The deaths were so anticlimatic. You had this huge fight scene with Bane and then all of sudden Bane just gets blasted away by Catwoman.
And Talia just dies from the car crash? And that was terrible acting BTW. That had to be one of the most unconvincing death scenes I have seen in a while.
Bane had already been defeated by Batman - THAT was his death scene. What Selina did was simply tie off some loose ends.
Plus one of her first lines she says something about how she wants to “Restore balance”, which is also the stated goal of the League of Shadows.
What was that a tattoo of? It looked more like a scar, or maybe a brand to me.
Small/mid-sized planes are unlikely to have a radar suite. It wasn’t a military jet; likely just leased locally.
Batman Begins 7.0
The Dark Knight 8.5
The Dark Knight Rises 8.0
I usually HATE comic book action movie. I didn’t like the Avengers at all. But I must say that Batman has come a long way since it’s “Bat Tootsie” days. The first movie, (Batman Begins), was dull at times, but it did it’s best to explain why a grown man would want to dress up like a bat and fight crime. The other two movies were just great action flicks.
Bane was no Joker, and Catwoman/Selina could have been a more “fleshed out” character. Blake had more of a backstory than Catwoman. I liked Blake, but that could partly have to do with me being a fan of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. They picked the wrong actress to play Miranda.
Overall, it was a quality movie series that I would recommend to people, even if they aren’t into comics, or didn’t like the old 1989 Batman movie. I might try to get my father into it so I can see The Dark Night Rises again.
I definitely see a lot of problems here, but for the most part I really enjoyed the movie. it’s no Dark Knight, but it’s still pretty great for what it is. Most of my complaints fall into the pacing issues mentioned above, or into the general problems with this series (it’s so arch-realist that it becomes disturbingly unreal).
But one structural issue which annoyed me to no end was that this movie starts off so grim, but it doesn’t really go somewhere with it. To me, this seriously breaks the flow of the movie. Batman may rise in the movie, but the problem was he started off in a deep, dark pit. Ergo, he could never fall. There was no tension in his being beaten by Bane, because we knew it was coming and because that event didn’t hurt him per se: he was already broken.
I loved it. Maybe a shy less than The Dark Knight just because The Joker was one of film’s most interesting villains but this was really good.
Like The Dark Knight, this seemed like two movies mashed together but they were two really good movies. I did question how did Bruce make it form a desert in Asia to Gotham and exactly what Bane’s point was to let anarchy reign for months when what he really wanted was to destroy Gotham (It’s possible with that second one, I missed something because sometimes it was hard to understand him).
Of the “twists”: it was pretty well telegraphed the cop was going to become the Next Batman but Talia was a surprise and I kicked myself as soon as she stabbed him because I knew Talia was Ra’s al Gu’s daughter and I should have seen it. But Miranda Tate was also a character from the cartoons (where most of my Batman knowledge comes from) so I was surprised.
I was convinced Batman would die but glad this version of Bruce Wayne got a happy ending.
What also surprised me was just how many call backs there were to the previous two movies. This really was a trilogy and I am glad I rewatched the previous two very recently.
But they didn’t take the hoods off of their prisoners before boarding them? No searches? I can’t even get into a movie theatre hooded. I think the staging was weak, but I can suspend belief for that one. It IS comic book world.
edit: Did Alfred really tell Bruce where the restaurant was specifically? I do agree it was a dick move to let his friends think he’s dead. They already know he’s Batman, so why the added drama? And wasn’t the bat-signal fixed?
And why didn’t Taila and Bane set off the bomb early then if it looked like they were in for trouble? Why the countdown?
I also don’t know if Bruce’s limp was consistent, even with his super duper snappy leg brace/cartilage repairing machine.
The more I remember my wtf moments during the movie the more pissed I am. I want my $11 back.
I’m really leaving the thread now, but I’m still pissy. I meant to edit and say:
I also don’t know if Bruce’s limp was consistent, even with his super duper snappy leg brace/cartilage repairing machine.
The stock exchange thing was so figging unbelievable. Same with the prison one. Not sure how Selina ended up in a row with men (?) or how she got to some more permanent facility without a trial. Also, how the hell does one bust open a prison with just putting a hole in one wall? Someone alert the writers of Prison Break! They were doing it wrong.
Also…his clean energy machine. I’m confused. Don’t you need a special permit for that? Don’t we get really angry at Iran for their clean energy program? Because a scientist was able to transform that machine into a nuke in three minutes onscreen…tell me Iran won’t have it so easy.
Some of the answers to the plot holes is BECAUSE HE IS THE BAT-MAN. But why can’t he just be THE BAT-MAN throughout the movie? I can see how THE BAT-MAN can get from Hell to Gotham in 24-48 hours (“We have 23 days…”) freshly shaved and in a nice suit without a passport or money because HE’S THE BAT-MAN but I can’s suspend belief again in ten minutes when he’s fighting Bane and looking like a weenie.
I don’t even know what the movie is about. “It’s better to end up with a murderous jewel thief living pampering her in luxury in Europe than be Batman”?
If he died penniless, where did his cash flow come from? Lucius couldn’t wire it to him. So if he always had a secret stash, why didn’t he pay that electric bill? 
Obviously he had serious hidden resources because he was able to get Rookie Cop’s character into his new Bat-cave. I can see how he gets to Gotham so soon after his escape. I still think his character was a little to schizo for my taste.
Speaking of the electric bill, the spouse came up with another glaring plot hole yesterday: Gotham was supposed to be under seige for 5 months, right? With all but one of its bridges destroyed, meaning the only way in was either over the one remaining bridge or by air? And the whole city was basically in anarchy, right? Sooo…
–How did people eat? Could they really import enough food to feed eight million people for five months over a single bridge and by air drop? They’d need a near-constant influx of trucks and drops, plus the infrastructure to make sure the food got where it needed to be.
–Did the average citizens of Gotham just go about their jobs in the face of all this stress, anarchy, and fear that a nuke would go off at any time? If so, that’s pretty hard to believe. If not, then who ran the power company, who picked up the garbage, who dealt with the inevitable dead bodies (people are going to die in five months in a city of 8 million, even leaving off the extras who will get sick due to the sanitation problems)? The people in the Wayne Building had a fire burning inside a skyscraper (don’t fires inside buildings produce all sorts of unpleasant and deadly vapors?)–why didn’t the fire sprinklers go off? And why weren’t there just riots in the streets as all the bad guys took advantage of their position and decided to show the average citizens who was in charge?
I know, I know: suspend disbelief. But that’s way too hard for me to do if we’re talking about five months. A few days, sure. But five months?
BTW, and I genuinely don’t know this so it’s probably not a legitimate question: Is this particular universe Batman-only as far as heroes go? Is there no Superman? If there is a Superman, then…where was he during this five months? Gotham was his city too. If he exists in this universe they should have at least had a one-line explanation for why he wasn’t helping out. With is X-ray vision he could probably have figured out which truck the bomb was in and carried it off into outer space. (Yeah, I know, I’m being facetious now.)
Aside from all the huge problems, I really did like the movie. It’s not one I’d go back to see (like The Avengers, which I’ve already seen four times) but I’m glad I went and I don’t want my $14.25 back (we saw it in XD).
I think people are kind of streatching to find plotholes:
We see them distributing food. I don’t think there’s really a problem with bringing it over one bridge. They bring enough food into the “real” Manhatten every day even though most of the traffic coming into the city isn’t semis carrying food.
And the one kid is seen stealing an apple. So obviously even with the food shipments, the food isn’t being distributed.
We don’t know. They don’t show much of what regular people were doing in Gotham. But just because they don’t show something doesn’t make it a “plothole”. Presumably the people of Gotham figured out how to stay alive in a cut-off city for five months somehow.
Some utility workers struggle to keep the plumbing working probably wouldn’t make for a very interesting scene, and even if it did, the movie was already two and a half hours.
Did you notice that in a city of 7 million, the streets are pretty much cleared out?
Five months? Come ON. That’s not a stretch to find a plothole. How in the hell has it not turned into a stinking garbage-ridden crime pit?
Seems like everyone stayed more or less inside. We see everyone huddled indoors, and when Batman wins we see people start to come out onto the streets.
“What happens when a city gets cut off from the rest of the world for five months” would make a pretty cool movie. But it wasn’t the focus of this movie, so we didn’t really see much of whats going on. That isn’t a “plothole”.
I don’t think I’m stretching (and remember, I liked the movie). I think if you’re going to make a “realistic” superhero movie, you need to at least toss in a one-off line here and there to deal with the obvious problems of nearly closing off one of the largest cities in the country for 5 months. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. I’m very forgiving–it doesn’t even have to be more than marginally plausible. I’ll give them a lot of leeway. But they have to at least acknowledge that they’ve thought about the issue.
Oh, and to add another one (I think this might have been mentioned already upthread, but I’m not going to go back and find out right now): Pretty much every cop in the city was stuck underground and out of action for the better part of that five months. Are you going to tell me that eight million people are going to behave like choirboys in a highly tense situation like that, without even any authorities to rein them in?
If so, you must have taken different mob psychology classes than I did. 
They did. They show them bringing supplies in, lowering it down to the trapped cops, bringing it to distribution points, etc.
Err..again. Its in the movie. Bane’s evil band of criminals took over and formed their own “police” force. We see trashed apartments and mass looting (Catwoman and her completely unnecessary partner have a bit of dialogue in one of the trashed apartments). Everyone else stays the hell indoors to avoid getting murdered.
And how come they all looked so good after emerging? Everyone was shaved.
I did loev that the villains’ motivation ultimately boiled down to: “Dammit, Batman proved us wrong and humilated our asses by doing it with more style than we can imagine. He actually fixed everything, more or less. I know! Let’s spend years building an overdeveloped plot to get revenge in a winding manner by holding the whole city hostage and turning it into an anarchic hellhole… and then blowing it up with us inside.”
Given the fact that they had irrational personal motivations and were dangerously unstable people, their plan does make crazy-ass sense. It’s still a remarkably crazy plan. I was mildly annoyed that they didn’t actually explore at all why Bane cared about Miss Talia “CrazyHotPants” Al’Gul, given that he doesn’t seem to have getting any from her. Not that I’m complaining, because the reveal did actually make sense with everything we knew.
I imagine the State of Gotham had to pass all kinds of special laws to deal with the (metaphorical) fallout of the Seige of Gotham City, including an expidated procedure for declaring death in absentia. GC itself probally spends a lengthy period under real martial law, and loses what’s left of it’s financial service industry to London.
with a stated blast radius of six miles. It didn’t even look like the bomb was detonated six miles outside the city, but even if it was, is the radiation generated from it just going to harmlessly dissipate away?..
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Yeah, that bothered me alot too. How far out would Batman need to fly out to spare Gothman the fallout? Would wind patterns help?
Interesting how Nolan chose to avoid any suggestion regard what likely happened to the female members of the 1%. IIRC we saw one woman hobbling on the ice, but most of those powerful businessmen would have wives & daughters in the city. Wouldn’t want to make the film too dark, now would we.
Do (theoretical) FUSION reactors even work like that?
I thought that fusion power was a holy grail because it’s safe and clean, with no risk of it turning into a bomb.
My research indicates that a fusion bomb requires a fission bomb to detonate it.
Any nucular surgeons in this thread that can answer?
If my math has not gone wonky, four megatons = considerably more than 160 x Nagasaki (22 kt).
They state that it gets turned into a “neutron bomb,” but a four megaton neutron bomb is just as lethal as the vanilla kind. The distinctive thing about neutron bombs is that they are low-yield but have a very high radiation emission. If you crank the yield up to 4 megatons, it kinda makes the other factors moot.
I think Nolan just likes the word “neutron,” honestly.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character is looking RIGHT AT THE FLASH. At the very, very least, he would be temporarily blinded. If the bridge is, say, 100 feet off the water, the farthest the horizon could be would be about 11 or 12 miles and Batman certainly doesn’t get over the horizon with the damn thing in a minute and some-odd seconds in an un-streamlined helicopter towing a big heavy ball of nuke. Hell, he’d have to be going about 400 miles an hour just to make the six-mile “blast radius” they mention in the film.
Sorry, but in the “gritty, realistic” Batman universe, most people in Gotham City and its surrounding boroughs are going to die, and it probably isn’t going to take them very long to do it, either. JGL is flash-blinded and cooked, along with all the kids, and the soldiers and cops on the bridge, and probably the people in the huge urban area to the right of the camera POV as JGL watches the bomb sail away. Some Gothamites might live, but the entire city would be on fire, so I’m not sure how long they’d live for. The EMP would kill every news chopper focusing on the emerging situation in Gotham, and the fallout would devastate whatever part of the U.S. Gotham is supposedly surrounded by. It would make every other nuclear disaster in history look utterly trivial.
And let’s not forget that Batman himself apparently bails out just before detonation (IIRC, we see him in the cockpit when the damn timer is down to scant seconds). So he somehow survives being at more or less ground zero.
And people mocked Indiana Jones for surviving in a refrigerator miles from the blast.
You’d think screenplay writers could use the internet and look up a few basic, simple things and get them even vaguely close, but they never seem to bother.
For what it’s worth, I found this among the least objectionable sloppy bits of the movie, which was long, bloated, and inexcusably boring. For my money, there was almost nothing on-screen worth seeing.
Man, I miss Heath Ledger.