Hot Off the Press: The Dark Knight Rises

It’s been a tricky week for the film reviewers. If you’re going to have a critical opinion about THE DARK KNIGHT RISES then it had better not be full of nasty criticism.

David Sexton in The Evening Standard did have some good things to say about the latest and last of Chris Nolan’s Batman films while reminding us of its cartoon origins.

What, [though,] I think Nolan has crucially brought to this franchise is solemnity and humourlessness. Belief, you might even say. None of the Marvel superhero films are so ominous and portenteous, so deliberately dark. Nolan has turned a preposterous character back into a grave myth, the story of a tortured saviour, reluctantly giving his all. That, I suspect, is what audiences crave in a world stripped of calls to faith, not just in-jokes or simple fun. That’s why they can’t bear to have the movie questioned — and why it’s going to be so big. 

while Anthony Quinn in The Independent  misses the comic clashes..

When these two put up their fists, the punches they land are like the noise a fridge would make if you pushed it off a high building. It is hardly more realistic than those cartoon graphics (POW! ZAP! KER-BOOM!) of the Batman show on 1960s’ telly. Those TV shows look homely next to the bombast of the present franchise. Along with the muddied sound of The Dark Knight Rises, the cumulative effect of the screenplay is portentous and deadening. It compounds the impression of a filmmaker who has sacrificed his quicksilver wit and invention for grandiosity – and length.

And SOMEONE in The Sunday Times just went for candor…

With Nolan’s films, the hostility between teenage fan-boys and middle-aged cineastes, between high and low culture, has collapsed into a “We all love Christopher Nolan” consensus. Not me! Sorry, guys. I’ll take James Cameron’s Terminator films or Tim Burton’s Batman duo over Nolan’s films any day. Anyway, this is the third and final film in Nolan’s trilogy, and this one really is all blockbuster brawn and very little brain. It’s as if Nolan and his co-screenwriter, his brother Jonathan, decided to dumb down, forget all that intellectual stuff in the previous two films and just serve up kick-ass action, spectacle and excitement. Yes, I know it touches on themes of terrorism and economic collapse, but only a fool would be taken in by this intellectual tokenism.

Fear not reviewers, we at The Omnivore enjoy your daring.

Read reviews for THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.

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