just went for sweet, peaceful silence instead.