The Dark Knight Rises - Well Worth de Wait

I am super cited to start off my movie reviews section with THE most anticipated movie by me - Dark Knight Rises. But before I do, I would like to give a little run down of the previous 2 installment of the 3 parts trilogy.

 It's been almost 4 long years since the previous installment of the trilogy, The Dark Knight, which I personally feel is one of the best batman movie ever made. Before Batman Begins hit the big screen in 2005, Batman was nothing more than just a cartoon figure to me especially after watching movies like Batman Returns(1992) and Batman Forever(1995). Its was pretty fun to watch seeing big cast like Danny Devito as the Penguin, Jim Carry as the Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones as Harvey Dent, with pretty big budget too. But it always seems something was missing yet never to really pin point what. Well, that was until I first saw The Dark Knight.

To be frank, I skipped Batman Begins thinking it's just ANOTHER batman movie trying to rip off the comic fans and action junkies. And even for Dark Knight, it was by pure accident that I got dragged by a friend to watch and thank God he did. It really gave me a good wake up call to what a powerful mind of a director could do to what seemingly to be a boring old subject, giving it new life and present it in a brand new way to us. Yup, you got it - Christopher Nolan. For those who are new to him, his work includes Inception (My personal favourite movie in recent years) and The Prestige.

His work made me realised what was missing - The Batman, his darkness, his pain and his life as a normal human being. In the previous two parts of the trilogy, a good part of the movie was to emphasised on those and even more so this time round. In the movie when the batman was totally and utterly defeated by Bane physically, broke his back and thrown down the pit, when he was bankrupted, when his toys and research facility was taken over and when the fusion technology which he spent most of his fortune on went into the wrong hands and turned in to a weapon against the people he was trying to save and most of all, when Alfred told him the truth about how Rachael really felt about him and his only family Alfred lied to him, the despair and agony can clearly be felt. It was from all these pain and physical sufferings that the dark knight rises from and continued to fight makes batman the true hero. Also what I do love so very much was how the story linked up especially the part where the Mercenary turned out to be Ducard, Batman's mentor in part one, played by Liam Neeson.  

There were some parts which I feel wasn't as good as I wanted it to be thou. The fight scenes were great but in my opinion not as good as the dark knight. Bane was depicted as the invincible villain both smart and brutal, tearing thru Gotham with no one capable of stopping him but in the end was killed by a shot by Cat Woman? That to me was pretty anti-climate. Also, the hand combat scene when Batman was trying to save Robin after he was capture while trying to free his fellow policemen from the underground, it was pretty clear that the tugs were standing there waiting to be hit and just seems fake compared to the one in the dark knight when Batman was combatting the police officers trying to take down the villains pretending to be doctors in the still under construction building.


With that being said, this movie is still very very well done. Every role was cast with the perfect person for the part and they acted it splendidly. I especially liked Michael Caine's acting from this film and I truly feel he deserved our compliment. Tom Hardy as Bane is also an excellent choice. Although you may not see much of his expression being blocked by the mask he was wearing, but his physical was enough to bring out the kind of ruggedness and power.  All in all, it may not be as action packed as the Dark Knight, but the story alone is well worth the time and effort. I seriously doubt anyone can top this trilogy of the Batman again, well, not without the use of CG anyway.