Batman: The Dark Knight Rises Movie

I shall keep this short as, frankly, there’s a million and one reviews of this movie all over the interweb and you’re not really going to be interested in little old mine!

I shall share it regardless of course.

This is a great film, make sure you see it on a true IMAX screen (not these ones that are slightly larger than normal cinema screens that pretend to be IMAX) to get the full effect, particularly of the opening scene when we’re introduced to Bane (Tom Hardy).

Bane is an excellent bad guy, though obviously with a comic book ‘Achilles heel’, which is an obvious one, which makes it a little odd that it takes Batman so long to figure it out, or rather to be told the answer!

Anyway, as I said, Bane is a fantastic bad guy, Hardy has beefed up enormously for the role which helps, the voice…well I’m not totally convinced, I just didn’t find it that menacing but maybe that was just me, my girlfriend found him suitably distressing.

Christian Bale is Christian Bale, the same as he’s been throughout the Christopher Nolan series really.

Michael Caine does a fantastic turn once more with Alfred the butler, he gets a much bigger say in things and has some acting to get his teeth into which he does with aplomb.

Equally Joseph Gordon-Levitt handles his role as…*ahem* ‘Blake’, with seemingly relative ease, it’s a nice touch at the end to keep things alive from both his point of view and the Batman franchise as a whole.

Anne Hathaway as Selina (not Catwoman – she isn’t referred to as Catwoman she just happens to have a catsuit, cat-esq ears and be a cat-burglar, I mean, thief!) does very well. It’s good to see her step out of her usual roles, she flip-flops between a whole range of emotions in the movie and handles the majority of them in a way that won’t do her career any harm at all.

There’s plenty of star-turns throughout the movie, most of them unexpected, some do better than others.

I can’t say this was my favourite film of Nolan’s take on Batman, it might have been that I’d built it up too much in my head, it might also have been that it didn’t quite feel different enough. There wasn’t quite the same psychological edge that we usually get from Nolan in his movies, some nice twists sure, but it was a bit more guts and glory then mess with your head.

Having said that, it trounces most things at the cinema now and recently and is a bloody good film either part of the franchise or as a stand alone.