The Dark Knight Rises - Christopher Nolan (2012)

1. The Dark Knight Rises is the latest in the DC Comics franchise from Hollywood’s most successful idiot, Christopher Nolan. 
2. Christopher Nolan really wants to make intelligent films, but he keeps making complicated films. It’s hard to know whether Nolan himself loses any sleep over the shortfall. He’s keen to associate himself with noir, a genre which he’s called maze-like. And this is very telling. Apart from things like low lighting, a preponderance of flashbacks, femme fatales and bruised male protagonists the defining feature of noir is an air of unresolved mystery. A maze isn’t really a mystery. There is only one entrance and one exit and Nolan’s films are prosaic in just the same way. Now you are lost in the maze. Here is the exit to the maze. 
3. If the prison from which the child Bane emerged was so awful, how come they’ve got a TV? How are they getting reception down there? Do they have cable? Ok, it’s quite a small TV but it’s just that, from the description Alfred gave, it sounded like a kind of living hell, rather than slightly better than a Spanish youth hostel. 
4. Films like Memento, The Prestige or Inception substitute the explanation of an idea for plot. In fact, it sometimes seems like Nolan’s goal as a filmmaker is to explain any idea that’s put in front of him as earnestly and humourlessly as possible, like he’s got a vendetta against ideas, like they make him feel bad in way he can’t express. And it’s weird because often the ideas he’s got it in for aren’t that well thought out, or really the kind of ideas that you'd think it was worth spending millions of dollars to get a scowling Christian Bale to stamp the life out of.
5. Nolan’s big action sequences are shot for real. He’ll really blow the wings off a plane, or lob a crane over the edge of a motorway, or build a bat bike that can leap three double decker buses. If you watch this interview you’ll notice that he regards the fact that studios give him money to enact his stunts with the reverence of a man in the presence of a mystery he really cannot understand. 
6. The Keysi Fighting Method, the martial art used by Bale’s Batman, was made up by two blokes in Spain. You’re probably wondering if men who make up their own martial arts are cool guys who hang around by their motorbikes with their muscly arms crossed. You are in for a treat. 
7. Oh no! Michael Caine is trapped a dream in which he’s playing Michael Caine doing an impression of Michael Caine doing an impression of Michael Caine!
8. Most of the mysteries in Nolan’s films are binary, the equivalent of asking a child which hand the sweetie is in. Is the top spinning, or is not spinning? Is the magician in the box, or not in the box? Is the bomb in this truck or the other truck? But why is the bomb in either? If Bane is so fiendishly clever, why didn’t he keep the bomb somewhere else? This never occurs to Bane, because it never ever occurs to Christopher Nolan.
9. The Gotham Stock Exchange is actually the frontage of the Masonic Temple in Covent Garden. Kind of wondering if they let him use it because he's a mason. Or maybe Nolan secretly believes that the masons are giving him the money to keep making films. 
10. After sitting through three hours of that, you probably felt like watching Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. It’s way better than this. Jack Nicholson is fantastic, and you get to watch Kim Basinger defining the phrase ‘in her prime’.